The Role Of Sports For Athletes And Women Athletes

Marketisation and commoditisation provide leverage for powerful nations to assert their dominance over their sport competitors by, for instance, buying their best athletes from the dominated countries and sometimes offering those athletes citizenship. There are instances when international corporate entities sponsor and own clubs in other countries, make all management decisions, and secure profits which they return to their home countries thereby leaving host countries further impoverished (Nauright 2012:54).The above global pattern has not favored most womens’ national and local teams as most corporate entities prefer to sponsor national mens’ teams. Both the commodification and corporatization of sport reduce especially womens’†¦show more content†¦Local leagues face serious challenges due to inability to raise funds as a result of reduced quality of play resulting in poor stadium attendance that mean fewer facilities, and as indicated earlier, this l ack of facilities has a trickle-down effect on accessibility of facilities for women in sports. Due to globalisation, national teams go into a stage of â€Å"dependent development† an example is the English soccer teams as a result of the presence of foreign players in the league system denying most of the local clubs eventually has a negative effect the national team (Maguire 2013:200). Globalisation has also impacted on local sport participation by way of administrative practices. For example, Carter (2002) documents the rise of global administrative bodies (such as FIFA and OIC) and FIVF (Vanderhoof 2011) that oversee and regulate various sports. Similarly, MacAloon (1984) discusses how the modern Olympic movement highlights the diffusion of sports forms and organisation across the globe. These organisations also continue empowering males (e.g., the amount of money FIFA gives to mens’ soccer teams during the World Cups is greater than the amount they give to womens’ teams). Such inequities sometimes serve as deterrents to female participants and thereby compromise efforts to create equality between the sexes (Grainey 2012:23). The internationalisation as well as the internationality of sports can