In the context of the International Civil Society Week organised by CIVICUS in Belgrade in early April, we took the opportunity to talk to Ivan Ergić, a famous Serbian football player that has developed a very critical view of the sports industry and how it has become en epitome of global capitalism. Gradually, the industry’s macho-type winner and looser dynamics have also captured political campaigns.
Francesc Badia: I am interested in your critical view of sports, and how the industry more generally is not being tackled in the right way.
Ivan Ergic: Sport has its own dynamic and its own identity. It has become one of the dominant global institutions, fully commercialised and professionalised. Sports industry today serves as a way of promoting socially domineering capitalism, particularly through the idea that competition brings the best results and the best out of humanity. This, I think, is completely wrong. It is also one of the last domains in which macho culture, and its relation to militarism, is still present. No wonder women’s sports are not accepted on the same level as mens’: the women that we do see become completely masculinised and can only enter the field as such. This only shows how militant the industry of sports actually is. All in all, the globalising way of promoting sports as a way of thinking and a way of life really just serves the dominant capitalist system.
