The Goals of Globalization

Review of International Political Economy,
Vol. 12, No. 5, December 2005, London

When academics write about sports, they are capable of accomplishing the impossible: sucking all the pleasure and fun from the spectacle. Take the following killjoy sentence from the essay "Globalization and goals: does soccer show the way?" in the December issue of the Review of International Political Economy: "The Gini coefficient of inequality in skill quality (or in goals) calculated in all countries will in that case amount to 38.9." Here, in a nutshell, we see the problem with intellectualizing sport. By applying the tools of social science to games, we are transported from the realm of play into the realm of tedious work.

For stretches, this essay is a highly technical slog. But author Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (the publisher of Foreign Policy), offers a highly interesting conclusion. He provides an empirical basis for debunking the conventional wisdom — that the commercialization and globalization of sports is an unmitigated disaster for the poorer clubs and countries.

Two years ago, I wrote a book on the very subject of this essay. I began with the assumption that the beautiful game is the ultimate example of globalization on this planet. It therefore makes for the ideal laboratory for studying how politics, economics, and culture will emerge in our increasingly integrated world. That is also the starting point for Milanovic’s essay. He aims to study what soccer, with its increasingly international labor market, reveals about inequality.

Not long ago, soccer was hardly an emblem of globalization. The labor market in international club soccer was highly protected. National leagues like Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga imposed quotas on their teams, permitting them to import only a limited number of players. A team such as Juventus of Turin could have only two non-Italian players on the field. According to Milanovic, this arrangement began to crumble in 1995. That was the year that a Belgian player named Jean-Marc Bosman sued his club and, ultimately, the European soccer federation for the right to play in France. He argued that league regulations violated the Treaty of Rome’s protection of the free movement of labor. "The European court thus ruled that the difference of treatment of the nationals from other European Union [EU] countries was anti-constitutional," writes Milanovic. Players were now allowed to move freely within the EU, and the limits on non-European nationals were raised in some countries and entirely lifted in others. "Today, for example, London’s Chelsea at times fields as many as nine foreign players (out of 11), a thing absolutely out of the realm of the possible only a decade or so ago."

That change didn’t occur in a vacuum. It happened alongside a broader movement toward commercialization in the game and changes in the global economy. Since its 19th-century inception as an upper-class "gentleman’s pursuit" in English public schools, soccer had resisted acknowledging that the sport was also a business, and a potentially lucrative one at that. But in the 1980s and 1990s, power brokers such as Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi, as well as a new generation of entrepreneurs, infused massive amounts of capital into the sport. With so much money at stake, soccer was bound to liberate itself from protectionism and embrace international integration.

So, have these changes contributed to a concentration of success in increasingly fewer elite clubs and countries? That is the conventional wisdom among soccer pundits. The answer Milanovic provides is appealingly nuanced. On the one hand, fewer clubs advance to the final rounds of such elite competitions as the European Champions League, a tournament that features the best club teams from across the continent. That is a depressing conclusion for fans, because it means that these tournaments have become far more predictable, with juggernauts such as Real Madrid and Chelsea stumbling less than in the past.

But Milanovic also delivers some good news. World Cups, the quadrennial tournament where nations assemble all-star teams, have grown even more competitive in this new era. Increasingly, countries that have no history of success have advanced deep into the tournament because their players compete for the best professional teams abroad. (Witness the recent success of Turkey and South Korea, both semifinalists in 2002.) And games in the competition, he finds, are decided by much smaller goal differentials. That means more nail-biters, a fact that even supporters of powerhouses like Brazil and Germany can surely appreciate.

Milanovic does not entirely approve of this situation. He worries that poor countries are suffering from the migration of African and Latin players to rich European countries, where they earn fat paychecks. As a solution to this drain, he proposes a regulation that would require players to spend one year out of every five working in their native country. He writes, "This type of socially more conscious globalization would combine the purely commercial interests (reflected in best players being picked by richest clubs) with the existence of a global authority that would impose non-commercial rules, and mitigate somewhat the harshness of the commercial-only outcomes."

That is a nice idea that rich clubs would never permit. Fortunately, Milanovic knows it. In fact, he concludes that soccer reveals how rich countries behave in this era of globalization. They resist even the most minimal regulations and rules that curb their pursuit of greater wealth and protect poorer nations. It is well worth following Milanovic to this powerful conclusion, even if the journey isn’t always as exciting as its subject.