Noam Chomsky, the man once referred to by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” doesn’t think much of sports. He sees it kind of like Karl Marx saw religion the ‘opiate of the masses’. His beef with the institution goes back to his school years, when it dawned on him he couldn’t give a fig whether the football team won the big game. A couple of decades later he wrote: “One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.”
Outside of the coffee-house gang whose stock in trade is the countercultural cachet offered up by Chomsky quotes, the ‘sports as deflection’ specimen isn’t incredibly popular. There are a gazillion sports fans in the world, none of whom particularly enjoy being told by professor types that they’re comparable to Neo, the Keanu Reeves character in the Matrix, before the red pill is dropped. (At the critical point in the film, Neo has a choice: he can take the red pill and see the truth for himself, or he can take the blue pill and return, comfortably unaware, to the illusion of the Matrix).
But whether one is wearing tie-dye in the coffee-house or team colours in the pub, there’s no denying that the business of sport has become as serious as the business of ‘people in power’. Sports executives, like the economic and political elite, need to ‘lock in value’. They need to lock in the media, the capital, and the public. And, while they’re busy doing this, it follows that they’re also ‘locking out’ a whole bunch of competing interests.
Maybe Neo should’ve taken the blue pill.