Global capitalism and sport mega events

If things go South: The renewed policy of sport mega events allocation and its implications for future research

“…Hence, SMEs may be held out of the Global North, in the Global South (Cornelissen, 2004, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Steinbrink et al, 2011) as a result of the RPSMEA (Graeff, 2019) of major sports institutions, rather than as isolated and individual cases. Thus, it is clear that world sports governing bodies have recently chosen to carry out their worldwide competitions in countries outside the Global North, where the necessary infrastructure is absent, in contrast with their traditional policy, a fact that may have opened a new epoch for SMEs.…”

“…Although the association between the North and the South through global sports has been already scrutinized by researchers (Campbell, 2010; Falcous and Silk, 2006; Giulianotti, 1995; Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007; Graeff, 2019; MacIintosh et al, 1993; Reiche, 2016), the social analysis of SMEs is yet to construct a theoretical framework to support its further conceptualization in the historical moment where cities start to reject to host them. This article aims to develop a comparative framework to discuss what we called a Renewed Policy of Sport Mega Events Allocation (RPSMEA), which permitted/encouraged a tour of SMEs outside the Global North between, at least, 2010 and 2022.…”

“…In the case of the theoretical tool that we are proposing here, we make use of these three aspects, as soon as the policy of allocating SMEs during the analysed period seems to have operated in these three dimensions. Discursive resources were employed (Graeff, 2019) to ‘inspire’ the allocation of SMEs in the Global South; for this purpose, governments, franchise owners, promoters, the media and local and transnational elites committed resources to advertise such discursive resources; and processes were put in place that lead to such events to be carried out in the Global South.…”

“…However, there are unwritten or non-explicit aspects that also shape policies in general and the allocation of events in particular. In the case of SMEs, part of these aspects is linked to discursive resources (Graeff, 2019) that serve to shape and legitimize trends.…”

“…In turn, this paper starts by discussing the political and economic shifts that resulted in SMEs being allocated to countries and cities outside the Global North. We want to point out that these decisions came together with an increasing desire of global sports corporates to expand their neoliberal entertaining trade to other parts of the world (Graeff, 2019; Hall, 2006). Next, we discuss the research context that allowed us to frame the background to discuss the occurrence of SMEs in the Global South.…”