Article
Community
Culture
Football
Idolatry
Sport
5 min read

The decade that defined sport 

What the sports stars of today owe to the eighties.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Maradona runs in celebration, holding a hand aloft as an England player sits dejected on the ground.
Maradona celebrates, 1986 World Cup.
Dani Yako via Wikimedia Commons

If the 1980s were your formative years as a sports fan, you will carry many images with you even today.  Dennis Taylor potting the last black after midnight to beat Steve Davis.  Barry McGuigan defeating Eusebio Pedrosa in the ring at Loftus Road.  The races between Coe and Ovett at the Moscow Olympics.  The tie break between Borg and McEnroe.  Botham’s Ashes.  Diego Maradona versus England at the Mexico World Cup.   

You will undoubtedly have other memories, though these will have been controlled by a limited number of broadcast editors.  I clearly recall watching Viv Richards’ astonishing century in one cricket World Cup final against hosts England being regularly interrupted on BBC1’s Grandstand with coverage of a routine horse race meeting.  The introduction of the less fusty World of Sport on ITV was a route in for some sports that faced an implicit class bias, but it was all still far removed from the 24/7 reverencing of sport today. 

The eighties was an era of transition as sport began to gain a place in our cultural consciousness.  It was also a decade in which the relationship between sport and politics became cemented on paths we still walk.  In Everybody Wants To Rule The World, academic and journalist Roger Domeneghetti has written an entertaining and informative book subtitled ‘Britain, Sport and the 1980s’. 

In our branding of the twenties as the decade of polarisation, we forget how deeply divided Britain was in the eighties.  Recent commentary on the fortieth anniversary of the miners’ strike has been a reminder of this and how violent public life proved.  Football hooliganism was pervasive and after a riot at a Luton Town – Millwall game in 1985, Margaret Thatcher asked of football officials: ‘what are you going to do about it?’.  In a pithy and telling response, the FA secretary Ted Croker said: ‘Not our hooligans, Prime Minister, but yours.  The product of your society’.  Perhaps more than any other exchange, it symbolised the braiding of sport and politics, threads that endure to this day. 

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers.

The argument that sport and politics don’t mix has a familiar ring for people who live with the tired old trope that religion and politics don’t either, as if our experience of culture and values are sealed off from each other.  Sporting boycotts in the 1980s - from Olympics to apartheid South Africa – placed athletes in the unavoidable position of having to make decisions about participation that would reflect on their values and could affect their careers; positioning that other people were spared.  These were an early taste of the moral standing afforded to sportsmen and women today; a status that somehow asks more of them, perhaps because other professions have become so tarnished and mistrusted. 

Domeneghetti’s book is also a sobering reminder of how ugly and careless much of our shared life was in the eighties.  The Bradford City fire and Hillsborough disaster were awful losses that showed the low priority of health and safety and the culture of institutional cover up that continues to blight the nation.  The author locates these failings in the wider context of disasters like Kings Cross, Piper Alpha and the Marchioness boat as part of his bid to write a social history of sport. 

Yet in a sense, Domeneghetti chose arbitrary parameters.  Football in particular was on the cusp of a revolution with the introduction of the Premier League in 1992.  Cultural sympathy for the game was about to change with the writings of Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch and Pete Davies in All Played Out.  The nasty face of football was to be transformed into a highly marketable model. 

The ugliness of the era is laid bare in the prolific and casual racism, sexism and homophobia that coursed through every sport.  The Windrush’s second generation broke through in the 1980s, notably in football, but was met with staggering levels of prejudice.  Anyone tempted to think this has now been eradicated hasn’t spent any real time at a football ground or on social media.  Women’s sport had virtually no profile in the eighties outside of tennis and athletics and as recently as 1978, Lord Denning had ruled that an eleven-year-old girl should not be allowed to play competitive football against boys the same age even though she merited a place in her team.  Meanwhile, stars like Justin Fashanu, Martina Navratilova and John Curry were targeted for their sexual orientation.  It remains hard for present day athletes to identify as gay, despite the rhetoric of acceptance.  Sport then, as now, held up an unerring mirror to our faces. 

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers.  But there is the gloss of a hyper-individualistic, neo-liberal culture.  Sports stars succeed because of a combination of innate gifting (which cannot simply be replicated) and material advantage (too many Olympic medals are still awarded to wealthy and advantaged Britons). I won because I wanted it more is a dishonest assessment of sporting success in the UK and in this way also holds up a mirror to other walks of life.   

The powerful personal branding of today’s athletes in many ways have their origin in the 1980s and the way the likes of Ian Botham, Carl Lewis and John McEnroe transcended their sports.  The cult of the conquering superstar is a smart diversion from the reality that money usually wins.  Just look at the Premier League table. 

Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.