CREATESPACE "Do you Believe in Miracles": Technology, Sports, & the Leagues of Nations

Sports have long been a means to sublimate the passions of man for war. Many sports, from lacrosse, to football, to soccer, to wrestling emerged from or have rules and action directly inspired by or related to war. Thus, the diversity of violence – or the diversities and complexities of violence as a general subject – includes sports as much as conventional war, total war, guerrilla insurgency, counter-insurgency, duels, assassination, feuding, law, and terrorism. But this work ultimately is about the present and future of sports as a means to sublimate the passions of man for war instead of the origins of sports in war. Sports are underglobalized and comparatively more nationalist than many other aspects of economic and cultural globalization: Global sports with global fan bases and international players are played in cities in specific developed countries (such as the national soccer leagues of Italy, Spain, or Britain attracting the best talent from Latin America or elsewhere; the NBA attracting the best basketball talent from around the world, and so on). Instead of, say, the fan bases for international basketball or international soccer having to follow the highest level leagues and teams only in a handful of developed countries, an intercontinental sports league (or leagues) would link cities across continents, and across the developed world and also fast-rising cities in the developing world. Compared to capital, information, goods, and, increasingly, many services, world sports with international fan bases are UNDERGLOBALIZED. In this work, then, I seek to propose and design in broad strokes new kinds of international sports leagues. Establishing intercontinental sports leagues would be a means to accelerate globalization: It would potentially generate stupendous economic growth, cultivate greater cooperation, contact, and understanding amongst nations and populations around the world, and accelerate globalization in ways heretofore imaginable only in science fiction tales set in later centuries or millenniums. Undoubtedly, new kinds of international and inter-continental sports leagues – whether soccer, basketball, hockey, baseball, cricket, or Canadian or American-style football – also would be means to sublimate the passions of man in sports instead of war.