Sport enters the twilight zone

Trawling through the satellite TV channels last week was an exercise in getting to grips with sport’s astonishing reach and ubiquity. South Africa’s women cricketers making heavy weather of their chase against Pakistan in the T20 World Cup, anyone?

Or perhaps you watched Portugal not finding their Fifa World Cup Group K encounter with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the last of the 48 qualifiers, entirely to their liking?

Maybe, though, you fancied quaffing your way through France vs Senegal on an adjacent channel. The game, rich in backstory, didn’t disappoint.

In the first half, Kylian Mbappé thrust into the Senegal box for France, where he was brought down by Senegal’s Sadio Mané. After the challenge the referee sprinted to the pitchside monitor, with the French hoping the review would result in a penalty. It didn’t and after much deliberation, the referee awarded a goal kick to Senegal.

The incident with Mbappé and Mané was interesting. First, simulation (or dissimulation) from modern footballers is an epidemic. If anyone had the misfortune of watching the Argentina vs Austria game a week later, you would have seen evidence of play-acting, amateur theatrics and generalised shithousery from pretty much everyone. The referee, an Egyptian named Amin Mohamed Omar, was partial to being a bit of a thespian, too.

With players falling down so often, no-one knows where they stand.

Second, modern media and social media seize on these controversial incidents with such relish that there is a widening gulf between what happened (no penalty to France) and what many thought should have happened (penalty to France). True, sport has always given rise to controversy. But nowadays we live in a world where what didn’t happen takes on a radioactive afterlife way beyond the outcome of the game.

Philosophers might point here to what may be called the fallacy of ontological equivalence. In other words, the idea that what happened (no penalty to France) is somehow equivalent to what many thought should have happened (penalty to France).

The fact is that a penalty didn’t transpire, no matter what fruity views many had on the matter. So we enter contemporary sport’s twilight zone, where what did happen is superseded and sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite afterlife of what should have, could have and might have happened.

Political scientists and sociologists would take up the intellectual cudgels at this juncture, pointing out that all this waffle and hot air often serve to obscure the hard economic realities of what is really going on in contemporary sport.

What might be more to the economic point, for example, is that football governing body Fifa has cottoned on to what it’s calling “dynamic pricing”, sometimes called “dynamic ticketing” at this World Cup. This is a sneaky mechanism borrowed from the entertainment industry for adjusting ticket prices based on demand.

There’s an obvious problem with dynamic pricing: it cuts all but the rich, the super-rich and celebrities out of the scramble for oversubscribed matches and knockout games. Consumer groups are up in arms. And some cities, like Toronto, have outlawed the practice. A base-level ticket for a group game in Qatar four years ago cost $11; four years later, prices in the US have jumped a hundredfold.

Critics say that such skulduggery — if this is what it is — would be outlawed by EU antitrust legislation. With the 2030 World Cup being co-hosted by Spain, Portugal and Morocco, Fifa is rolling in the green now. While it can.

Fifa is also operating a central resale marketplace for the first time, where it takes a 15% commission from both sellers and buyers. Scalpers have always been a feature of sport. They’re the shady guys who once stood outside Highbury in North London with an “Oi, mate, fancy a ticket for a tenner?” and a ticket inside their coat.

But the guys who sell the tickets now are also acting as a vehicle for their resale while taking commissions on both sides? That’s pretty neat. Unless, of course, you think it’s pretty dubious.

Why should we care about sport becoming more and more like a corrupt form of entertainment? Perhaps because sport, unlike politics and business, is the final frontier of decency

It’s perhaps not quite as fishy as the 2024 Chicago Marathon, which was won in the world record time of 2:09:56 in the women’s race by Kenya’s Ruth Chepngetich.

Soon after the record had been broken, Amby Burfoot, once editor of Runner’s World, growled: “We don’t have proof, but we know what we know.” Burfoot was watching his words. Without saying so, he was saying that the only explanation for Chepngetich’s performance was doping.

Six months later, Burfoot was vindicated. In March 2025, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), the unsung hero of the sport, slapped Chepngetich with a three-year ban for the use of hydrochlorothiazide, a diuretic and masking agent.

Note, Chepngetich wasn’t suspended for a prohibited substance but for the use of a substance to mask the prohibited substance. This goes to show how sophisticated doping in athletics has become. No longer do underfunded, overstretched authorities such as the AIU detect the dope. They only detect the dope masking the dope.

Neither was the Chepngetich sanction retroactive. This meant that her record-breaking victory in the 2024 marathon still stands, though many in the know seriously doubt its legitimacy.

The organisers of the Chicago Marathon (and the event’s sponsor, Bank of America) are relieved and happy. And so is World Athletics (WA) because it doesn’t need to attract any adverse publicity for scratching a high-profile record.

The great former middle-distance athlete Sebastian (now Lord) Coe is president of WA and has been since 2015. He presides over a sport in which Kenyan doping violations have rocketed in the past nine years, with 140 Kenyan athletes facing bans or anti-doping rule violations since 2017.

True, WA funds the AIU, as do some of the great world city marathons, but the AIU is the size of a dung beetle against an elephant: it employs only between 10 and 15 key personnel. Its size alone tells you how seriously WA takes doping. The AIU is part panacea, part public relations exercise, rather like putting a plaster on a gaping wound.

Sport’s dark side is not confined to either Fifa’s pricing or WA’s willed blindness. In a couple of days, Wimbledon starts in the leafy suburbs of South London. Tennis is arguably the most corrupt sport in the world. Match-fixing is rife in the lower echelons.

Spare a thought here for the guy ranked 128^th in the world, someone who has never progressed beyond the second round of a major and whose claim to fame — indeed, the one he dines out on — is once taking a set off an injured Rafael Nadal. If you were such a guy, nearing the end of a mediocre career, wouldn’t you be tempted to fix a qualifying-round match early one Thursday morning in Miami or Dubai?

July also brings that made-for-television sporting event, the Tour de France, with riders, let’s not forget, being dubbed by a French journalist in the 1920s as “convicts of the road”.

Associated from the very beginning with every artificial stimulant under the sun (including cocaine, ether and strychnine), it is now a race within a race, the second of the two being the race to see which rider is being pulled along by a hidden motor in his bike frame.

Former Tour winner Greg LeMond told Roadman, an Irish podcast, that until very recently, “I was seeing five bike changes in a high-profile race, and that really pissed me off”.

The implication from LeMond is that at least some of these bikes had hidden motors. They were changed regularly so as to avoid thermo-imaging by race officials.

Why should we care about sport becoming more and more like a corrupt form of entertainment, I hear you grumble. Good question. Perhaps because sport, unlike politics and business, is the final frontier of decency.

We never know the outcome in advance. We never know what we might find out about ourselves and that imaginary construct — our country or team — in the act of winning or losing. This alone means we should hold sport dear. And hold administrators to account if we can.

Otherwise, sport will simply become the playground of the rich, with their Botox and bottled water. Ordinary mortals like you and me will be forced to occupy the cheap seats, from where we see precious little of the action.