Performance Pressures
Name, Image, and Likeness: Where is the Research?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leon Banks, Anna Scheyett
The National College Athletic Association (NCAA) had long required student-athletes be unpaid “amateurs”, despite the multi-million-dollar profits in college sports. Two cases contested this; O’Bannon v NCAA (2014) and NCAA v Alston (2021) found that the NCAA violated anti-trust laws. Soon after, the NCAA voted that student-athletes may receive compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL). NIL is often managed through boosters and foundations separate from universities, with variable transparency and there is wide variation across state NIL laws. Combined with huge amounts of money, and student-athletes who are young and potentially very vulnerable to influence, the risk of exploitation and of being tangled in various laws, is high. The need for research on the impact of NIL is thus crucial. Our research asked “Who is studying NIL and what is their focus?” Using multiple major databases, we completed a scoping search on NIL, finding 64 articles. First authors’ disciplines were primarily Law (56%), Sports Management/Administration (18%), and Business (8%). Articles focused primarily on Legal analyses of NIL (41%); Impact on subpopulations (e.g. women); Rights of student-athletes (22%); and NIL’s impact on athletes (16%). In only 16% of articles were actual data collected, the remainder were legal analyses and “think pieces”. The implications of these findings are concerning. We found little scholarship examining the experiences of student-athletes receiving NIL, its impact on their finances, relationships, team dynamics, or mental health. Research in this area is essential to shed light on the impacts of NIL on student-athletes.
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi! Oi! Oi!: Price Gouging Australian Nationalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lucas Moreira dos Anjos Santos, Sam Duncan, Tom F Heenan
Melbourne, Australia’s second biggest city, has re-invented itself as a ‘global’ sporting city in late 1980s. Such re-invention was articulated by politicians, media tycoons, and property developers to create a services-based economy post de-industrialisation (Heenan, 2020). Mega-sporting events, such as the Australian Open, have relied consistently on governments, of different political orientations, to give monies to subside sporting events and venues. This paper contends that the subsidisation of sports events and venues is a part of a political economy in which sporting organisations continually lobby for more monies and control over public space, in the name of sport and community, while architects and developers stand by to Lego-scape surrounding parklands. As with other cities around the globe, Melbourne has been transformed by this type of sport-gouging that has seen public monies and space funnelled into private and not-for-profits’ hands. There seems little sign that this gouging will abate. As this paper suggests, such gouging stems from an entrepreneurial clique of politicians, sporting administrators, media and property developers acting for self rather than community interests. This clique has successfully manufactured the misconception that sport is the primary expression of White Australian nationalism with its catch-cry, ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi! Oi! Oi!’. As this clique leveraged on sport as expression of Australian nationalism, these sport events also worked to sustain existing class, race, and gender-based inequalities.
Arab-washing Sport's Emerging Global Order
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tom F Heenan, Sam Duncan, Lucas Moreira dos Anjos Santos
With the emergence of a new global political economy in a polycentric world, nation-states have adopted strategies to reposition themselves. This has included hosting and investing in global sporting events and ecosystems. Historically, nation-states have engaged in sport diplomacy, using events and sportspeople to foster favourable public images, globally. But in recent years, the use of this strategy by non-democratic states, with questionable human rights records, to rebrand their global images has been condemned as sportswashing. This is too simplistic. Traditionally, sport evolved within racial and colonial hierarchies that have been increasingly challenged since the late 1960s. This challenge is seen in the rise of the oil-rich Gulf States as revenue sources and sites for global sporting events. Sport has been used to brand the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Dubai and Abu Dhabi as Disneyfied places of spectacle and excess. Similarly, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have diversified oil revenues into sport, challenging the traditional hierarchies in golf and football. This challenge has been accompanied by mounting Western criticism of the regimes’ labour and human rights records with sport perceived as a means by which these states wash their abuses. This constitutes an Orientalist use of the term, washing away the challenge the states pose to sport’s traditional racial and colonialist hierarchies. Seemingly, the West engages in sport diplomacy, ignoring its own human rights abuses, while the East merely sport-washes. The West’s control of the discourse washes away the real point; the Saudi and Gulf States’ challenge to sport’s traditional order.
