Big time developer Ed Roski Jr. has plans to bring professional football, and by that I mean American smash mouth football, not soccer, back to the Los Angeles area.  He’s got a lot of, er, yardage to cover given the cost of such an endeavor (he says he can do it all with private monies), the players and owners may be locked in a money dispute come 2011 and other factors are at play.

Fans of Dr. Pop might not know this or care much, but the last team to wear with pride the title of “Los Angeles” in front of a franchise’s name was the former and current Oakland Raiders.  They played here in the Coliseum in South Central from 1982 to 1994.  Back then, the Raiders were actually a good team and had won Super Bowls 11, 15 and 18, the last one in L.A.  They suck mightily now, but such is not the point of this post.

Roski, CEO and chairman of Majestic Realty Company, a massive commercial developer and one of the individuals who had a hand in the building of the Staples Center, would like to construct his proposed Los Angeles Stadium (including retail shops and office space) on 600 some odd acres of land near the intersections of the Pomona (60) and Orange (57) Freeways in the City of Industry.

I’m not sure what Mr. Roski has promised the sons and daughters of Industry (for more about this interesting enclave southeast of downtown Los Angeles incorporated in 1957, read Victor Valle’s recent hard-hitting book, City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California) in terms of what he projects the stadium would generate insofar as taxes and local revenues are concerned.

For as detailed in books like Field of Schemes by Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan and Public Dollars, Private Stadiums by Kevin J. Delaney and Rick Eckstein, pro sports stadiums don’t exactly return what municipalities put into them in economic terms.  Certainly there’s some local employment in the concession and parking booths of the stadium, and there can be spill over to local restaurants and bars in an area, but it’s the players and owners getting the beaucoup bucks off the gate and swag like T-shirts and caps.

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This month Dr. Pop is all about sports and politics, about the ways that the love of the game gets mixed up with the love of money and power. Celine examines the “rules of the games” in the upcoming London Olympics, Gary comments on a recent drive for professional football in LA spearheaded by a local power broker, and Andrea turns her eye to the collateral consequences of the 2010 African Cup of Nations. Each story deals with the tension between sports for the sake of enjoyment, and sports for the sake of enhancing market values or securing political futures. They address the ways that athletic competitions have become a key fixture in the contemporary global political economy.

This unique mixture, between the politics of sports and the economic game of politics, comes into play every time a city faces a decision about building a new stadium or a country attempts to host a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup.  At stake in these decisions is the deployment of scarce public dollars and vital urban lands. As the future of these resource get decided, a broad collection of stakeholders must debate:  What kinds of benefits might an expanded sports infrastructure bring to our city?  Who will get to enjoy these benefits and for how long? And because these are tough questions, these debates can set off fierce competitions between opposing groups, competitions which make many championship games seem like little-league. To read more about how these questions are being answered in South Africa, check out this recent NY Times article: “Cost of Stadium Reveals Tensions in South Africa.”

At the heart of these debates is the issue of who has the right to access and to enjoy the city. This often becomes a clash between the use value and the exchange value of urban space, between the ways that city dwellers make the most of city lands and the ways these same lands are controlled by outside investors, as well as commercial and government interests.  The 2008 Beijing Olympics offer a clear example of what happens when the concern with building a new sports infrastructure becomes more important than the human rights of urban dwellers. In addition to the seven gold medals won by swimmer Michael Phelps, the Beijing Olympics also featured the displacement of roughly 1.5. million people from their homes.

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Plan for London Olympics 2012 Village Photo: ecofriend.org

In 2012, London will be hosting the Summer Olympics, “the greenest games to date” according to the Olympic Delivery Authority chief executive, David Higgins.

London authorities are gearing up to win the gold in sustainability, with claims of cutting carbon emissions, lighting a carbon neutral Olympic Flame, using recycled materials and cleaning up the brownfield upon which athletes will compete. But that’s not the only legacy the city hopes to accomplish. London is also looking to implement a robust social agenda to accompany the physical regeneration projects. As the Strategic Regeneration Framework report hopefully proposes:

The true legacy of 2012 is that within 20 years the communities who host the 2012 Games will have the same social and economic chances as their neighbours across London.

London Olympics Photo: gadiss.com

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The amount you can learn might come as a surprise if you don’t read the sports pages, and possibly even if you do. Last month I heard David Goldblatt speak, and definitely learned a whole lot about things I didn’t really know before.  In case you want to hear the whole talk yourself, here is a podcast recording and a video (for the video, scroll down to 18 February 2010 | Professor David Goldblatt).  It was a great talk.

Let’s take the African Cup of Nations 2010 for starters, what did it teach us?

Now I did know where Angola was, but I did not know that there is an unconnected piece of Angola called Cabinda, and that it has been fighting for its independence for decades. Why does Angola care? Cabinda contains a third of Angola’s oil. So to hold soccer games in this rather out-of-the-way place, miles from any other stadium, was entirely a political decision. Cabinda, we own you.

But that’s still up for rather violent debate, as rebels proved by attacking the Togolese tour bus with its Angolan military escort. Three people died in the ensuing thirty minute firefight. So wasn’t there a peace accord signed in 2006? Well, if you could call it an accord when you pull a rebel out of a Dutch prison where he has been languishing for some time and make him sign something on behalf of loads of other people he hasn’t talked to recently, and that contains nothing about disarmament or amnesty. I’d prefer to call it fraud.

And so the rebels attacked a soccer team’s tour bus.  For more on the dark side of national politics, you can read  David Goldblatt’s article, “Africa and the Cruelty of Football.”

And of course, there are the direct connections between teams and politics, Goldblatt gave another example of a trip to Israel, where soccer teams correspond to different political factions. He looked particularly at Beitar Jerusalem. Over the past 70 years it has become increasingly tied to the extreme right wing, fans planting soccer club flags beside those of settlements. During half-time you will customarily see  some fans gather to pray. When asked why, the leader of “La Familia” faction said “This is my country … When I see one million Muslims praying in my country, it makes me nervous.”

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