Future of sports and politics

Amidst strong performances, two animated conversations have marked the Indian cricket team’s journey in World Cup 2019 being held in the UK. 

India’s wicketkeeper and former captain MS Dhoni wore wicketkeeping gloves in the initial matches with an army emblem that was ultimately not allowed by the International Cricketing Council (ICC). 

This came in the backdrop of what we know has happened in India before and after its recently concluded national elections of 2019. 

Now, ICC has also given the Indian team a predominantly orange-shaded away jersey (replacing a blue jersey for the first time ever), which the team donned against England in the group matches. 

This has raised concerns about India’s cricket team becoming an instrument for the nation’s ruling populist political coalition. After all, the dominant party here, the BJP, also takes pride in its taste for orange or its close variant, saffron. This, even though as some ironically point out, saffron possibly originated in Iran. 

Others have highlighted that green, too, is a prominent colour in the Indian flag, but it was not there in the previous jersey nor in this version, so how about giving green a place of honour? 

As Indians, we know how that may be a no-go zone, but these two events point to a larger question at hand. As the world shifts towards populism and accompanying political tastes, is sports going to be an instrument for strongman populist leaders to gain legitimacy? 

This is a slightly different question from sports being used as a platform for politics like one saw in the Munich Olympics or even with the Kashmir and Baluchistan posters seen in the sky during the ongoing cricket World Cup.

History can provide some pointers to this question. The obvious first candidate to turn to is the early 20th-century version of the Bundesliga, the Gauliga, the highest level of play in German football that was prevalent betweennd 1945 after the Nazi takeover of the Sports Office of the Third Reich. 

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, the German Football Association came fully under the party’s influence. It resulted in the renaming of football competitions, banning of worker sports clubs and the prohibition of Jewish sports associations. 

Additionally, clubs with strong connections to Jews were punished and fell out of favour, including modern superstar clubs like Bayern Munich. 

Connoisseurs of movies would remember here too the Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone starring Escape to Victory, based on a team of prisoners of war playing against their German captors – inspired by the infamous Death Match in Zenit Stadium in August 1942 in occupied Kiev. That was a match between a German military side, Falkelf, and a team called FC Start made up mainly of Dynamo Kiev players. 

Nazis were inspired here by Mussolini and his programme on state capture of Italian soccer. We may know the Azzurris to be wearing blue now, but back in the 1938 World Cup against France, they not only wore the infamous maglia nera or black shirts, they also gave a fascist salute, sported Fascio Littorio (a Fascist symbol of bundle of sticks and an axe) and entered stadiums with the Fascism anthem Giovinezza. 

In fact, as Emma Anspach and Hilah Almog document in their fascinating book, Mussolini’s Football on soccer politics, sports has always been an instrument for political leaders, from Stalin in Russia to more recently for Vladimir Putin. 

Even the People’s Republic of China has engaged in a programme to establish global sports supremacy, be that in organising Olympics to having national multi-decadal missions on winning Olympic gold medals. 

Pedro Acuna’s doctoral dissertation at UC Irvine enigmatically titled Dribbling with the Left and Shooting with the Right is also a worthy read here. Acuna documents a social history of soccer as a political instrument in Juan Perón’s Argentina between 1946 and 1955 and Carlos Ibáñez’s Chile between 1952 and 1958. 

Thus when one sees today a Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Kaka or Cafu publicly endorsing current Brazilian President Bolsenaro or a Mesut Ozil wedding being blessed by Turkish President Recep Erdogan, or a Hungarian President Orban being crazy about his national soccery ecosystem – why should anyone feel surprised at all? 

History, after all, has a well-settled way of repeating itself and celebrities in society, be that from sports, religion, arts, sciences, economics, literature, movie making or entrepreneurship, indeed provide a convenient option to populist leaders to enhance their acceptability. 

A Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a LeBron James or a Colin Kaepernick from the US or a Mohun Bagan soccer team playing bare feet and winning against the East Yorkshire Regiment in pre-Independent India of 1911 espousing sports activism, may in fact be the odd ones out today.  

In summary, the behaviour, as economists would argue, seems incentive-compatible. Populist leaders would certainly love the legitimacy of being endorsed by sports celebrities, and sports stars shouldn’t mind buttressing their active playing careers or post-retirement lives endorsing populist leaders with long periods of power. 

All that said, few points of contemplation arise though. For populists, would there be diminishing returns from using sports celebrities as instruments? What are the conditions marking that point of diminishing returns? What is the role of gender here? Might there be an element of masculinity in populism that could invert behavior from women sports celebrities? 

Overall, our times maybe curious and evolving, but as Mandela noted unintendedly and presciently perhaps, a reconciliation between sports and populism seems like the expected (even if not the perfectly pleasant) way forward.

The author is from IIM-A and Hoover Institution