How political will sports look in 2024?
The future of sports and politics will look less flashy — but it might have a better chance at success.
Dear readers,
Happy New Year’s Eve! We hope you all had a restful holiday season and that you’re ready to ring in 2024 in your preferred style.
The New Year is a perfect opportunity to take a step back and think critically about the things you take for granted the rest of the year, so for the last edition of 2023, we’re reexaming one of Southpaw’s key premise in light of the events of the past few years. We hope you enjoy.
-Calder and Ian
How political are sports in 2023? As the year drew to a close, one of our favorite sometimes-sportswriters, The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, raised this question in a pair of podcasts that he appeared on. (You can find those podcasts here and here.) Kang’s basic thesis is the same one that we’ve entertained in various editions of this newsletter: Following the political upheaval of 2020, the sporting world in the U.S. has entered a period of political reaction, or at least systematic de-politicization. Three years ago, it seemed like American sports were becoming an organized left-leaning political force to be seriously reckoned with. Today, they are a non-entity on the national political stage.
So, it’s worth taking Kang’s question seriously: Are sports political in the sense that we understood them to be when we started this newsletter back in 2020?
In one sense, the answer is obviously yes. Sports are still tangled up in the broader political dynamics that shape American society. How teams and athletes use their platforms to influence (or reinforce) public opinion, how athletes interact with their bosses, who gets to speak on behalf of athletes, how the economics of the sporting world influence the product that fans see on the field — these are all inescapably political questions, and they exist in the sporting world regardless of whether anyone pays attention to them or not.
But in some crucial respects, the sporting world — including the sports media — has become decidedly less political since 2020. Anyone who has been paying attention to the sports world knows this, and it would be foolish to deny it. Organized political protests by athletes are few and far between, and when athletes do speak out on political issues, they do so in the bland patois of statement-ese. The overwhelming majority of mainstream sports coverage is assiduously apolitical (or subtly reactionary). The political paradigm change that seemed to be beginning in 2020 did not come to pass.
What’s behind this change? There are a host of dynamics driving politics back underground in the sporting world, some of which Kang and his interlocutors bring up and some of which we’ve observed in the course of our own reporting. The first — and most significant — is the fact that leagues were generally not rewarded for their political advocacy, as Will Leitch mentioned in our conversation with him back in May 2022. The paradigmatic example of this failure is MLB’s decision to move its All-Star Game out of Atlanta in 2021 to protest Georgia’s new voting restrictions — a move that generated a ton of backlash without actually pressuring the state to amend its laws. (And — surprise, surprise! — the league recently announced that it will host its 2025 in … Atlanta.)
That failure was symptomatic of a broader problem with the athlete mobilization of 2020, which was its failure to build lasting institutions to support athletes’ on-field protests. The few political organizations that athletes created after 2020 have mostly gone belly up. More Than A Vote — the voting rights group that Lebron James helped set up in 2020 — has been reduced to a glorified apparel company as its leaders have been re-absorbed into the Democratic Party’s electoral machine. (Michael Tyler, the group’s former vice president, is now the Biden campaign’s communications director.)
That failure to institutionalize the athlete-led upheaval of 2020 has meant that as athletes go back to the time-consuming work of being professional athletes, their causes slowly recede into the background. It also means that leagues don’t have much to show for their controversial efforts. Baseball fans might have been able to get behind MLB’s All-Star game stunt if the league could show that it actually influenced policy — but the league refused to mobilize its (quite robust) lobbying apparatus around the cause, so it predictably fell flat.
Conservative backlash has played a role, too. After 2020, the Fox News outrage machine successfully tarred the (mostly black) athletes who spoke out as anti-American, cop-hating subversives who were carrying water for the Democratic Party. Even athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simon Biles who address liberal-code issues like mental health became conservative punching bags. Becoming a set-piece in America’s culture wars takes a toll on any sane person, and it’s hard to blame athletes for wanting to avoid that fate. This is, after all, part of the right’s strategy: turn serious issues into culture war issues, thus rendering them too toxic to touch.
The effect of athletes’ retreat from the political arena has been compounded by the sports media’s simultaneous reversion to its apolitical norm. In 2023, two overwhelming imperatives structure the sports media landscape: be fast and be insider-y. The sports journalists who wrack up millions of followers online aren’t the ones doing muckraking investigations into the leagues’ political maneuvering — they’re the ones who are obsessively mining agents and insiders for scooplets and working their sources so they can tweet out press releases twenty seconds before the leagues do. This pressure is not unique to sports journalism — as political journalists, we see its impact every day in our own field — but there’s not as much of an institutional backstop to counterbalance it in the sporting world (with a few notable exceptions like the Washington Post). The New York Times will always have a political investigations team; it no longer has a dedicated sports department.
On his podcast, Kang — who is a self-professed gambling addict — also pointed out that the rise of sports gambling is fundamentally altering the sports media landscape in a way that hasn’t been seen since the rise of fantasy sports. All signs indicate that sports gambling will become increasingly lucrative in the coming years, and it makes sense that a whole ecosystem of gambling-related sports media is popping up to service that market. But given the financial imperatives described above, it’s inevitable that gambling-related media will suck up all the oxygen (and money) that sports journalists might otherwise dedicate to substantive investigations of the politics of sports. That’s a shame, but it’s not really a surprise.
Obviously, we here at Southpaw regard this retreat with more than a little disappointment and remorse. But in another sense, we think the past few years have been an important course correction. In retrospect, it’s clear that 2020 was anomalous, with leagues shut down or operating in self-enclosed bubbles at the very same moment that historic, once-in-a-generation mass protests unfolded in the streets. It makes sense that star athletes, big-name teams and legacy sports publications would get swept up in the tide.
But it was never these groups that were going to save the sporting world. In the years since 2020, we’ve seen success with groups organizing for material gains — like the minor league baseball players and women’s soccer players organizing for fair pay, or college athletes forming labor unions. These groups are organized on a collective basis not because it’s fashionable or trendy but because they can’t survive without it. Their livelihoods depend on collective action.
It’s intoxicating when the upper echelons of the sporting world appear to get behind left-wing causes. But the appearance of solidarity is just that — an illusion, a drunken fantasy. We certainly got a bit tipsy on that illusion and suffered through the resulting hangover. But we’re feeling a bit more clear-eyed now. If you’re counting on the stars of the sporting world to “politicize” sports, they will never be “political” in the way they were in 2020. But if you pay attention to the athletes further at the margins, the sporting world has never been more political than it is now.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . the questions and ideas shaping sports In 2024? “These 11 questions will shape sports in 2024” by The Washington Post staff (Dec. 29, 2023).
. . . the plague of terrible writing in sports journalism? “Presenting The 2023 Shams Charania Award For Excellence In Divulging Of Information Through Syntax Comprehended By Many” by Giri Nathan in Defector (Dec. 28, 2023).
. . . a sports/politics look ahead in India? “Looking at 2024: Politics and sport, arts of the possible” by Sandeep Dwivedi in Indian Express (Dec. 30, 2023).