Since its formative years sport has had a commercial component to its operation. As early as
590 BC Greek athletes were financially rewarded for an Olympic victory (Harris, 1964).
However, in no previous time period have we seen the type of growth in the
commercialization of sport, that we have seen in the last two decades. Today, sport is big
business and big businesses are heavily involved in sport. Athletes in the major spectator
sports are marketable commodities, sports teams are traded on the stock market, sponsorship
rights at major events can cost millions of dollars, network television stations pay large fees to
broadcast games, and the merchandising and licensing of sporting goods is a major multi-
national business. These trends are not just restricted to professional athletes and events, many
of them are equally applicable to the so-called amateur sports.
In some ways parallelling the increased commercialization of sport has been the
emergence of academic interest in the business and management of sport. Much of the work in
this area, including some of my own, has been concerned directly or indirectly with issues of
effectiveness and efficiency and has the implicit or explicit aim of improving managerial
practice and the functioning of organizations. From this perspective, sports goods and services
are commodities which, like other goods and services, are subject to market forces. The
managers of sport organizations are presented as purveyors of rationality and the management
of a sport organization is considered to be a socially valuable technical function that is carried
out in the general interest of athletes, employers, sponsors, and spectators alike.
However, such approaches do little to challenge the virtue of commercialization and the
managerial actions that have portrayed this process as a socially desirable and unproblematic
practice. Also, they do little to demonstrate the negative side of this drive towards rationality,
or to present new and challenging ways of thinking about the business side of sport. Rather,
such uncritical views are actually concerned with the preservation of established privileges and
priorities such as maintaining hierarchical control and generating profit. The commercial trends
that are occurring in sport are far too important and wide ranging to be accepted
unquestioningly and it is here that I would like to think there is a role for the sport sociologist;
to challenge some of these practices. While the organizational and managerial changes we
have seen take place as sport has increasingly become a form of commercial activity can be
enabling and beneficial for sport and sports people, they can also be constraining and, as such,
should be the subject of more critical analysis than occurs at present. In this brief paper, I look
critically at the use of marketing in voluntary sport organizations. I focus specifically on these
organizations not because they are exemplars of marketing practice, but because as
governments in many countries have reduced funding for amateur sport, marketing has been
presented as the solution to financial problems. I offer a brief critique of this practice and show
that while there are certainly benefits to the effective marketing of sport there are also a
number of concerns which emerge about its use.
In the world of "amateur sports", the concepts and practices of marketing have become
centrally important. In the discourse which is promoted by government bureaucrats,
professional sport administrators and politicians, the voluntary sport organization is about
much more than the development of athletes. Rather, it is about selling sport to potential and
existing customers. This requires informing these individuals and collectivities about what is
on offer and, in the process, articulating and shaping needs (Morgan, 1992), i.e. marketing the
sport. In large part the increased interest in marketing has been the result of a reduction in
state funding for amateur sport organizations which have had to turn to the private sector for
the shortfalls they are experiencing (Slack & Berrett, 1996). The growth in importance of marketing is evidenced by
the number of organizations that now employ in-house marketing personnel or hold contracts
with external marketing agencies. It is also evidenced by the increased amount of corporate
support given to sport (more than $3.5 billion per year in North America - albeit a significant
proportion on professional sport), the growth of sport marketing as a sub-disciplinary area in
sport studies, and the emergence of organizations such as the Sport Marketing Council in
Canada and the Institute for Sport Sponsorship in the UK.
Marketing as a managerial activity occurs primarily at two levels in voluntary sport
organizations. The first of these involves the marketing of a particular sport to potential
participants, usually young children who may take up the sport. The second involves the
marketing of the organization's properties such as its name or logo, events it may hold or the
athletes who are its members, in order to obtain corporate sponsorship. I will deal with each in
turn.
The marketing of a sport to increase participation is an intuitively appealing and logical
function for a voluntary sport organization. It is also consistent with the directives of
mainstream management gurus who see marketing as concerned with serving the interests of
potential and actual consumers by satisfying their needs. The basic tenet, whether it being
selling chocolate bars or sport, is that an increase in consumption leads to an increase in
satisfaction. The basis of this premise is that an 'exchange relationship' takes place where, in
our situation, the voluntary sport organization provides the opportunity for an individual to
participate in the sport and then he or she, in turn, provides loyalty to the organization through
competing for them, paying membership fees, being involved in social activities and so forth.
The concept of an exchange relationship implies that each individual is free to select the option
they want in a free and open marketplace. It does not take account of the fact that structures
such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, and geographical location can constrain an
individual's ability to respond to the marketing initiative. As Alvesson and Willmott (1996,
p.120) suggest, it presents an image of common sense voluntarism, ignores the asymmetrical
relations of power in [marketing] relationships, and "provides a deceptively simple easy-to-
understand formulation of the complexities of human interaction and neglects to discuss how
structures of domination and exploitation shape and mediate relationships".
While few would deny that it is the responsibility of those working in voluntary sport
organisations to promote and publicise their sport and, that this can be to the benefit of both
the organisation and the participant, an excessive emphasis on marketing presents an image of
the young athlete and potential athlete as commodities. For some organizations, they may be
merely another membership fee to be added to the coffers or another name on the membership
list which can be used to justify the funding of the sport by government agencies and corporate
sponsors.
The marketing image that is presented to young potential athletes and their parents is
consistent with marketing other products and services in that it is about constructing myths.
Involvement in sport is presented as healthful recreation and, more than often, as providing the
potential to achieve fame through athletic success. Such images tend to downplay the negative
aspects of the activity such as drugs, injuries, eating disorders, and so forth. Also, they
frequently focus on the objective criteria of winning and the pleasure that comes from such
success as opposed to the more subjective satisfaction that can come from the aesthetics of
performance and competing against oneself. The negative effects of such marketing can also
include the reinforcement of gender stereotypes, the promotion of conformity, and an over
emphasis on competitiveness.
Marketing in the form of seeking and obtaining sponsorship is like the marketing of
participation opportunities; an intuitively logical and appropriate activity for a voluntary sport
organisation to be involved. The increased amounts of funding that have come to sports
through corporate sponsors have had considerable benefits for the voluntary organisations that
stage athletic events and for a number of the athletes who engage in them. Increased
sponsorship has been linked to increased media coverage and spectators in many parts of the
world regularly see athletes they would not normally get to experience were not for
sponsorship. The athletes themselves have benefited; no longer shackled by the bonds of
amateurism, top performers in sports like track and field, cycling, skiing, figure skating and
volleyball have been able to receive compensation for their efforts. This has come about
largely through the money that is obtained through sponsorship. In addition, events at all
levels that may not have been possible or would have been operated in a less grandiose form
are now viable because of money from corporate sponsors.
However, marketing and sponsorship are not the neutral activities that their primary
advocates would have us believe. The very discourse of marketing and its incorporation into
voluntary sport organisations may be seen as helping transform them " at their very roots into
structures that fit more easily with the dominant market and marketing ethos of '90s society"
(Morgan, 1992, p. 143). On the face of it such a discourse may, as I noted earlier, promote the
concept of exchange and the ideas of freedom that accompany this (cf. Copeland, Frisby
& McCarville, 1996) but as Morgan (1992, p. 143) notes it is also a discourse which
"conceals underlying inequalities of power which are produced and reproduced both inside and
outside the market transactions". First, and maybe the most obvious of these inequalities, is
the ability of some sport organizations to transact in the marketplace and secure corporate
support. Those organizations which have been most successful in securing corporate monies
are those which are concerned with the larger and more visible sports. Copeland, Frisby &
McCarville (1996) for example, in a study of Canadian corporations found that nearly 70% of
all the organizations they surveyed were sponsoring professional sport or elite level "amateur"
sport. Sports with a lower profile are often unable to attract substantive financial investment
from corporate bodies. Hargreaves (1986) has even suggested that in those organizations
which do receive sponsorship this situation can contribute to uneven development within a
sport because there is no guarantee of resources percolating down to the lower levels of the
activity. When state funding was the primary source of income for these agencies there was
some degree of balancing of the 'haves' with the 'have nots'. The marketplace is less sensitive
to these needs and a phenomenon where the rich get richer maybe in effect. In fact, some
preliminary findings from work we are doing in Canada tends to suggest since national sport
organizations have had to replace state funding with corporate support, those that have been
the least successful in this are showing signs of returning to the "kitchen table" type of design2
(cf. Kikulis, Slack & Hinings, 1992) they exhibited prior to the large infusion of
government funds (not that such a move is necessarily bad for all of these organizations). It
does, however, demonstrate the lack of stability they exhibit in the face of changing funding,
something that does not augur well for their effective operation.
Corporate involvement in voluntary sport organizations may also be constraining in that it
may be a relatively fickle source of funding. A change in the CEO of a sponsoring corporation
and /or a change in the company's strategic direction can result in the rapid withdrawal of
funds, again a factor which does not promote the long term stability of these bodies.
Involvement with corporate sponsors also means that the demands of the marketplace are
given precedence over the wants of athletes. Corporate sponsors who fund sport organizations
and major sporting events expect a significant degree of commitment from participating
athletes, whose interests in terms of their competition schedule become subordinate to the
sponsor's desire to have them participate in funded events. Star athletes now compete on
sponsored circuits which Aris (1990) suggests may carry more status than competing for
one's country in a major event. Athletes are lured with prize money and/or appearance fees so
much so, that injuries may be ignored, educational opportunities are put aside in the quest for
success and banned substances are employed to enhance performance. These individuals no
longer represent their club, their country or themselves, they represent the corporations who
provide the money for their sport. As Kidd (1988a, p. 302) points out the expectations of
corporations have "become so commanding that they, in effect, have blocked the expression of
the older, humanistic amateur based aspirations of Olympism and other similar values." It is,
former Canadian Alpine Ski coach Curry Chapman (cited by Kidd 1988b, p. 23) notes, not just
them [the athlete] going down the mountain any more but it's also a bank, a drug store, and a
car parts chain as well.
Such concerns do not, however, appear to daunt the sporting establishment who have
embraced marketing as the remedy to many of their financial ills. Such an emphasis can, no
doubt, brings its rewards, but the commodification of athletes which the marketing emphasis
brings does, as I have shown, have its shortcomings. While there are a number of convincing
arguments for the use of marketing as an integral part of the operation of voluntary sport
organizations, it is incumbent on those of us involved in the social sciences and interested in
studying phenomenon such as the commercialization of sport to not accept at face value the
technological rationality and efficiency of such changes. Rather, it is important for sport
sociologists to develop a critique of these practices. While this has occurred in the broader
field of policy and organizational studies, it has not happened to the extent to which I believe
it should in sport and it is here that there is a role for the sport sociologist in the next
millenium.
1Some of the ideas in this paper were presented as part of a keynote speech at the 1997 International
Committee for the Sociology of Sport Conference in Oslo, Norway, June 30th, 1997.
2The term "kitchen table" refers to an organisational design characterised by undifferentiated task arrangements, low formalisation of procedures and informal decision making.
