Going the extra mile
Beyond the glitz and glamour of sporting mega-events, there is the potential to make a real difference to the life of local communities, says David Goldblatt
At first glance, the world of sport does not seem an obvious ally of the Big Society agenda. The two sporting events getting the most headlines at the moment – professional football and the London 2012 Olympics – seem a long way from the DIY mutualism that the concept seems to encompass. The Premiership, for example, and indeed all commercial football, is organised as a segment of the entertainment industry. Consumers pay for the passive experience of watching highly paid professionals, live and on television, in a spectacle orchestrated by private corporations and media companies. The Big Society, by contrast, is committed to activism and amateurs, and to nurturing non-market relationships and not-for-profit economic actors.
The success of the London 2012 Olympics depends on the recruitment and efforts of tens of thousands of volunteers, but the whole show would be inconceivable without the massive financial and administrative input of the state. The funding for elite athletes in nearly all Olympic sports comes via the government, while the huge programme of urban redevelopment being carried out around the Olympic Park in East London is being run by unaccountable quangos. This is hardly the stuff of bottom-up grassroots localism.
The Big Society is unlikely to be organising commercial competitions or sporting mega-events any time soon. However, there are a number of interesting possibilities for those who want to nurture participation in sport, create new forms of social capital and engineer a transfer of assets and power away from both the state and the market.
One of the great legacies of Victorian sport is the idea of the club: a mutual association of individuals who above all want to play and participate, rather than consume, make money or accumulate power. In recent years, the hypercommercialisation of sport and the privatisation of clubs, bought out by rich owners, have obscured this notion. Today, however, this may be changing.
When the owners of Wimbledon football club were given permission to up sticks and move to Milton Keynes in 2002, a significant number of fans, appalled by this, created their own club, AFC Wimbledon. Now, just eight years later, the club, which is owned and run by its members, is poised to enter the Football League. Supporters of Manchester United, unable to stomach the leveraged buyout of the club by the Glazer family in 2005, parted company with the team and created their own: FC United of Manchester.
Encouraged by the government agency Supporters Direct, fans have established trusts at more than 150 football clubs. Fifteen of these, including Exeter City and Bradford City, are partly or entirely in some form of common ownership.
In the case of Ebbsfleet United, which was collectively purchased by many thousands of subscribers to the website MyFootballClub, the new owners get to vote online on decisions at the club, including ticket pricing and transfers. There are few things, it seems, that can gather and mobilise people around a local civic identity and shared projects like sports clubs.
More than just a game
If clubs are capable of mobilising citizens’ energies for the benefit of common projects, can they do more than just put a team out on Saturday? In Britain, sports clubs as catalysts for wider forms of social activism are harder to come by. Although prodded by government and provided with considerable resources, professional football clubs’ efforts in the field of education, for example, are disappointingly limited. To see how it is really done, and what the potential of sports clubs might be, we need to look to Africa.
In the late 1980s, Bob Munroe, a UN development worker in Nairobi, was walking through Mathare, the city’s oldest and most deprived slum. Some children asked him if he would referee their football match. He said he would, but only if they helped him clear the rubbish from the playing space first: Mathare has never had a municipal waste or sewage service despite being home to a quarter of a million people. The children agreed and, from that exchange, the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) was born.
MYSA now organises coaching and competitive football leagues for 25,000 children in Nairobi’s poorest areas, including 5,000 girls. In the leagues, you get one point for a draw, three for a win and six for doing your environmental cleanup. The children do the work, MYSA provides shovels, equipment and skips, and Mathare and the other neighbourhoods have a waste service at last. The organisation survives on small donations from foreign companies and agencies, but its success depends above all on the amazing energy of the young, self-educated social activists who began playing football and now run MYSA. On the back of this network, MYSA now runs lending services for football boots and books, as well as clinics and health centres across Nairobi. It has also created a professional team – Mathare United – in which all players are contractually obliged to do significant social work. This team has proved good enough to win the Kenyan Championship.
It might be no bad thing if the organisation of youth sport in Britain (its points system included) were more directly controlled by the young and more systematically tied to social activism, community service and a commitment to personal and educational development.
London 2012’s contribution to the Big Society agenda does not lie in its volunteer programme alone, important and admirable as it is. After all, if we cannot find willing participants for the biggest show on earth when it comes to town, we really are in trouble. Rather, the Olympics’ significance lies in the politics of sporting infrastructure. So far, the great built legacy of the games is destined for the private or the public sector. The main stadium is sought by professional football clubs, and much of the Olympic village will be sold off. What if we had decided from the outset that all these facilities would be handed over to sporting trusts, consortia of clubs and neighbourhood groups? What if the entire infrastructure had been designed with reconversion, rather than sale, in mind? The energy released would be immense.
All over the country, lidos and swimming pools destined for closure by cash-strapped local councils have been given new life by community groups and cooperatives that have taken them over. In Chipping Norton, for example, the lido has become a cooperative and has prospered thanks to the efforts of local citizens. Why not do the same, not just with the Olympic infrastructure but also with many of the country’s sporting facilities? Playing fields, in particular, will no doubt be left to decline as public-sector budgets collapse.
Beyond the glitz and the gigantism of the industry, the lessons from the sporting world make a small but important contribution to the much bigger policy debate that the idea of the Big Society poses. Our sporting life points to the immense potential waiting to be tapped once we recognise the power of play to mobilise support and the capacity of clubs to be more than clubs. We must be bold enough to support new forms of common ownership and a real transfer of assets from state to society.
David Goldblatt FRSA is a journalist and author
At first glance, the world of sport does not seem an obvious ally of the Big Society agenda. The two sporting events getting the most headlines at the moment – professional football and the London 2012 Olympics – seem a long way from the DIY mutualism that the concept seems to encompass. The Premiership, for example, and indeed all commercial football, is organised as a segment of the entertainment industry. Consumers pay for the passive experience of watching highly paid professionals, live and on television, in a spectacle orchestrated by private corporations and media companies. The Big Society, by contrast, is committed to activism and amateurs, and to nurturing non-market relationships and not-for-profit economic actors.
The success of the London 2012 Olympics depends on the recruitment and efforts of tens of thousands of volunteers, but the whole show would be inconceivable without the massive financial and administrative input of the state. The funding for elite athletes in nearly all Olympic sports comes via the government, while the huge programme of urban redevelopment being carried out around the Olympic Park in East London is being run by unaccountable quangos. This is hardly the stuff of bottom-up grassroots localism.
The Big Society is unlikely to be organising commercial competitions or sporting mega-events any time soon. However, there are a number of interesting possibilities for those who want to nurture participation in sport, create new forms of social capital and engineer a transfer of assets and power away from both the state and the market.
One of the great legacies of Victorian sport is the idea of the club: a mutual association of individuals who above all want to play and participate, rather than consume, make money or accumulate power. In recent years, the hypercommercialisation of sport and the privatisation of clubs, bought out by rich owners, have obscured this notion. Today, however, this may be changing.
When the owners of Wimbledon football club were given permission to up sticks and move to Milton Keynes in 2002, a significant number of fans, appalled by this, created their own club, AFC Wimbledon. Now, just eight years later, the club, which is owned and run by its members, is poised to enter the Football League. Supporters of Manchester United, unable to stomach the leveraged buyout of the club by the Glazer family in 2005, parted company with the team and created their own: FC United of Manchester.
Encouraged by the government agency Supporters Direct, fans have established trusts at more than 150 football clubs. Fifteen of these, including Exeter City and Bradford City, are partly or entirely in some form of common ownership.
In the case of Ebbsfleet United, which was collectively purchased by many thousands of subscribers to the website MyFootballClub, the new owners get to vote online on decisions at the club, including ticket pricing and transfers. There are few things, it seems, that can gather and mobilise people around a local civic identity and shared projects like sports clubs.
More than just a game
If clubs are capable of mobilising citizens’ energies for the benefit of common projects, can they do more than just put a team out on Saturday? In Britain, sports clubs as catalysts for wider forms of social activism are harder to come by. Although prodded by government and provided with considerable resources, professional football clubs’ efforts in the field of education, for example, are disappointingly limited. To see how it is really done, and what the potential of sports clubs might be, we need to look to Africa.
In the late 1980s, Bob Munroe, a UN development worker in Nairobi, was walking through Mathare, the city’s oldest and most deprived slum. Some children asked him if he would referee their football match. He said he would, but only if they helped him clear the rubbish from the playing space first: Mathare has never had a municipal waste or sewage service despite being home to a quarter of a million people. The children agreed and, from that exchange, the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) was born.
MYSA now organises coaching and competitive football leagues for 25,000 children in Nairobi’s poorest areas, including 5,000 girls. In the leagues, you get one point for a draw, three for a win and six for doing your environmental cleanup. The children do the work, MYSA provides shovels, equipment and skips, and Mathare and the other neighbourhoods have a waste service at last. The organisation survives on small donations from foreign companies and agencies, but its success depends above all on the amazing energy of the young, self-educated social activists who began playing football and now run MYSA. On the back of this network, MYSA now runs lending services for football boots and books, as well as clinics and health centres across Nairobi. It has also created a professional team – Mathare United – in which all players are contractually obliged to do significant social work. This team has proved good enough to win the Kenyan Championship.
It might be no bad thing if the organisation of youth sport in Britain (its points system included) were more directly controlled by the young and more systematically tied to social activism, community service and a commitment to personal and educational development.
London 2012’s contribution to the Big Society agenda does not lie in its volunteer programme alone, important and admirable as it is. After all, if we cannot find willing participants for the biggest show on earth when it comes to town, we really are in trouble. Rather, the Olympics’ significance lies in the politics of sporting infrastructure. So far, the great built legacy of the games is destined for the private or the public sector. The main stadium is sought by professional football clubs, and much of the Olympic village will be sold off. What if we had decided from the outset that all these facilities would be handed over to sporting trusts, consortia of clubs and neighbourhood groups? What if the entire infrastructure had been designed with reconversion, rather than sale, in mind? The energy released would be immense.
All over the country, lidos and swimming pools destined for closure by cash-strapped local councils have been given new life by community groups and cooperatives that have taken them over. In Chipping Norton, for example, the lido has become a cooperative and has prospered thanks to the efforts of local citizens. Why not do the same, not just with the Olympic infrastructure but also with many of the country’s sporting facilities? Playing fields, in particular, will no doubt be left to decline as public-sector budgets collapse.
Beyond the glitz and the gigantism of the industry, the lessons from the sporting world make a small but important contribution to the much bigger policy debate that the idea of the Big Society poses. Our sporting life points to the immense potential waiting to be tapped once we recognise the power of play to mobilise support and the capacity of clubs to be more than clubs. We must be bold enough to support new forms of common ownership and a real transfer of assets from state to society.
David Goldblatt FRSA is a journalist and author
Share