Dear readers, are you already looking forward to the final of the European Football Championship on Sunday evening? Many do that. Probably around 18 million Germans will watch the game in front of the screens. Some of them will be irritated if a few advertising clips are shown immediately after the final whistle instead of the emotions, for example from Qatar Airways. But then you can cheer or enjoy yourself again.
Football still attracts, even if it has already got a bit more attention. The same can be said in anticipation of the Olympic Games in Tokyo in just under two weeks. For the TV stations, the summer games with their many competitions and emotions are a sure-fire success. The fact that there will be no spectators in the stadiums diminishes the TV experience. But it doesn’t make it obsolete.
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The secret of the attraction of sport is not only due to the emotions it releases. But also in the lightness, the sheer aesthetics of the movements. If you see the gymnast Simone Biles in action for the first time, you will catch your breath. And when the little Italian footballer Lorenzo Insigne starts dribbling tonight, many viewers will be amazed – and in those seconds they will forget everything else. All of this and the fact that almost everyone can participate have made sport a mass phenomenon.
But how carefree, how innocent can and should sport be? This European football championship also showed that the game has more than just a sporting component for the masses. Players kneeled on their knees before kick-off to take a stand against racism. The German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer also wore the captain’s armband in rainbow colors out of solidarity with the people in Hungary, who see sexual freedom in their country endangered by a new law. And last but not least, a Greenpeace activist flew breakneck into the Munich arena to demonstrate against the EM sponsor Volkswagen.
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The sports stage has grown so large that it can no longer be used exclusively for himself. Incidentally, the sport never succeeded in doing that. The mantra of the big associations that politics and sport should be strictly separated from each other could never be kept. The Olympic Games have been instrumentalized or boycotted, sport was once a class struggle and is still seen in many countries as a sign of the country’s general productivity.
The sport was never impartial, but it was probably not yet as heavily loaded with so many other topics as it is current. The big players in sport are to blame for this, of course. Be it the International Olympic Committee IOC, the World Football Association Fifa or clubs like Paris Saint-Germain or Manchester City – they all have their most valuable products (Olympic Games, World Cups, jerseys and TV advertising) sold nefariously to the highest bidder. They don’t care who pays and for what reasons. The much-cited ethics of sport have fallen by the wayside.
The 2008 Olympic Games took place in Beijing and will be held there again in six months, because the Communist Party wants to pursue political propaganda both internally and externally. The Emirate of Qatar is also looking forward to hosting the World Cup in 2022. The country, in which falconry and camel races have a long tradition, hopes that this will boost its image.
In the near future, the background noise around sports is likely to get even bigger. In this respect: Enjoy the soccer game on Sunday evening. And if you can’t stand the advertising from Qatar, the best thing to do is to switch off with the final whistle.
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