Sport and the Repudiation of the Global

Sport, especially its most spectacular manifestation during mega-media sports festivals like the summer Olympic Games and the football World Cup, is often viewed as a key exemplar of globalization. Sociologists of sport have increasingly questioned this assessment, citing various empirical instances of resistance to, or amelioration of, globalizing forces in sport. This article explores a more radical theoretical possibility: that sport may be constitutively unsuited to carriage of the project of globalization in its fullest sense. It asks whether the social institution of sport is so deeply dependent on the production of national cultural difference (however the `nation' might be constructed and conceived) that it repudiates the possibility of comprehensive — that is, cultural — globalization.