"Sport is precious it shouldn't be abused by commercial interests". To what extent is this true in sport today?

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“Sport is precious it shouldn’t be abused by commercial interests”. To what extent is this true in sport today?

Over the last few decades sport has moved from solely amateur to a professional era. I will be writing an essay that will weigh up the arguments on both sides and come to a judgement as to what extent sport has been abused by commercial interests. I will also talk about how commercialisation has given to sport as well as increased participation, and the various steps taken to bring sport from the amateur era to the professional era.

The word amateur comes from the Old French word for ‘lover of’ and this is clearly the main reason why people play amateur sport. Because they love the game that they play, as oppose to it being their job to play the game. Whereas, a professional sportsman is someone who gets paid to play sports, and often contracted to some sort of club or team. Professional sport has become more and more common, and one of the main reasons for this is because of commercialisation. Commercialisation of sport is the involvement of the media, and sponsors who seek a financial reward through sport. Commercialisation of the Olympic Games first really came about in the run up to the 1984 games in Los Angeles. For marketers, the Olympic Games are really a great target to promote products at. It is watched all over the world, so effectively being one of the chief endorsements of the games gets product recognition all across the globe. The first person to really capitalise on the advantages of commercialising the Olympic Games, was Peter Ueberroth. He intended to create an Olympic Games that did not cost the city a penny. He spread the cost for the Olympics by using sponsors to fund it. He, in a sense ‘Americanised’ the Olympics. It is generally acknowledged that Ueberroth saved the Olympic Games, at least in the financial sense.

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Commercialisation can be seen as a bad thing in sports, the Olympic Charter itself states ‘Sport is precious…it should not be abused by commercial interests’. And to some extent this is true; commercialisation can bring about a number of bad aspects to sport. Many would argue that Roman Abramovich being able to buy Chelsea Football Club for that amount of money is wrong and essentially just turned Chelsea into a super-team, with little to none competition, and this would be fine if Chelsea had earned their way to the top by winning matches but they didn’t so essentially the game ...

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