believe underpin sport. That takes us back to the spirit of sport. But what is it? Are its underlying values the same today as they were in the past? Or are there other values that could and should define sport in the twenty-first century?
In this chapter, I argue that the spirit of sport is what we say it is—we hold the power to define the meaning of sport. It is time to use that freedom to open up the spirit of sport to renewed discussion, debate, and change. First, however, let’s get closer to the heart of what we mean by the “spirit of sport.” Is it something with a price tag? Where should we expect to find it? Where might we have lost it?
Money Matters, But Not That Much
A discussion of modern sport often turns to money. Baseball players get $100 million-plus contracts. FIFA has more than $1 billion in the bank. Cities gift the NFL hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for new stadiums. Top golfers and tennis players get tens of millions in endorsement contracts. Nike, Adidas, and Under Armor are rolling in profits. College football coaches and athletics administrators are paid millions of dollars.
But although money is the focus of a lot of discussion, in the big economic picture, sport is just not that big. One popular textbook on sports economics observes, “while sport looms large in people’s minds, in economic terms it is still a small proportion of overall economic activity, at least as measured.”4 We can get a sense of the size of sports in the overall economy by taking a look at some numbers.
Table 2.1. Revenue of US Professional Sports Leagues and the NCAA, 2013
Table 2.1 shows some recent summary statistics for the major US professional sports leagues and the NCAA. The league with the most revenue is the NFL, with more than $12 billion in 2015.5 The NFL wants to see this grow to more than $25 billion by 2027.6 How much is $12 billion? Turkish Airlines, the world’s seventh-largest international airline, has revenue of about $12 billion.7 Another comparison of $12 billion in revenue is the entire US coffee industry.8 To put that number in context, $12 billion was also about how much Apple earned every two weeks in the first quarter of 2016.9 In dollars and cents, the NFL is about 4 percent of the size of Apple. Yet the Super Bowl is the most watched TV program in the United States and, apart from soccer’s World Cup, maybe even the world. Money doesn’t tell the whole story.
In 2014, Bloomberg Business asked how the NFL might compare if it were a “real business” rather than a nonprofit.10 (A nonprofit! Amazing, right?)a Bloomberg suggested that the market capitalization of the NFL would be $46 billion, based on the sum of individual team valuations. Putting together revenue and market capitalization, Bloomberg concluded that “the NFL has one of the smallest revenue bases. It would rank behind seventeen of the companies in terms of the amount of money it brings in.” Hypothetically, it would rank 106th in the S&P 500 in terms of market capitalization and 255th in revenue. Bloomberg also notes that the NFL commissioner made $37 million in 2013 (and more in 2014), which was more than Disney CEO Robert Iger, who made $34 million leading a company with $48 billion in revenue.11
The entire 2013 revenue of the major US sports (including NASCAR and the NCAA) was about $25 billion. That represented about 0.15 percent of the total US gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the size of the nation’s economy.12 The overall sports industry, which in addition to professional sports includes things like health clubs, equipment, and apparel, was estimated to be $485 billion in 2013,13 representing almost 3 percent of GDP. More broadly, the global sports industry was estimated to be about $1.5 trillion in 2013, or about 2 percent of global GDP.14 No matter how you slice the data, whether looking narrowly at the professional sports or broadly at the sports industry, sport is not a very big part of the US or the global economy.
What about sport in Europe? Soccer (or “football” as Europeans call it) is the overwhelmingly dominant sport across the continent.15 Table 2.2 shows some information about the biggest football leagues in Europe. The total annual revenue in 2013 for football is coincidentally quite similar to the $25 billion in revenue of the major US sports. About half of that comes from the “Big Five” domestic leagues in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France.b Even though the mix of games and leagues is very different in Europe compared with the United States, the magnitude and share of the economy of professional sport in Europe is similar to those in the United States.
Table 2.2. Revenue of European Soccer Leagues, 2013
In contrast to the relatively small proportion of the economy that sport occupies, it takes up a large share of our collective attention. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but a 2001 study at Northwestern University found that in the United States, the most commonly reported subject in newspapers of all sizes was sports.16 In 2015, ESPN was the most watched US cable network, having aired eighteen of the top twenty-seven most-watched programs.17 The largest television audience in UK history was for the final of the 1966 World Cup; in the Philippines, a 2006 boxing match between Manny Pacquiao and Erik Morales broke the national record for TV viewers.18
In short, sport has an outsized presence in society when compared to its economic footprint. Money matters a great deal in sport, but sport is not defined by economics. There is something about sport not captured by economics that captivates us, that holds our attention, and doesn’t let us go. What is it? For more than a century, that je ne sais quoi has been called the “spirit of sport.” Let’s see if we can get a sense of it.
Looking for the Spirit of Sport: Track and Field—And a Famous Flop
Track and field is characterized by its utter simplicity. Running, jumping, throwing. Athleticism at its most fundamental. Unlike most team sports, athletics offers the clear objectivity of results. We know that Usain Bolt runs faster than Jesse Owens, even though Owens died six years before Bolt was born, because they ran the same race.c As soon as children can walk, they want to run, and they want to race. How fast can I go? Am I faster than my mom, dad, brother, or sister?
The spirit of sport might be described as competition for the sake of competition, for something pure and untainted. If that is indeed what the spirit of sport is, then the best place to find it is in the most simple of all sports, track and field. But when we take a close look, we find that simplicity and purity are hard to pin down. In reality, sport is characterized by innovations—both human and technological—and by efforts to push the boundaries of the rules. Let’s take a look at the high jump, which is characterized by a century-long quest to see how high humans can soar.
One of the longest-standing athletic world records for both men and women is for the high jump. Like sprinting, the sport is a simple one—athletes try to get their entire body over a horizontal bar without dislodging it. The highest clearance wins.
The world record for men has been held since 1993 by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, who cleared 2.45 meters (just under 8 feet 1 inch). To get a sense of just how mind-blowing this athletic feat is, imagine jumping as high as the crossbar of a standard soccer goal. Think about that the next time you are standing on a soccer field. It seems impossible. For women, the record is 2.09 meters (or a bit over 6 feet 10 inches) and it has been held since 1987 by Stefka Kostadinova of Bulgaria. That is like jumping over the top of Blake Griffin, the Los Angeles Clippers basketball player. Seemingly just as impossible. These records have stood for what is an eternity in sporting terms, by far the longest period since high jump records were first, kept more than a century ago, as shown in figure 2.2.
Will these records ever be broken? Have athletes jumped as