Should Sports and Politics Mix? A Brief Historical Look
It’s 8:50 in the morning, your alarm rings. It’s December 18th, 2022. You quickly rush to the TV, and turn on the game that you’ve been waiting for a month now. Across the world, 1.5 billion other people do the same. It’s the world cup final, and more than 20% of the world is watching.
Massive sporting events like the world cup and olympics gather so many viewers across so many channels. In fact, aside from the funeral events of famous figures, sporting events are the most watched events of any kind in history. This amount of viewership is seldom gathered from any other event, making them a target for controversial messaging about political topics. To accurately say whether sports and politics should mix, or be kept separate, we need to take a historical look at times that this has happened before.
It’s 1936, and the Olympics are being held in Berlin. During this time, Hitler, now leader of Germany, wants to show the world what a wonderful nazi paradise he’s built, just three years before the start of World War II. He builds massive stadiums, with music, dance, and everything planned to the exact degree. For the most part, his idea worked. Germany showcased to the world that they are now this big empire that has rebuilt itself from the ashes of World War I. Other examples of countries using sports to show off their might would be the 1980 and 1984 olympics. Taking place during the cold war, both Russia and the US wanted to prove to the world that their system was better, communism vs capitalism.
More violent collisions between these two worlds have happened as well. In 1978, Argentina, then ruled by an authoritarian “junta”, also wanted to refurbish their image in the eyes of the world. The cheering of the fans on the sidelines masked the executions and torture of the regime’s opponents being held at the exact same time. Although the regime didn’t last very long after that, the 1978 world cup went down as a gross mix of politics and sports, something that should never happen again. During the Yugoslav war of the 1990’s, a buildup of decades of ethnic hatred was often released during sports matches. Support of the local sports team became associated with that country’s supremacy, so when the Serbian Red Star Belgrade soccer team played against the Croat Dynamo Zagreb; nationalists of either side would chant death messages, start riots, and cause general panic and chaos during the matches.
Now of course, this type of nationalism and brutality is less seen. While there are sports matches that run deeper than just pure competition, there's a softer edge to it. While soccer matches between the Catalán team Barcelona and other Spanish teams might carry slight tension as a result of wanting independence, few Catalan nationalists are calling for the death or destruction of other Spanish citizens. Popular sports teams, like Manchester United, all the way to the New York Yankees are now being made up of many different ethnicities and backgrounds, so nationalism attached to a single team is fading. While the Olympics still promote patriotism, politics are fading from sports, which honestly is the best option. Politics and sports have a history of conflict, so it’s best they be kept separate.
