If your friends' Facebook behavior is at all like that of mine, you will find the conclusions of Gaming the World compelling. Facebook status updates during the recent soccer World Cup, regardless of the location of one's friends, seemed to confirm that in “postindustrial societies today, professional team sports are not just a crucial part of (global) popular culture but also significant agents of cultural change and global communication” (p. 26).
Consider this: By watching Facebook status updates, you could tell that the soccer World Cup does grip the world's attention, as Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann argue. Moreover, one can tell that fandom can be local and simultaneously cross national and ethnic boundaries (Chapter 2). That many Americans seem to breathe and eat and live soccer during the World Cup but not at other times, however, supports their argument that soccer's current status in North America is still merely “Olympianized.” That means it is an object of immense interest every four years but not at other times (Chapter 3). And, finally, that one can make these observations on Facebook is inextricably tied to the authors' argument that this is a phenomenon of “the second globalization” (p. 26): It is fostered by the economic, political, and technological developments of the last couple of decades. It is significant, though, as the book shows, that this kind of globalization is a cultural-political phenomenon and not reducible to political economy.
There are two ways of thinking about sports in a broader social and political context. One is to see them as a reflection of broader forces and trends, and the book offers a valuable contribution to this perspective. For example, students of comparative and international political economy will recognize in Markovits and Rensmann's account patterns familiar from the so-called convergence–divergence debates. That is, if we ask whether globalization will make institutions around the world more similar or whether there will remain discernible local variance, the book answers “both.”
First, Markovits and Rensmann argue that globalization is not merely an American phenomenon (as it is often portrayed, particularly by the critics of globalization): In sports, soccer is the true global hegemon, they argue. Yet local exceptions, large and small, persist, the relatively marginal role of soccer in the United States being the most obvious example. This American exceptionalism was the topic of Markovits's (2001) Offside, coauthored with Steven L. Hellerman; in Gaming the World, soccer has made significant inroads into American “sport space” but remains Olympianized. In another example of convergence-with-divergence, Markovits and Rensmann discuss the ways in which the politics of gender in sports cultures have both differed and resembled each other on both sides of the Atlantic: The second wave of feminism had a significant impact on women's participation in sports in North America and Europe, but the contours have been significantly different and the status of women's sports varies greatly. This is most obvious in the degree to which women's soccer is appreciated as an (at least occasionally) important spectator sport in some countries where men's soccer has not been particularly significant. Similarly, the cultural significance of college sports makes the United States exceptional, even unique, from the perspective of the rest of the world. These are, the authors argue, examples of the limits to globalization.
The other way of thinking about the relationship between sports and politics is to see the former as intrinsically political. As the quotation at the start of this review suggests, Markovits and Rensmann argue that sports are in themselves a causal force in the shape that globalization takes. People disagree vigorously on the value of globalization in economic terms, but the authors' argument helpfully cuts across debates between the so-called neoliberals and critics of globalization. One way of reading the book is to see that sports offer—at least potentially—a bridge between the empirical phenomenon of globalization and the normative ideal of cosmopolitanism. Where the former is often seen as a unidirectional development, with multinational capitalism at its source and assimilationist tendencies as its result, the latter imagines a genuine diffusion and integration of cultures, attitudes, and values. In this way, the overlapping tendencies of both convergence and divergence—global cultures with local variations and interesting exceptions here and there—are neither a conceptual paradox nor a political problem. Instead, they are proof positive that at least on some occasions, it is possible to have the world come together and share an appreciation for a common cultural phenomenon, whether it is the World Cup or Michael Jordan, and, importantly, have this happen despite cultural differences and even disagreements.
The key mechanism is, at least metaphorically, linguistic: Soccer provides a common language that unites people who speak different languages and have different values, Markovits and Rensmann argue. It is worth noting that Rensmann is, among other things, a Hannah Arendt scholar, although she is never mentioned in the book, and that the development described is consistent with a kind of Arendtian cosmopolitan vision. One almost wonders whether the Union of European Football Associations consulted Markovits and Rensmann in its production of a 2010 television commercial in which a European soccer league is advertised with the slogan “28 countries, one language.”
The reader will not have to wonder what the authors think of this kind of cosmopolitan globalization. Although their purpose is explanatory, not normative, they celebrate the cosmopolitan effects of sports. The book does not hide its appreciation for the way sports can help undermine xenophobia, racism, and sexism. Their preferences notwithstanding, Markovits and Rensmann are not naively Whiggist, and they devote an entire chapter to the way sports also serve as a forum and a vehicle for the expression and even exercise of racist and xenophobic animus. They think, however, that soccer hooliganism and racist taunts likely are ugly vestiges and death throes of a kind of world order that won't be sustainable. At the same time, they are less sanguine—if we agree with them, as I do, that the integrationist trends are positive—about a significant transformation in the way sports appreciation is gendered. Perhaps the evidence they adduce suggests that sports lag behind other social practices when it comes to gender equity. But given that they show us interesting global variance on this score, the causal mechanisms would be particularly interesting to explore.
This gets us to general issues of method. Gaming the World makes its argument with descriptive inference: The claims about a causal mechanism in which soccer is a force in global change are made on the basis of descriptive data, both qualitative and statistical. Some of the data are historical, some economic and sociological, some even from the authors' personal experiences.
Because of this, some political scientists may well find Markovits and Rensmann's thesis intuitively plausible and still wish for a more systematic presentation of evidence and a more systematic analysis. In a way, the authors invite such a wish: they explicitly call sports “an independent variable” (p. 13) in global change, but they don't operationalize it or their dependent variable, global change, in a way that would immediately allow either systematic statistical testing or the consideration of alternative hypotheses.
I raise this merely to acknowledge that one could go about uncovering some of the causal mechanisms of globalization in a different way, even in the domain of such cultural phenomena as sports. But in a methodologically pluralist discipline such as ours, methodological critiques are frequently the scoundrel's last refuge. Descriptive inference can get at causal mechanisms, as historians demonstrate every day, and the authors' deep knowledge—as well as their unabashed love—of their topic helps them adduce such a rich variety of descriptive evidence that a purely methodological challenge won't cut against their argument.
Markovits and Rensmann's love of their sports might invite another kind of challenge, however. To be sure, we should all study topics we care about (why bother otherwise?), but as someone who does not share their enthusiasm for either team sports or spectator sports, I would have wanted them to go beyond professional team sports more than they do. No book can do everything, of course, and I am thoroughly convinced of their claim—and that of many other people—that soccer is the true global sports hegemon. But the book has little to say about individual professional sports, some of which are globally significant. Just think of the different kinds of questions that golf and tennis, on the one hand, or motor sports, on the other, might raise. Are their effects on global culture consistent with those of soccer, say? And what about varieties of participatory and recreational sports, whose diffusion around the world and integration with local cultures seem inextricably linked to the second globalization, just as their spread in the first globalization was tied to nationalism?
The point is not that Markovits and Rensmann should have written an even richer and more wide-ranging book; rather, at issue is the relative significance of “the soccer effect” on globalization. Of course, even to ask this question requires one to have read and appreciated their book.
