Sports and Play in the US

Relationship between sports and social class explains why many of us in the sociology of sport use a combination of structural and cultural theories to help us understand sports in society.

For example, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political theorist, developed a theory stating that members of the "ruling class" in contemporary societies maintain their power to the extent that they can develop creative ways to convince most people that their society is organized as fairly and efficiently as possible under current social and economic conditions.

Elite and powerful people have considerable influence over what "counts as sport" and how sports are organized and played in mainstream social worlds. Even when grassroots games and physical activities become formally organized as sports, they don't become popular unless they can be used to reaffirm the interests and ideologies of sponsors with resources.

For example, ESPN organized and televised the X Games to fit the needs of corporate sponsors that buy advertising time to promote their products to young males.

In all societies, social class and class relations influence who plays, who watches, who consumes information about sports, and what information about sports is available in....

mainstream media. Patterns of sport participation and consumption are closely associated with money, power, and privilege. At a basic level, organized sports are a luxury item in the economies of many nations, and they are most prevalent in wealthy nations where people have discretionary money and time.

Today, in wealthy nations, there are a number of well supported athletes who have access to these training technologies, which

makes the idea of a "level playing field" laughable, despite claims by the IOC and media commentators that the competitions are fair.

When these values and cultural practices are widely accepted, average people are....

more likely to believe that the status and privilege of the wealthy and powerful are legitimate and deserved.

Other exceptions are individual athletes who have wealthy corporate sponsors.

For example, US hurdler, Lolo Jones, was able to use her talent, face, and physique to attract corporations that wanted to capitalize on the media attention she receives (Longman, 2012). But even Red Bull, her major sponsor, hedged its investment in Jones by hiring twenty-two scientists and technicians to work with her exclusively from 2005 through 2012. These performance specialists monitored her training runs with 40 motion-capture cameras. An Optojump system replicated her feet hitting the track surface on every stride during 110 meters of hurdling. The Phantom Flex high-speed camera moved astride her and recorded 1500 frames per second as she ran. The resulting analyses of these data and input from other specialists were then used to customize daily training for Jones (McClusky, 2012).

There are opportunities for some of the top women athletes to play professional sports in other parts of the world.

For example, US national soccer team star Megan Rapinoe has played for a professional team in France, where she made $14,000 a month. Most of the top WNBA players also play on teams in Europe where they often make more than during their seasons in the United States.

Many boys and young men use sports to establish a masculine identity, but the dynamics of this process vary by social class.

For example, in a qualitative analysis of essays written about sports by 15- and 16-year-old French Canadian boys in the Montreal area, Suzanne Laberge and Mathieu Albert (1999) discovered that upper-class boys connected their sports participation with masculinity because playing sports, they said, taught them leadership skills, and being a leader was central to their definition of masculinity.

Most elite sports require expensive equipment and training.

For example, in any form of motor racing the costs can reach $200,000 per year, plus private driving coaches at $5000 per weekend (Cacciola, 2012). Clearly, this influences who can become seriously involved and successful in these sports.

Latin Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, and Native Americans are clearly underrepresented in...

most sports and sports organizations in the United States. Many Euro-Americans feel uncomfortable with ethnic diversity in situations in which they must trust and work closely with co-workers. Most often, this feeling is caused by a lack of knowledge about the heritage and customs of others and little exposure to ethnic diversity involving meaningful communication.

As entry barriers declined between 1960 and the late 1970s,...

new barriers related to retention took their place. Retention barriers existed when contracts for experienced black players were not renewed unless the players had significantly better performance records than white players at the same career stage. This pattern existed through the early 1990s, but it has faded with time.

Method of transferring public money into the private pockets of wealthy individuals has...

occurred as social services for the unemployed, the working poor, children, and people with disabilities are being cut.

The sports participation of girls and young women also is limited when they're expected to shoulder responsibilities at home.

For example, in low-income families, especially single-parent and immigrant families, teenage daughters often are expected to care for younger siblings after school until evening when parents return from work. But schools and teams rarely sponsor and organize cooperative child care for students who care for siblings. Such cooperative strategies are foreign to individualistically oriented people in the United States and might be rejected as being "socialist." But without arrangements that help them with their child-care responsibilities, such students will typically drop out of sports or never try out.

The impact of social class on sports participation often varies by age, gender, race and ethnicity, and geographic location.

For example, married women with children are less likely than their male counterparts to have the time and resources to play sports.

Finally, many professional athletes at the minor league level make less than workers in nonsport occupations.

For example, most players in minor league baseball make less than minimum wage in the US when their hours of training, competition, and traveling are totaled.Their season is over 5 months long, they play 140 games, and most players are paid less than $55 per game, or about $7,500 for the season. Elementary school teachers have much higher salaries than these players, better working conditions, greater financial stability, and a pension plan.

Absent in the coverage is recognition that the Games are also a celebration of wealth and inequality.

For example, prior to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, 78 of the approximately 204 nations that have participated in the Olympics have never won a medal and another 62 countries have won 5 or fewer medals in Olympic history. Many nations have not won a medal for at least 40 years. The United States, on the other hand, with its combination of wealth and population size, have won 2,827 medals—over 1069 more than any other nation.

Young athletes often have visions of playing professional sports, and their parents may have similar visions. But the chances of turning these visions into realities are remote. The odds or chances for a person to become a college or professional athlete are difficult to calculate, and many different methods have been used.

For example, the calculations could be based on the number of players in the top league in a sport, such as the National Hockey League in North America, or they could be based on the number of professional hockey players in all major and minor league teams worldwide.

There are opportunities in professional basketball, volleyball, soccer, figure skating, bowling, skiing, bicycling, track and field, and rodeo, but the number of professional female athletes in these sports remains low, and only a few women make over $100,000 annually.

For example, when Forbes magazine ranked the top 100 moneymaking athletes worldwide during 2018, Serena Williams was the only woman on the list.

Even the health and fitness movement, often described as a grassroots phenomenon in North America, involves mostly people who have higher-than-average incomes and education and work in professional or managerial occupations.

For the most part, people in low-income jobs don't run, bicycle, or swim as often as their high-income counterparts. Nor do they play as many organized sports on their lunch hours, after work, on weekends, or during vacations. This pattern holds true throughout the life course, for younger and older people, men and women, racial and ethnic populations, and people with disabilities: Social class is related strongly to participation among all categories of people.

when athletic scholarships go to financially needy young people who focus on learning and earn their degrees,....

participation in college sports increases their chances for career success. But this is far more the exception than the rule.

Over time, economic inequality in society leads to the formation of class-based lifestyles that involve particular forms of sports.

For the most part, sport participation in various lifestyles reflects patterns of sponsorship and access to participation opportunities. For example, the lifestyles of wealthy people routinely include golf, tennis, skiing, swimming, sailing, and other sports that are self-funded and played at exclusive clubs and resorts.

They may play games, but they seldom have the resources needed to organize and play sports as we know them.

For these people, the sports played in the United States and other post-industrial nations are clearly out of reach.

This case of boxing shows that all sports participation is embedded in particular social and cultural contexts.

For young people from resource-deprived areas and families, sports participation may help them cope with or survive the immediate circumstances of their lives, but it does not automatically provide "lifelines" or "hookups" that connect them with other social worlds in which opportunities are available.

Sports that emphasize partnership, sharing, open participation, nurturance, and mutual support are seldom sponsored because....

people with power don't want to promote values that reaffirm equality and horizontal forms of social organization in society.

Women in most post-industrial nations have challenged the legacy of traditional gender ideology, and progress has been made in some sports organizations.

However, a heavily gendered division of labor continues to exist in nearly all organizations. In traditional and developing nations, the record of progress is negligible, and very few women hold positions of power in any sports organizations.

Money and economic power exert significant influence on the goals, purpose, and organization of sports in society. Many people believe that sports and sports participation are open to all people and that inequalities related to money, position, and influence have no effect on the organized games we play and watch.

However, formally organized sports could not be developed, scheduled, or maintained without economic resources. Those who control money and economic power use them to organize and sponsor sports. As they do so, they give preference to sport forms that reflect and maintain their values and interests. As a result, sports emerge out of a context in which inequality shapes decisions and the allocation of resources. In the process, sports reproduce the very inequalities that so many people think are absent in them.

Professional development programs, workshops, and coaching clinics have been developed since the late 1990s to assist women as they work in and try to change these cultures and make them more inclusive.

However, full equity won't occur until more men in sports organizations change their ideas about gender and its connection with sports and leadership.

Exceptions to this are found in Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer teams that have many Latino players and a fair representation of Latinos in management.

However, neither Asian Pacific Americans nor Native Americans fare very well in any US sports organizations, partly because they are perceived as having little sports knowledge and experience, regardless of the reality of their lives.

"racial" or "ethnic," often exist in sports and other organizations.

However, they continually reproduce an organizational culture and operating procedures that cause minority men and all women to be underrepresented in positions of power and responsibility.

Of course, these facts are distorted in media content that presents disproportionately more images of successful black athletes than blacks in other positive roles.

If young African Americans use media images as a basis for making choices and envisioning their future, their choices will be based on faulty information.

This also is reflected in the compensation received by CEOs of large corporations:

In 1965 they received about eighteen times more than typical workers that year. In 1978 it was 27 times more, in 1995 it was 135 times more, and in 2018 it was over 361 times more. As top executives took more pay for themselves, the pay for typical workers remained stuck at 1980 levels. This illustrates how power and position often influence class relations.

Social class

refers to categories of people who share an economic position in society based on their income, wealth (savings and assets), education, occupation, and social connections. People in a particular social class also share similar life chances—that is, similar odds for achieving economic success and power in society. Social classes exist in all contemporary societies because life chances are not equally distributed across all people.

When Tom Farrey (2008), then an Emmy-Award-winning journalist at ESPN, investigated this issue he concluded that "college athletics in general are more the province of the privileged than the poor"

In a follow-up investigation in 2017, Farrey found that this pattern persisted and even carried over to basketball. He concluded the following: Indeed, most athletic scholarships are going to middle-class kids with college-educated parents, not to kids from poor families who need a scholarship to get anywhere close to a university campus. ... Simply put, NCAA sports have been gentrified. (Farrey, 2017)

Athletes from nations with relatively low GDP are extremely unlikely to have access to the training and support required to qualify for and travel to the Paralympics.

In countries where poverty rates are high, people with physical or intellectual impairments have little or no opportunity to participate and train in sports.

Among all full-time undergraduate students less than 2 percent receive some form of athletic aid.

In fact, academic scholarships amount to many millions of dollars more than the total amount of athletic scholarships, even though many high school students and their parents don't know this.

Class relations work in similar ways. People with resources sponsor sports that support their ideas about "good character," individual responsibility, competition, excellence, achievement, and proper social organization.

In fact, whenever people obtain power in a social world, they define "character" in a way that promotes their interests. For example, when wealthy and powerful people play sports in exclusive clubs, such as Augusta National (golf club) in Georgia, they use a class ideology that legitimizes their right to do so and establishes their membership in such a club as a privilege they deserve for being winners in society.

Black and Latinx households are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to financial resources that could be spent on sports and sports participation.

In terms of annual income, Latinx and black households, respectively, have incomes that are $17,660 and $22,600 less than the annual incomes of white households. Over the course of a 40 year work life, this amounts to a deficit of over $706,000 for Latinx households and $904,000 for black households.

most of the jobs in women's sports continue to be held by men, and women seldom are hired for jobs in men's programs, except in peripheral support positions.

In the United States, when men's and women's high school or college athletic programs are combined, men become the athletic directors in about 80 percent of the cases.

Opportunities for women in sports will continue to shift toward equity, but many people resist making the structural and ideological changes that would produce full equity.

In the meantime, there may be gradual increases in the number of women coaches, sports broadcasters, athletic trainers, administrators, and referees. Changes will occur more rapidly in certain sport industries that target women as consumers and need women employees to increase their sales and profits.

According to working-class boys, playing sports enabled them to display toughness and develop the rugged personas that matched their ideas of manhood.

In this sense, social class influenced the ways that sports and sport experiences were integrated into the lives of these young men.

These coaches reaffirm the beliefs that it is normal and necessary for adults to control young people and that young people must learn to accept that control.

In this way, sports reproduce a hierarchical form of age relations, with adult power and privilege defined as normal and necessary aspects of social worlds.

the college sports that offer high school seniors the best odds for a scholarship include...

rowing, golf, equestrian events, gymnastics, lacrosse, swimming, fencing, and water polo—all of which are dominated by upper-middle-class, white participants

Studies also show that adjustment problems are most likely when injuries force an athlete to retire without notice.

Injuries link retirement with larger issues of health and self-esteem and propel a person into life-changing transitions before they're expected. When this occurs, athletes often need career-transition counseling and other support.

Boys and girls from higher-income families seldom have household responsibilities that force them to drop out of sports.

Instead, their parents drive them to practices, lessons, and games; make sure they are well-fed; have equipment they need; and provide access to cars when they are old enough to drive themselves to practices and games.

Finally, all 20 of the people on the list are men—although women are among the American gamblers—and eighteen of the twenty are white men.

It is clear that white men hold nearly 100 percent of the major power positions in elite sports today. These men have much in common with other economic elites in the United States.

Media coverage focuses on the best athletes in the most popular sports, and they often have longer and more lucrative playing careers than others.

Little coverage is given to the more typical cases—that is, those who play for one or two seasons before being cut or forced to quit for other reasons, especially injuries or lack of resources to pay for training. We hear about the long careers of popular NFL quarterbacks, but little about the many players whose 1-year contracts are not renewed after their first season. The average age of players on the oldest NFL team in 2018 was 27 years old and 16 of the 32 NFL teams had an average age of less than 26 years old.

Even informal games require facilities, equipment, and safe play spaces—all of which are more plentiful in upper- and upper-middle-income neighborhoods.

Low-income neighborhoods generally lack what is needed to initiate and sustain informal activities; families don't have large lawns at their homes, they don't live on safe cul-de-sacs without traffic, and there is a short supply of well-maintained neighborhood parks. This is why social class and class relations must be taken into account when we study sports in society and try to explain the patterns of sport participation we see around us.

In fact, when corporate credit cards are used to purchase blocks of season tickets, as they are in most venues, the only mixing of social classes is between "the haves" and "the have-mores."

Meanwhile, team owners misleadingly blame players' salaries for escalating ticket prices.

Sport team owners are not the only wealthy and powerful people who benefit when stadiums and arenas are built with public money.

New publicly financed sport facilities increase property values in urban areas in which major investors and developers can initiate profitable projects. Others also may benefit as money trickles down to the rest of the community, but the average taxpayers who fund the facilities will never see the benefits enjoyed by the wealthy few.

Ironically, the average residents whose taxes build stadiums and arenas usually can't afford to buy tickets to sports events in these venues.

One reason for high ticket prices is that corporate accounts are used to buy so many tickets to games that the team owners raise ticket prices to match the demand.

Age relations are especially apparent in youth sports when participants don't meet adult expectations or when they violate the rules developed by adults. The adults use their power to define deviance, identify when it occurs, and demand that children comply with rules and expectations.

Overall, adults use their superior resources to convince young people that "the adults' way" is "the right way" to play sports. When young people comply with adults' rules and meet adults' expectations, they're rewarded and told that they have "character."This is why many adults are fond of college and professional coaches who are autocratic and controlling.

This highlights the influence of social class in sports. In fact, when it comes to sports participation today, the socioeconomic status of an athlete's family has never been more important.

Participation now depends almost exclusively on family resources. This point was made more generally by Robert Putnam, a respected public policy professor at Harvard, when he noted the following: We're moving toward an America that none of us have ever lived in, in which being affluent or being poor is inherited. ... The most important decision any kid makes [today] is choosing their parents (in Rinaldi, 2015).

There were over 20 million undergraduate students in 2018-2019

shows that 500,733 (about 2.5 percent) of these students were on intercollegiate teams. Approximately 177,559 athletic scholarships were available for those team members. Some received full scholarships covering tuition, room, meals, and fees, but most received partial scholarships amounting to a fraction of a full scholarship as determined by the team coach. The average amount of a scholarship in NCAA Division I schools was about $14,270 for men and $15,162 for women in 2013, but these dollar amounts were much lower for athletes in NCAA Division II, NAIA, and NJCAA schools.

The dynamics of class relations do not stop here. After contributing public money to build stadiums and arenas, local and state governments often give discounted property tax rates to team owners and their real estate partners who develop areas around the new venues.

Property taxes are the main source of revenues for public schools, so urban public schools often have less money as team owners and developers increase their wealth.

What happens in the occupational careers of former athletes? Are their career patterns different from the patterns of others? Is sport participation a stepping-stone to future occupational success and upward social mobility? Does playing sports have economic payoffs after active participation is over?

Research findings on this topic are tricky to interpret. For example, young people who play on school sport teams generally come from families that have higher incomes and more wealth than the families of other students. Therefore, if they have more successful occupational careers, how do we know if this is due to family-related socioeconomic advantages or to their experiences in sports?

Global inequalities related to per capita income, living standards, and access to developmental resources cause many of the most serious problems that we face today.

Research shows that even though the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined over the past two decades, the gap between the richest and poorest people worldwide is growing wider. Close to 3.5 billion people, about 46 percent of the world population, lives on less than $5.50 per day as they struggle to maintain stability in their lives

They can't understand how or why boxer Floyd Mayweather made $285 million in 2018, an amount equivalent to the annual living expenses of about 600,000 people in certain regions of the world.

Similarly, workers who make less than $3 a day producing the balls, shoes, and other equipment and clothing used by most people in wealthy nations, would question the fairness of such inequality.

How sports come to be connected with class relations in society.

Sports offer "proof" that inequalities are based on merit, that competition identifies winners, and that losers should work harder or change themselves if they want to be winners, or simply try and try again. Most important, sports provides a metaphor for society that portrays social class as a characteristic of individuals rather than an economic structure that influences life chances and the distribution of resources in society.

Career opportunities for female athletes are limited relative to opportunities for men.

Tennis and golf provide opportunities, but the professional tours for these sports draw athletes worldwide. For women in the United States, this means that the competition to make a living in these sports is great. About 2,500 players representing 100 nations competed in Women's Tennis Association (WTA) tournaments during 2019, but only the top 200 players won enough money to fully pay for their expenses on the tour. Of those, only twenty-one were from the United States. In fact, most US players are among the 1300 that had made less than $5000 during the year.

Professional leagues for women now exist in basketball and beach volleyball, but they have provided career opportunities for fewer than 400 athletes in any given recent year.

The National Women's Soccer League was established in April 2013 as the third attempt to make women's professional soccer a spectator sport. In 2019 there were nine teams and 282 players, although only 190 of those players were mainstays on the nine teams. Each team had a $421,500 salary cap for the year with the minimum salary being $16,538 and the maximum salary being a $46,200. To assist the league, the soccer federations from the United States, Canada, and Mexico paid the salaries of players on their national teams—about fifty players in all.

Social stratification refers to

structured forms of economic inequalities that are part of the organization of everyday social life. In other words, in comparison with people from upper social classes, people from lower social classes have fewer opportunities to achieve economic success and power. Children born into wealthy, powerful, and well-connected families are in better positions to become wealthy, powerful, and well-connected adults than are children born into poor families that lack influence and social networks connecting them with educational and career opportunities.

When athletes encounter problems transitioning out of sports into careers and other activities,...

support should be and occasionally is provided by the sports organizations that benefited from their labor. Some organizations, including universities and national governing bodies for Olympic sports do this through transition programs focusing on career self-assessments, life skills training, career planning, résumé writing, job search strategies, interviewing skills, career placement contacts, and psychological counseling. Retiring athletes often find it helpful to receive guidance in identifying the skills they learned in sports and how those skills can be transferred to subsequent careers.

Dominant class ideology in the United States has long been organized around two themes:

the American Dream and a belief that the United States is a meritocracy.

The longer athletes are cut off from non-sport relationships and experiences, and the more central and salient their athlete identity,...

the more difficulty they will have when making the transition out of sport and into non-sport-related social worlds.

The implications of social-class dynamics become very serious when health and obesity issues are considered. Limited opportunities to exercise safely and play sports are among the factors contributing to high rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, especially among girls and women from low-income households.

The availability of facilities, safe spaces, transportation, and sports programs all vary by so.cial class, and girls and women in low-income households experience the effects of social class in different and more profoundly negative ways when it comes to involvement in physical activities and sports.

One of the outcomes of such an ideology is that competitive success comes to be linked with moral worth.

The belief that "you get what you deserve, and you deserve what you get" works to the advantage of people with wealth, because it implies that they deserve what they have and that inequality is a fair and natural outcome of competitive processes. A related belief is that as long as competition is free and unregulated, only the best will succeed and only the lazy and unqualified will fail.

The discussion of social class and class relations in this chapter is grounded in a critical approach that identifies who benefits from and who is disadvantaged by the ways that sports are organized and played.

The focus is on economic inequality, the processes through which inequality is reproduced, how it benefits wealthy and powerful people, and how it affects sports and the lives of people associated with sports.

At the start of the 2019-2020 season, there were only 14 African-American head football coaches in the 130 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), down from 21 during the 2013-2014 season; 85 percent of the head coaches were white men.

The percentage of black head coaches across all men's and women's sports in NCAA Divisions I, II, and III hovers around 5 percent (excluding HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities). Overall, black men and women make up less than 5 percent of the athletic directors at more than 1200 NCAA universities, and in the 30 Division I conferences there is only one black commissioner.

In the WNBA, the pay is a fraction of what men in the NBA make—an average of about $79,000 in 2019, with a league minimum salary of about $41,000. None of the 144 players is allowed to make more than $113,500 for the season.

The total salaries for all WNBA players amounted to about $11.4 million, which was only one-third of the salary paid to LeBron James for the 2018-19 season. Another way to compare is to say that for every salary dollar that an NBA player makes, a WNBA player makes about 1.3-cents. To be fair, there are 48 more games in an NBA versus a WNBA season, so WNBA players really earn almost 4-cents for every dollar earned by an NBA player.

Measuring the true cost of job creation is tricky.

The type of job created and the economic conditions at the time and place that the job is created all influence costs. However, for the money spent to build a major sport facility, the returns in the form of new jobs are relatively low.

More than ever before, it takes money to play sports and develop sport skills. Tickets are expensive, and spectators often are divided by social class in the stadium:

The wealthy and well connected sit in luxury suites and club seats, whereas fans who are less well off sit in other sections, depending on their ability to pay for premium tickets or buy season tickets.

When parents and athletes discover that full scholarships are available to only one-third of the athletes on college teams, they are shocked.

Their shock may turn into disbelief when they remember that they spent $5000 or more a year to keep their son or daughter in a sport from age six to seventeen—a minimum "investment" of $60,000, to say nothing of the time, energy, and long weekends spent driving to and sitting at practices, games, and tournaments—and eating fast food.

Among the top twenty are eight CEOs in major sport organizations, including two NFL teams.

There are eight CEOs of media and media marketing companies and two owners of sport teams (in the NFL). Rounding out the top 20 are LeBron James, who was new to Los Angeles when this list was compiled, and the American Sport Gambler, that became powerful when the US Supreme Court ruled that states could permit gambling on sports events.

What about other careers in sports?

There are jobs for women in coaching, training, officiating, sports medicine, sports information, public relations, marketing, and administration.

As up to 100 million Americans place legal bets on sports it will impact the way people watch sports, the content of sports media programming, and the organization of sport venues when it is possible to bet on the game at the game.

There will be additional changes as each state makes decisions on the legality of sports betting and as they compete with each other for a piece of what will quickly become a $6 billion business with a great potential for growth.

The uniquely American belief that "you can be anything you want to be" never acknowledges that a person's class position influences life chances or that life chances influence patterns of social and economic mobility in all social classes....

Therefore, Americans often dream about what they hope to be in the future rather than critically examining their current economic circumstances and the ways that class relations affect their lives. The belief that "you can be anything" also discredits poor and low-income people by associating poverty with individual failure, laziness, and weakness of character.

The facilities employ relatively few people, they are closed much of the time, and most of the jobs are seasonal and low paying.

Therefore, after reading reports of studies done by independent economists, it appears to me that for each job created by a new stadium, between 10 and 20 new jobs could have been created if the same amount of public money had been invested in more strategically chosen development projects. This means that stadiums and large arenas are lousy job creators for the public money spent on them.

Familiar people are "known quantities" and perceived to be predictable and trustworthy.

Therefore, if a team owner or university athletic director is a white male, which is true in about 80 percent of all cases, he may wonder about the qualifications of ethnic minority candidates, especially if he lacks exposure to diversity. He may wonder if he can trust them to be supportive and fit in with his managerial style and approach. If he has doubts, he'll choose the candidate he believes is most like himself. Additionally, black head coaches in professional and big-time college sports appear to be assessed more critically than white head coaches, and when they are fired, they are less likely to be rehired at the same level.

Promoting this ideology is difficult when it conflicts with the real experiences of many Americans who work hard and haven't achieved success in the form of the American Dream or have seen their success disappear due to factors beyond their control.

Therefore, people in the upper classes are most likely to retain their position and status if they can create and perpetuate widespread agreement that competition is a natural and fair way to allocate rewards and that the winners in competitive processes deserve the rewards they receive.

Although the power wielded by these and other powerful people in sports does not ignore the interests of common folk in the United States and worldwide, it clearly focuses on the expansion and profitability of the organizations represented by the power holders.

Therefore, sports are sponsored and presented to highlight the meanings and orientations valued by economic elites at the same time that they provide exciting and enjoyable experiences to people like you and me.

There are no coaches and only one athlete on the list because they are simply hired hands—workers who serve at the discretion of those who run the business of sport.

Therefore, the journalists who did the selecting and ranking focused on who could make decisions that would have a profound influence on the organization and culture of sports in the United States.

Racial prejudice was strong and team owners assumed that white players, coaches, and spectators would not accept black players unless they made immediate and significant contributions to a team. Black athletes without exceptional skills were passed by.

Therefore, the performance statistics for black athletes surpassed those of white athletes, a fact that many white people used to reinforce their stereotypes about the "natural" physicality of black people with African ancestry.

Class relations

the ways that social class is incorporated into the organization of our everyday lives.

Young people from upper-income households often have so many opportunities that they seldom see sports as high-stakes, career-related activities in their lives. For a young person with a car, nice clothes, money for college tuition, and good career contacts for the future, playing sports can be fun, but it's not perceived as necessary for economic survival, gaining respect, or establishing an identity.

Therefore, young men from middle- and upper-income backgrounds often disengage gradually from childhood dreams of becoming professional athletes and develop new visions for their futures. For them, playing sports does not hold the same life significance as it does for their peers from working-class and low-income households

As the globalization of money, commercial trade, and financing opened up in the late 1970s, class relations in many societies changed to increase the income, wealth, and consumption gaps between the poor and the powerful.

These economic changes enabled those who were connected with the flow of capital around the world to increase their power and wealth. As a result, the gap between the rich and the poor expanded in terms of income, wealth, and political influence.

Higher prices seldom discourage corporate executives because until 2018 they could claim a portion of the ticket costs as a business deduction,

thereby reducing their taxes by 18-35 percent. As a result, tax revenues decline and the government has less money to fund sport programs for average taxpayers, and most of those taxpayers can't afford the expensive tickets. This means that stadiums today seldom are places where social classes mix as they cheer for the same team.

Furthermore, when cities spend public money to build stadiums for professional teams,...

they create far fewer jobs than could be created by other forms of economic development.

During the 1980s and 1990s, many college and professional sport teams had plantation-like hiring practices—..

they employed black workers but hired only white managers. Since the mid-1990s, the rate at which blacks have been hired in managerial positions has varied by sport. There's been slow progress in some sports organizations, especially those associated with college and professional football

Because young men from low-income households often have more at stake when it comes to playing sports,...

they face more personal pressure than wealthier peers, because they often lack the material resources required to train, develop skills, and be noticed by people who can serve as their advocates.

Research indicates that when chief executive officers (CEOs) recruit candidates for top management positions,...

they favor people with backgrounds and orientations similar to their own, and they often hire people they know or have worked with in the past.

When people struggle to stretch the family budget,....

they seldom can maintain a lifestyle that includes regular sport participation.

Spectators may cheer at the same times and experience similar emotions, but

this is the extent to which social-class differences are transcended at the events, and the reality of social class and inequality returns as soon as people leave the stadium.

The lifestyles of low-income people and those living under the poverty line seldom involve regular sports participation,....

unless a shoe company identifies young potential stars and sponsors their participation.

When sports were first desegregated in the United States, blacks faced entry barriers—that is,

unless they had exceptional skills and exemplary personal characteristics they were not recruited or given professional contracts.

We often hear about the importance of equal opportunities in society, but there are few discussions about the ways that people in upper socioeconomic classes...

use their income, wealth, and power to maintain their positions of advantage in society and pass that advantage from one generation to the next. Instead, we hear "rags-to-riches" stories about individuals who overcame poverty or a lower-class background to become wealthy, stories about "millionaires next door," and stories about CEOs who are "regular guys" with annual incomes of $10 million or more.

School sports programs in middle- and upper-income areas also may be threatened by financial problems, but they're maintained by "participation fees" paid by athletes' parents.

These fees, as high as $500 or more per sport, guarantee that teams across many sports are available for young people lucky enough to be born into well-to-do households. Additionally, when school teams don't meet the expectations of well-to-do parents, they either vote to raise more public funds or use private funds to build new fields and facilities, hire coaches, and run high-profile tournaments that often attract college coaches who recruit athletes by giving them scholarships. Therefore, when tax revolts and political decisions cause public programs to disappear, well-to-do people simply buy private sport participation opportunities for their children.

In this way, sports and other forms of exciting entertainment become cultural vehicles for establishing "ideological outposts" in the minds of people who are ruled.

These outposts can then be used to send other messages into the popular consciousness— messages from sponsors and media commentators who reaffirm a class ideology legitimizing current forms of class inequality in society.

To rectify the lack of black coaches, legal pressures forced the NFL in 2003 to adopt the "Rooney Rule,"

which required teams to interview minority candidates for open coaching positions. Although the impact of this affirmative action policy is not clear, only four of the 32 NFL teams had black head coaches during the 2019-20 season. With 70 percent of the players being black men, 88 percent of the head coaches are white men.

The United States is the only country in the world where some colleges and universities provide scholarships to athletes who play on their sports teams.

These scholarships provide financial support to pay for some or all tuition and other education-related expenses. As the cost of higher education has increased far beyond the rate of inflation and income growth, the value of athletic scholarships has increased. As a result, many parents see the possibility of a financial payoff if one or more of their children excels in a sport and is offered a scholarship.

Women from upper-income families, on the other hand, usually face few constraints on sport participation.

They can afford child care, domestic help, carryout dinners, and sport fees. They participate by themselves and with friends and family members. Their social networks include other women who also have resources to play sports.

The fact that athletes today have had to make such a complete commitment to their sports from an early age has often cut them off from the very experiences and relationships they need when they must adjust to life after they stop competing.

They have never had an "off season" as athletes had in the past, nor have they had the time or energy to focus on personal development away from the intense seven-day-a-week training and competition schedule.

People like to think that sport is the great equalizer, that it transcends issues of money, power, and economic inequalities.

They see sports as open activities in which success comes only through individual ability and hard work. However, all organized sports depend on material resources, and those resources must come from somewhere. Therefore, playing, watching, and excelling in sports depend on resources supplied by individuals, families, governments, or private organizations.

At the same time, executives and their friends and relatives enjoy free perks worth untold billions of dollars,

which they refer to as "development investments" rather than "welfare for the rich."

Girls and young women who grow up in these families play sports during their childhoods and attend schools with well-funded sport programs.

They seldom experience the same constraints as their lower-income counterparts, even though their opportunities may not equal those of their upper-income male peers.

When sales taxes are used to pay off bonds, people in low- and middle-income households pay a higher percentage of their annual incomes to build the stadiums than people in higher-income households.

This amounts to a case of the poor subsidizing the rich with government approval for the financial benefit of billionaire sport team owners.

Many women who work in sports organizations continue to deal with organizational cultures that are primarily based on the values and experiences of men.

This contributes to low job satisfaction and high job turnover among women.

The wealthy aristocrats who developed the modern Olympic Games even used their power to establish a definition of amateur that favored athletes from wealthy backgrounds.

This definition, which excluded athletes who used their sport skills to earn a living, has been revised over the years so the Olympics now include those who are not independently wealthy.

Many people in the United States see sports as a sphere in which people from low-income and poor backgrounds can experience upward social mobility:

—an affirmation of the American Dream

These sports often involve expensive facilities, equipment, and/or clothing, and generally require that people have jobs and/or lives in which they have the control, freedom, and time needed to participate; some people also combine sport participation with their jobs by using facilities that their business associates also use.

This has interesting implications in the United States, where companies pay the club memberships of their top executives and then classify most club expenses as "business deductions" on the corporation's tax returns. Taking these deductions reduces the company's taxes and reduces the tax revenues that fund public sport programs for people who cannot afford golf, tennis, or elite health club memberships.

The dynamics of class relations sometimes have ironic twists.

This is certainly true when public money is used to build stadiums and arenas that are then used by wealthy individuals who own professional sport teams that often bring them large profits. Billions of dollars of public money in the United States is spent to build these facilities that add to the wealth of powerful individuals and corporations and then subsidize their real estate developments in the area immediately around the facilities.

People in the United States often shy away from critical discussions of social class and class relations because they're uneasy about acknowledging that equality of opportunity is largely a myth in their society

This is especially true in regard to sports and sports participation—a sphere of life in which most people believe that money and class-based advantages don't matter.

Job opportunities for women have not increased as rapidly as women's programs have grown.

This is partly due to the persistence of orthodox gender ideology and the fact that Title IX does not have precise enforcement procedures when it comes to equity in coaching and administration. Title IX enforcement focuses almost exclusively on athletes, and has had little impact in other aspects of school sports and no direct impact on sports outside of schools that receive money from the federal government. Therefore, a pattern of female underrepresentation exists in nearly all job categories and nearly all sports organizations. This pattern exists worldwide.

The fact that about 80 percent of the players in the NHL and one-fourth of all college hockey players come from outside the United States means that it is meaningless to calculate the odds of a US high school hockey player making it to a college team or the NHL without taking this into account.

This is the case for other sports as well. For example, nearly one-third of all college tennis players come from outside the United States. The point here is that all calculations must be qualified, and many estimates reported in the media are inaccurate.

Traveling to the Paralympics is especially costly for Paralympians because they often must bring with them prostheses, wheelchairs, and a person to help them navigate unanticipated barriers.

This is why athletes from the nation that hosts the Paralympics win 80 percent more medals than it's athletes won in the previous Paralympic Games. Travel is not a major issue for them, and they know what to anticipate while in the host city. Additionally, host cities and nations make special efforts to make sure that their athletes confront as few barriers as possible.

Collectively, they benefit from a class ideology that legitimizes the existing status and power hierarchy in American society and supports the idea that the current level of economic inequality, even though it is greater than it has been for a century, is good for the country.

This is why they are sincerely committed to a form of sport—elite men's sports—in which competition, conquest, individualism, authority, and consumption are highlighted in everything from media coverage and stadium design to team logos and ads for upcoming games and contests.

Corporate funders support individuals, teams, and sports that generate product visibility through media coverage and high-profile state and national tournaments.

This keeps certain sports alive, but only on terms that continue to meet corporate interests.

In other words, playing a sport may earn a person respect in the local neighborhood, but this respect comes in the form of horizontal social capital, that is, relationships at the same level of social stratification.

This may be useful for managing current circumstances where they live, but sports participation rarely leads to upward social mobility unless it enables a young person to earn vertical social capital that opens doors to real opportunities.

With the average career length being just over three years long, many players say that NFL stands for "Not For Long"

This means that few players older than 30 are still in the league. Much more typical than 30-year-old players contemplating another season are 24-year-olds facing the end of their professional sport careers (Belson, 2018).

Additionally, the dollar value of an average scholarship is often far less than parents have "invested" into their child's sport career.

This means that spending money to develop a child's sport skills in the hope of seeing a net benefit in the form of a college scholarship makes no financial sense.

Today, it takes money to watch sports on television as satellite and cable connections come with ever-increasing monthly subscriber fees, expensive sport packages, and pay-per-view costs.

This means that sports and sports participation are closely linked with the distribution of economic resources in society.

Boys in US culture are more likely to make commitments to athletic careers at a young age when they perceive limited options for other careers and when their family situation is financially insecure.

This means that the personal stakes associated with playing sports are different and often greater for boys from low-income households than they are for boys from higher-income households. Similarly, male athletes from poor and working-class households often use sports participation to obtain "respect" in a society where they often lack other means to do so.

wealthy investors often purchase the tax-free municipal bonds that cities sell to obtain the cash to build these facilities.

This means that while city and/or state taxes are collected from the general population to pay off the bonds, wealthy investors receive tax-free returns, and team owners use the facilities built by taxpayers to make large amounts of money for themselves.

Additionally, professional sports opportunities are short term, averaging 3-5 years in team sports and three to 12 years in individual sports.

This means that, after playing careers end, there are about forty additional years in a person's work life. Unfortunately, many people, including athletes, coaches, and parents, ignore this aspect of reality.

Despite these studies and what we now know about social class and sport participation, people in the media regularly feature stories that highlight young people who rise from poverty to achieve fame and financial security.

This recycles the myth that sports are a path to a better life at the same time that it reaffirms the American Dream, reinforces the image of the United States as a true meritocracy, and promulgates the class ideology supported by those beliefs.

One of the strategies for doing this is to become the primary providers of popular pleasure and entertainment so that people see the ruling class as sponsors of their joy and excitement.

This strategy is especially effective if the ruling class can use entertaining events to promote particular ideas and beliefs about what should be important in people's lives.

Over those same years corporate sponsorship of sports has increased exponentially.

This, too, is linked to class relations because CEOs seek to sponsor sports that can be presented in ways that reaffirm the existing class structure in society and the ideology that supports it. This is partly why popular spectator sports worldwide emphasize competition, individualism, highly specialized skills, the use of technology, and dominance over opponents.

Ignored in the media and popular discourse are the oppressive effects of poverty and the limited opportunities available to those who lack economic resources, access to good education, and well-placed social connections.

Those stories are too depressing to put in the news, claim executives for the commercial media—people don't like to hear about them, and they lower audience ratings. However, social-class differences in the form of socioeconomic inequalities are real; they have real consequences for life chances, they affect nearly every facet of people's lives, and all of this is clearly documented by valid and reliable data

The Olympic Games provide a clear example of the impact of global inequality in sports.

Those who follow the Summer or Winter Olympics through mainstream media hear and read that these are celebrations of athlete commitment, dedication, hard work, and sacrifice.

However, the NCAA continues to use a definition of amateur that prohibits athletes from being paid beyond the cost of their education, even if they are part of a multi-billion dollar business in which others can make millions of dollars annually.

Throughout most organized sports, money and economic power now operate in complex ways as elite-level training has become privatized and costly in many countries.

Active sport participation, attendance at events, and consuming media sports are positively correlated with a person's income, education, and occupational status.

Training at the elite level of sports requires considerable resources. Some costs may be covered by sponsors for those lucky enough to have them, but others must be covered by personal funds. For example, when the record-setting swimmer Dara Torres trained for the 2008 Olympics, she spent about $100,000 per year for her support staff, including a pool coach, a strength and conditioning coach who also is her dietician, two full-time people who stretch her muscles, a physical therapist, a masseuse, and a nanny to care for her daughter. Torres was 41 years old, but she represents a widely accepted approach to training for elite athletes of any age.

Women in middle- and lower-income families are most constrained by homemaking and child rearing responsibilities.

Unable to pay for child care, domestic help, and sports participation fees, these women have few opportunities to play sports. They also lack time, transportation to and from sport facilities, access to gyms and playing fields in their neighborhoods, and the sense of physical safety that enables them to feel secure enough to leave home and travel to places where they can play sports.

The dynamics of becoming and staying involved in boxing have been studied and described by French sociologist Loïc Wacquant.

Wacquant spent over 3 years training and hanging out at a boxing gym in a low-income Chicago neighborhood.During that time, he documented the life experiences of fifty professional boxers, most of whom were African Americans. His analysis shows that deciding to dedicate oneself to boxing in the United States is related to a combination of class, race, and gender relations.

Most of us are aware of economic inequalities in society. We see them all around us.

We know they exist and influence people's lives, but there are few public discussions about the impact of social class on our views of ourselves and others, our social relationships, and our everyday lives.

When compared with white households, black households possess $146,470 less wealth, and Latinx households possess $141,410 less wealth.

Wealth serves as a cushion that provides stability in a household, and it certainly has an impact on family decisions about spending money for sports participation. These income and wealth gaps will influence who has opportunities to develop elite sports skills, receive athletic scholarships, and play sports at elite levels.

Chris Dundee, a famous boxing promoter, once said, "Any man with a good trade isn't about to get himself knocked on his butt to make a dollar"

What he meant was that middle- and upper-class boys and men have no reason to play a sport that destroys brain cells, that boxers always come from the lowest and most economically desperate income groups in society, and that boxing gyms are located in neighborhoods where desperation is most intense and life-piercing.

Wacquant notes that these men see boxing as a "coerced affection, a captive love, one ultimately born of racial and class necessity"...

When he asked one boxer what he would change in his life, the answer represented the feelings of many men at the gym: I wish I was born taller, I wish I was born in a rich family, I ... wish I was smart, an' I had the brains to go to school an' really become somebody real important. For me I mean I can't stand the sport, I hate the sport, [but] it's carved inside of me so I can't let it go (in Wacquant, 1995a, p. 521).

The lifestyles of middle-income and working-class people, on the other hand, tend to include sports that by tradition are free and open to the public, sponsored by public funds, or available through public schools.

When these sports involve the use of expensive equipment or clothing, participation occurs in connection with various forms of financial sacrifice. For instance, buying a motocross bike so his child can ride and race means that a father must work overtime, cancel the family vacation, and organize family leisure around motocross races.

On the other hand, married men with children are less likely to feel such constraints.

When they play softball or soccer after work, their wives may delay family dinners or keep dinner warm until they arrive home. When they schedule a golf game on a Saturday morning, their wives make breakfast for the children and then chauffeur one or more children to their youth sports games.

Of course, most professional athletes have short careers or play at levels at which they do not make much money.

When they retire, they face the same career challenges encountered by their age peers, and they experience patterns of success and failure similar to patterns among comparable peers who didn't play sports. This means that playing sports neither ensures nor boosts one's chances of career success.

They define dedication in terms of focusing exclusively on improving sport performance and winning competitions.

When this is how sport participation is organized, overall development among athletes is constricted rather than expanded, and athletes may be at a disadvantage when it comes to career success.

Publicly funded youth sports programs have been reduced or eliminated in many US communities, and varsity teams in low-income school districts are being eliminated...

When this occurs, fewer young people from low-income neighborhoods have opportunities to play sports, especially those requiring large fields and safe, functional facilities. This is why basketball remains a primary focus among low-income boys and girls; public schools usually can offer basketball teams and coaches if they have a usable gym that has not been converted into a permanent lunchroom or classroom.

We can expect that sports participation, the development of sports skills, and rewards for sports performance will increasingly go to people in households with above-average income and wealth.

When we compare the availability and quality of school and club sport programs by social class, we see that economic inequalities have a major impact on opportunities for sports participation today.

The American Dream

a hopeful vision of boundless opportunities for individuals to succeed economically and live a happy life based on hard work and consumption.

The American Dream is usually connected with a belief that the United States is a meritocracy

a social world in which rewards go to people who deserve them due to their abilities, qualifications, and recognized achievements. Believing that the United States is a meritocracy helps people explain and justify economic inequalities. It supports the assumption that success is rightfully earned and failure is caused by poor choices and a lack of ambition.

To understand the dynamics of class relations, think about the ways that age relations operate in sports. Even though young people are capable of creating and playing games on their own,...

adults intervene and create organized youth sport programs. These programs emphasize things that adults think are best for their children.

Meanwhile, professional teams sponsor a few charity programs for "inner-city kids" and occasionally send players to speak at urban schools....

all of which garner press coverage that describes team owners and athletes as great public servants! As school systems fail due to poor funding and teachers complain about this scam, local editorials and letters to the editor accuse educators of wasting public money and demand that they become more frugal.

Patterns are similar for the Paralympics, where GDP—gross domestic product, or the monetary value of all goods and services produced annually...

along with the population size of a country are highly correlated with the number of medals won by athletes

As tickets become more expensive and spectators are increasingly segregated according to their ability to pay, social class...

and class relations become more evident in the stands.

When sports teams are organized to foster one or more of these four developmental outcomes,...

athletes are more likely to have career-related advantages due to their sport participation. However, sport teams are seldom organized to do these four thing. Coaches often want to separate athletes from experiences and relationships unrelated to their sport.

When playing a sport requires multiple participants, the lack of resources among some women affects others,...

because it reduces their prospects for assembling the requisite number of players. This is also true for men, but women from middle- and lower-income families are more likely than their male counterparts to lack the network of relationships out of which sports interests and participation emerge and are sustained over time.

Additionally, at this point in time, the "ruling class" also makes...

billions of dollars as they perpetuate this ideology— an outcome that further solidifies their status and power. This critical theoretical approach helps us see the dynamics of class relations and the process of hegemony at work in sports and other spheres of our lives.

Wacquant explains that most boxers know they would not be

boxing if they had been born in households where resources and other career opportunities existed. "Don't nobody be out there fightin' with an MBA," observed a trainer-coach at the gym

Race-based salary discrimination existed in most sports immediately following desegregation,

but evidence suggests that it is not a chronic issue in major team sports. This is because performance can be objectively measured, tracked, and compared to the performances of other players. Statistics are now kept on nearly every conceivable dimension of an athlete's skill. Players' agents use these statistics during salary negotiations, and they have an incentive to do so because they receive a percentage of players' salaries and don't want racial discrimination to decrease their incomes.

adults have the resources to develop, schedule, and maintain organized sports that reflect their ideas of what children should be doing and learning. Children often enjoy these adult-controlled sports,...

but their participation occurs in a framework that is determined by adults and organized to legitimize and reproduce adult control over their lives.

The four challenges that retiring athletes face are to

(1) reaffirm or reconstruct identities in terms of activities, abilities, and relationships that are not directly related to sport participation; (2) nurture or renegotiate relationships with family and friends so that new identities can be established and reaffirmed; (3) re-engage with the normal, everyday world in ways that provide a personal sense of meaning; and (4) come to terms with the totality of their life in sports. Meeting these challenges successfully may take time, and it always involves relationships that support nonsport identities

Conclusions about sport participation, career success, and social mobility must be qualified in light of the following recent changes related to elite and professional sports in the United States and other wealthy societies:

-An increase in salaries that began in the mid-1970s has enabled some professional athletes to save and invest money that can be used to create future career opportunities. -An increase in the media coverage and overall visibility of sports has created greater name recognition than past athletes enjoyed; therefore, athletes today can convert themselves into a "brand" that may lead to career opportunities and success. -Athletes have become more aware that they must carefully manage their resources to maximize future opportunities.

In 2007, Keith Harrison, a scholar at the University of Central Florida,...

completed a thorough study of NCAA hiring practices and concluded that the head football coach position "is the most segregated position in all college sports"

Philosopher-boxer Joseph Lewandowski (2007, 2008) points this out in his research on boxing in communities characterized by "social poverty"—an absence of vertical social capital that

connects young persons to people at higher levels of social stratification and real opportunities to move "up and out" of their immediate circumstances, or even to change them.

But the gender ideology used by influential decision makers inside many sports organizations will...

continue to privilege those perceived as tough, strong, competitive, and aggressive—and men are more likely to be perceived in such terms.

In the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA),...

fewer than 40 golfers out of the approximately 95 million adult women in the United States make enough prize money to cover their expenses during a season of tournaments.

Middle-class boys said that playing sports provided them with opportunities to be with peers and gain acceptance in male groups, which....

fit their ideas of what they needed to do to establish identities as young men.

The American Dream also

focuses attention on individual aspirations and often blurs an awareness of social class differences in material living conditions and differential life chances among categories of people.

Even if their son or daughter does receive a scholarship in an NCAA Division I school,...

he or she will work very hard for 35 to 40 hours per week for all or nearly all of the academic year. Scholarships may be lost due to injuries or coach decisions, and some athletes may quit teams because they don't feel that the scholarship is worth the effort.

Discriminatory hiring patterns have also been troubling in big-time college football. Although the NCAA claims a commitment to diversity,

heir progress in achieving it has been slow.

This is why new facilities resemble giant circular shopping malls built around a central entertainment stage. They house expensive luxury suites and separate club seating, where high-income spectators have special services available...

-waitstaff, hot food menus, private restrooms, televisions, refrigerators, lounge chairs, temperature controls, private entrances with no waiting lines or turnstiles, and special parking areas—so that attending a game is no different from going to an exclusive private club.

Sport participation does not automatically confer developmental advantages on athletes.

hose advantages depend on how sport programs and teams are organized. When playing sports expands developmental opportunities for young people, it is more likely to be associated with future occupational success. When playing sports constricts developmental opportunities, future success is less likely.

Sustaining a belief that the United States is a meritocracy depends on related beliefs that individual ability, qualifications, and character are objectively proven through competitive success; that...

humans are naturally competitive; and that competition is the only fair way to allocate rewards in a society. This is why people with money and power like to use sports as a metaphor for life-it identifies winners like them as deserving individuals who have outperformed others in a natural process of individual competition and achievement.

Indicates that sports don't provide exceptional upward mobility opportunities and that there are better career opportunities outside of sports

if there are educational opportunities to take advantage of them.

To join a soccer team that schedules practices late in the afternoon and plays games in the evening or on weekends is all but...

impossible when you're the family cook, shopper, chauffeur, housekeeper, and homework supervisor.

When we discuss social class and sports, it is essential to think beyond our own society. Inequalities exist at all levels of social organization:

in families, groups, organizations, communities, societies, and the world.

In cases where researchers have controlled for the influence of family income and wealth, it appears that athletes may have a slight advantage over comparable peers if playing on a sport team does one or more of the following things:

1. Increases opportunities for a young person to complete academic degrees, develop job-related skills, and/or extend one's knowledge about the world outside of sports. 2. Increases support from significant others for overall growth and development, not just sport development. 3. Provides opportunities to develop social networks that are connected with career possibilities outside of sports and sports organizations. 4. Expands experiences, identities, and abilities unrelated to sports.

The dynamics of ethnic relations in every culture are unique. Making generalizations about ethnic relations and opportunities in sports is difficult. However, dominant sport forms in any culture tend to reproduce cultural values and the social structures supported by those values. This means three things:

1. Members of the dominant social class in a society may exclude or define as unqualified job candidates with characteristics and cultural backgrounds different from their own. 2. Ethnic minorities often must adopt the values and orientations of the dominant social class if they want to be hired and promoted in sport organizations. 3. The values, orientations, and experiences of ethnic minorities are seldom represented in the culture of sport organizations.

On a general level, career and mobility opportunities exist in sports and sport organizations. However, as we consider the impact of sports on mobility in the United States, it is useful to know the following things about sport-related opportunities:

1. The number of paid career opportunities in sports is limited, and the playing careers of most professional athletes are short term. 2. Professional opportunities for women are growing but remain limited on and off the field relative to men. 3. Professional opportunities for ethnic minorities are growing but remain limited on and off the field relative to whites with European heritage.

Many people believe that sports are a path to economic success for people from all social classes. When people talk about athletes, they often mention particular rags-to-riches stories. However, these beliefs and stories distract attention from the ways in which sports reflect and perpetuate economic inequalities.

1. What is meant by social class and class relations? 2. How do social class and class relations influence sports and sport participation? 3. Are sports open and democratic in the provision of economic and career opportunities? 4. Does playing sports contribute to occupational success and social mobility among former athletes?

Unfortunately, there is much misinformation about the number and value of athletic scholarships in the United States. Most people believe that they are more numerous and valuable than they actually are. As far as I can tell, this belief exists for the following reasons:

1. When high school athletes receive standard recruiting letters from university coaches they often tell people that they are anticipating full scholarships when in fact they subsequently receive only partial aid or no aid at all. When they don't disclose this disappointing outcome many people continue to believe that the scholarship was actually received. 2. Athletes who receive partial tuition waivers or other forms of partial athletic aid sometimes lead people to believe that they have full scholarships. 3. Many people assume that everyone who makes a college team, especially at large universities, has a scholarship, but this is not true.

Inflation rate between 1991 and 2019 was 87 percent, whereas average ticket prices for MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL increased

196 percent, 255 percent, 196 percent, and 141 percent, respectively, during the same period. Therefore, ticket prices have increased three to four times the rate of inflation—partly due to increased costs at new stadiums and arenas, but mostly due to team owners wanting to attract people who have money to spend on food, drinks, apparel, and everything else they sell.

Attendance and seating at many events, from the opening ceremonies at the Olympics to the NFL Super Bowl, are now tied to conspicuous displays of wealth, status, influence, and corporate power.

After observing a recent Super Bowl and the events leading up to the game, journalist Dave Zirin (2008) concluded that "Before it is anything else, before it's even a football game, the Super Bowl is ... a 2-week entertainment festival for the rich and shameless." Although ticket prices vary year to year depending on the teams involved, they range from about $3,000 to $5,500 (resale) per seat. Live attendance at the Super Bowl and other sports mega-events is priced at a level that few individuals can afford unless they are using company credit cards to buy them.

it was explained that retirement from sports is best described as a process rather than a single event, and most athletes don't retire from sports on a moment's notice—they disengage gradually and revise their priorities as they disengage.

Although many athletes handle this process smoothly, develop other interests, and move into relatively satisfying occupations, others experience short- or long-term adjustment problems that interfere with occupational success and overall life satisfaction.

Decisions that affect the meaning, purpose, and organization of sports are made at many levels—from neighborhood youth sport programs to the International Olympic Committee.

Although scholars who study sports in society identify people who exercise power in various settings, they usually don't rank those with power in and over sports.

A study investigating the social class and family backgrounds of NBA players led Joshua Dubrow and Jimi Adams (2012) to conclude that white athletes from low-income backgrounds were 75 percent less likely to play in the NBA than athletes from families that were better off.

Among black athletes, those from low-income families were 37 percent less likely to become NBA players than their peers from well-off families.

The visibility of black athletes in certain spectator sports often leads people to conclude that sports offer abundant career opportunities for African Americans.

Anecdotal support for this conclusion is provided by successful black athletes who attribute their wealth and fame to sports. However, the extent to which job opportunities for blacks exist in sports has been greatly overstated. Very little publicity is given to the actual number and proportion of blacks who play sports for a living or make a living working in sports organizations. Also ignored is the fact that sports provide very few career opportunities for black women.

Alan Tomlinson, a British sociologist who has studied power and social class for decades, has noted that sports, as they are sponsored and played today, ultimately "reproduce social and economic distinctions and preserve the power and influence of those who control resources in society."

As a result, he says, sports today "cannot be fully understood unless this key influence and core dynamic is fully recognized"

Additionally, these developments often require the displacement of low-income housing that is seldom replaced.

As a result, many of these sports venues fuel gentrification.

African-American athletes are involved almost exclusively in five professional spectator sports: boxing, basketball, football, baseball, and track.

At the same time, some of the most lucrative sports for athletes are almost exclusively white—tennis, golf, hockey, and motor racing are examples. My best guess is that fewer than 6000 African Americans, or about 1 of every 6660 African Americans, currently make significant incomes as professional athletes in the United States.

Publicly financed sport venues may provide the illusion of unity and development in a city, but they are mostly vehicles for transferring public money to wealthy individuals and corporations.

Behind the illusion often exists disunity and economic inequality.

class ideology

interrelated ideas and beliefs that people use to understand economic inequalities, identify their class position, and evaluate the impact of economic inequalities on the organization of social worlds.

Social mobility

is a term used by sociologists to refer to changes in wealth, education, and occupation over a person's lifetime or from one generation to the next in families. Social mobility can occur in downward or upward directions.

Class ideology in the United States consists of interrelated ideas and beliefs about the American Dream, meritocracy, and competition;

it illustrates that inequality is a result of people receiving what they deserve; it emphasizes that opportunities exist and that success is achieved only when people develop abilities and work hard; and it justifies inequality as a natural result of competition in a society where merit counts.

Overall, these men were simultaneously committed to and repulsed by their trade, and their participation was clearly connected with the dynamics of social class in their lives.

Boxing and the gym provided a refuge from the violence, hopelessness, and indignity of the racism and poverty that framed their lives since birth. They excelled at the sport because being a young, poor, black man in America "is no bed of roses".

The meanings given to the global gap between the wealthy and poor differ depending on the ideologies that people use to guide their understanding of world affairs.

But apart from ideological interpretations, it is clear that about 40 percent of all people in the world have few resources to use on anything beyond basic survival.

With funds being cut and coaches laid off, schools in poor neighborhoods struggle to maintain sports programs while looking for new funding from corporations.

But corporations usually sponsor only the sports that promote their brand and products. For example, a shoe company will support basketball because it fits with its marketing and advertising programs.

Because athletes are now pushing the performance limits of the human body, they increasingly seek technologies that will bring them success

But these technologies are expensive, especially when they are delivered and managed by physiologists, biomechanists, medical experts, biochemists, strength coaches, virtual reality trainers, nutritionists, psychologists, recovery experts, video and statistical analysts —all of whom work with coaches to turn scientific findings into training programs.

Jobs are created whenever hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a city.

But those jobs also would be created if the arenas and stadiums were privately financed.

It remains possible to attend some sports events for free. High school and many college games and meets in the United States are affordable for most people, and in some communities the tickets for minor league sports are reasonably priced.

But tickets to most major intercollegiate and professional games are beyond the means of most people, even those whose taxes were used to build the venues in which the games are played. The cost of attending these events has increased much more rapidly than the rate of inflation over the past thirty years.

Spending money to play or watch sports in person is a luxury that most low-income people can't afford.

Despite this most people in wealthy nations continue to believe that sports are a meritocracy in which everyone has an equal chance to play and succeed

the only college sports that consistently generate revenues are those in which the majority of players are black men:

Division I football and men's basketball. On average, these men come from households with less wealth and income than the households from which most other Division I athletes come (Allison, Davis & Barranco, 2018). This creates an interesting class- and race-based scenario: Black men work in their sports to generate revenues that provide scholarships to white athletes from households generally having far greater wealth. White parents, students, and athletes don't think about this pattern of resource distribution, but black football and basketball players are well aware of it.

Understanding social class and the related concepts of social stratification, socioeconomic status, and life chances is important when studying social worlds.

Economic resources are related to power in society, and economic inequalities influence many aspect of people's lives.

Even in wealthy countries, a disproportionate share of medals has always been won by athletes with support from families.

Exceptions to this pattern are few. The former Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic (East Germany), China, and Cuba have experienced considerable success. But in these communist countries, central state planners used public money to train and support an impressive number of medal winners.

Efforts by some fans wanting to reduce ticket prices seldom develop traction because people in luxury boxes, club seats, and other premium seats don't want to join or be identified with spectators who can't afford high-priced tickets and concessions.

Expensive tickets are status symbols for wealthy spectators; they want class distinctions to be part of the sport experience, and they are willing to pay—or have their corporations pay high prices so they can conspicuously display their status and have an experience with other wealthy people.

Access to this training is restricted to a small proportion of athletes that compete at a national or international level.

Fairness and a level playing field are undermined by this inequality.

Indeed, most athletic scholarships are going to middle-class kids with college-educated parents, not to kids from poor families who need a scholarship to get anywhere close to a university campus. ... Simply put, NCAA sports have been gentrified.

Farrey's observation is supported by recent studies. Amanda Paule's (2012) study of the recruiting strategies of college coaches showed that they looked for athletes from upper-income backgrounds who could afford to take a partial scholarship and pay the rest of their expenses, or athletes from very low-income backgrounds who could qualify for need-based aid that came from outside the athletic department. Additionally, because many coaches had small recruiting budgets, they sometimes limited their scouting to camps and tournaments at which young people from middle- and upper-income families were usually overrepresented.

Class, gender, and race dynamics are strongly connected with athletic scholarships.

First, young people in upper-middle-class families (with household incomes of $100,000 per year or more) have resources to develop skills in highly privatized sports such as lacrosse, soccer, volleyball, rowing, swimming, water polo, field hockey, softball, and ice hockey. As a result, they are more likely than athletes in middle- and lower-income families to receive athletic scholarships, although most could afford college without athletic aid.