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Sports & Money

Sports has become part of the average person's life, whether we play or mostly watch it on TV. Sports has also become a means of entertainment to us humans, diverting our attention from the every day hustle, the hardships and problems we face daily. It allows us to look at people taking part in activities, which sometimes reminds us of our childhoods when we ourselves used to play those sports. We will often criticise some sports players for not scoring a point, goal etc thinking that we ourselves could do better, as we think that it is easy as playing in the park when we were at primary school.

You know I will not be writing about sports and its technicalities for too long as there must be a motive for me writing about sports and the environment around it. To be more specific, I will comment about professional sports and it's place in modern society, how it affects us, how it creates job opportunities, possible corruption in sports and of course the huge amounts of money involved.

Professional sports has come a long way and has grown to be a multibillion dollar industry. It is a mixture of business and pleasure as we see billionaires buying their own teams, why? Because they can. It's a scenario of big boys with toys; we can see this in sports, such as motor racing, football, basketball and other sports. Most sports are just based on competitors playing with one ball. How did these simple sports become such big business and so important in our lives? As far as I know these modern day sports are based on ancient Greek times and even Roman times when the loser of any game would have to pay the ultimate sacrifice. If you watched the film gladiators you can see similarities of how the crowds roared when someone got killed, even in modern history where lynching a black man in the united states would generate a big roar from the crowd who gathered to party in their ritual of 'pick a nigger' where the term picnic derives from. Since the people doing those things were barbaric, we now moved into an age where those practices are no longer acceptable therefore we find other ways of entertainment in sports. Instead of the gladiator type sports or lynching sports we now have football, basketball or whatever sports you can think of.

Many years ago many people played sports for the love of the game or for the fun of it. In this day and age several people with talent are taking the game a bit more serious, dedicating their time to perfecting their skills to become professionals, essentially to earn a lot of money and in most cases become millionaires thus making their lives better. This is because sports has become a household 'thing' so to speak and everyone wants to see it or be involved with it one way or another. Whether to subscribe to the weekly games or buy tickets to see the stars at least for once in their lives. The demand for sports has never been higher. Due to this modern day sports has become a business. Many companies have been formed, TV channels etc sports has been so big that some teams are on the stock market where fans can buy and sell shares in their company (sports team). As I say this, the number of sports teams as public limited companies plc's are in decline as many top teams are been taken over by businessman who will turn these teams as their own private teams, which effectively means private limited companies. These new owners will get all the profit's made by the team, however if the team is unsuccessful then they will bear the brunt of the losses.

Sports has created job opportunities for the average person, more so for the average child. Instead of growing up to take up careers such as an accountant or a lawyer, doctor etc, a child can now have genuine aspirations of taking up sports as a career. Still many would encourage them to focus on their education as the chances of turning pro at sports are very limited. Still there is a chance nonetheless as we see many youngsters from Africa, Brazil and the rest of the world grew to become some of the world's highest paid soccer stars due to the Capitalism nature of sports, where a child could be in poverty in South America or Africa today, but in 10 years time could be a multimillionaire due to the huge amounts or money in sports and of course the demand. Still I could see corruption like in any other industry where a team can buy a player from Africa on the cheap and bring them to play in a European soccer league and in a few years sell them on for several millions. At the same time it provides the player with huge amounts of money which they will use to help not just themselves but probably their whole families or friends.

I look at sports as just a form of entertainment and like others; I watch sports with my friends and will talk about the latest football/soccer news at work with my colleagues. At the back of my mind I still cannot comprehend why there is so much money in sports and there is so much famine all over world, particularly in places like Africa and India. There are also places in Eastern Europe where there are starving children, yet the media choose to ignore it as it is not good for TV. Even some of these sports stars spending habits disgusts me as I believe they should know themselves and where they are coming from and not waste their money, which could be spent on feeding some starving children or even start some form of economy in some poor villages across the world. Some sports stars are no different from rappers as they are also caught up in capitalism where the poor continue to suffer and the rich do not care. At the same time there are many sports stars who are using their money to help people, which is testimony that not everyone has gone mad.

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