Playing on the Edge

Introduction: Getting the Global Edge

In theorising the globalisation of sport (Marjoribanks and Farquharson 2012; Miller et al. 2001; O’Brien, Holden, and Ginesta 2020), it is necessary to grapple with the proposition that, as with geopolitics and economics, there is a progressive, ineluctable unfolding of sport-related institutions, practices and symbols across the world. This grand narrative, sometimes accompanied by aggregated data on trade, technology, media texts, people movement, and so on, is a convenient summation of the abstract logic of globalisation supported by selected (not to say often selective) empirical data. Globalisation discourse became common wisdom at the turn of the twenty-first century and, in turn, provoked commensurate resistance, sometimes producing overblown rhetoric on both sides. In its broadest sense, globalisation is variously in process but, where mechanically conceived, globalisation theory is inadequate to the tasks of describing and explaining how sport and other cultural forms are made manifest in multiplicitous ways in different places, times and among social groups (Steger and James 2019). For this among other reasons, some scholars (such as Urry 2003: 44) insist that we should distinguish between ‘globalisation theory’ and a ‘theory of globalisation’. Indeed, if sporting globalisation was as smooth and all-consuming as is often claimed, why is there so much unevenness in its development and persistent variability in sporting practices and tastes? Furthermore, why do even highly sophisticated, capital rich sports such as American football, baseball, cricket and even association football (soccer) often struggle to take root in targeted zones of the world?

To answer such questions, it is necessary to have detailed historical, social and cultural knowledge about the variable conditions encountered by and affecting the institution of sport. Less ambitious – though still predominantly uni-directional – approaches to the globalisation of sport conceive of it in terms of stages of development involving regions, countries and sub-national contexts where ‘future sport’ is being fashioned. This is a variant of the global diffusion theory that takes account of the origins of modern sport in the West, and its passage along lines of imperialism and colonialism (Biyanwila 2018). When applied critically, this perspective exposes the historically derived power dynamics that confer advantage on the already advantaged in the global expansion of capitalist sport. In such accounts, all roads now tend to lead to Asia (Mangan and Hong 2003), the continent that, after the West exhausted the possibilities of eternal, irrepressible expansion in its foundational sport and media markets (Miller, Rowe, and Lawrence 2010; Rowe and Miller 2021), holds out most hope for the seemingly endless growth of a global ‘media sports cultural complex’ (Rowe 2004; 2011).

In the transition to this twenty-first ‘Asian Century’ (Johnson, Mackie, and Morris-Suzuki 2015), increasing attention has turned to how the next chapter of the sport globalisation story can be foretold. Sports economists (Gratton et al. 2012) are especially interested in the exploitation of Asia’s commercial potential in the context of variable regional linkages and classifications (including Australasia, Oceania and the composite entities variously described as the Asia-Pacific or, increasingly, the Indo-Pacific). At the next, lower scale, there is a focus on particular continental zones, with East Asia offering immediate growth possibilities given its combination of population size and advanced sport organisation and industry. The sport with the greatest global reach, association football, has been a particular focus of this ‘moving East’ perspective (Cho 2015; Mangan, Horton, and Ren 2020; Manzenreiter and Horne 2004). While East Asia, especially China, has attracted most attention in discussions of the global growth of professional sport, it has shifted increasingly to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as this region makes ambitious plays to host major sport events, bolster its domestic sport competitions, and to build service-oriented sports, entertainment and tourism infrastructure (Reiche and Brannagan 2022). Qatar’s success in bidding for and hosting the men’s 2022 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, and Saudi Arabia’s endorsement by FIFA to host the 2034 edition (discouraging Australia from proceeding with a bid), is a clear indication that more than one Asian region is ‘catching the eye’ of global sports organisations including those that govern combat sports (Stern 2023).

The more minute the concentration on a specific region, the more apparent become the intricate sporting interconnections within and across them. The Covid-19 pandemic starkly revealed how what might appear to be the smooth operation of the global sport machine can suddenly stutter and temporarily seize up (Krieger et al. 2021; Pedersen, Ruihley, and Li 2020; Rowe 2020), thereby exposing the complex, stratified web of institutional relationships that comprise, in deploying the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984; 1988) influential theory, the sport field (Rowe and Gayo 2021). At the same time, two other of Bourdieu’s key concepts apply to sport – that of capital, which crystallises competition and exchange relating to the cultural, the political, the economic and the physical – and of habitus, which involves the ways in which sport figures in social dispositions ranging from identity formation to bodily comportment (lisahunter, Smith, and Emerald 2015). A Bourdieusian perspective emphasises both struggles for position within fields and struggles between them as, notably in the case of the media field (Gayo and Rowe 2018), they intersect and overlap. The running theme in this theoretical and conceptual framework is of the tension between stasis and entropy, as the various components of the media sports cultural complex seek to maintain and improve their own positions while, directly and indirectly, reinforcing, permeating and marking the boundaries of other constituents of the sport field. While such processes have global reach, the shifting regional aggregations within and across Asia and Oceania addressed in Playing on the Edge afford compelling opportunities to approach and understand what is entailed in the advancement of an analysis of sport that plausibly proposes how apparently universal mechanisms of change can result in surprising, idiosyncratic and even perverse outcomes.