• Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 5, December 2005, London

When academics write about sports, they are capable of accomplishing the impossible: sucking all the pleasure and fun from the spectacle. Take the following killjoy sentence from the essay “Globalization and goals: does soccer show the way?” in the December issue of the Review of International Political Economy: “The Gini coefficient of inequality in skill quality (or in goals) calculated in all countries will in that case amount to 38.9.” Here, in a nutshell, we see the problem with intellectualizing sport. By applying the tools of social science to games, we are transported from the realm of play into the realm of tedious work.

For stretches, this essay is a highly technical slog. But author Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (the publisher of FOREIGN POLICY), offers a highly interesting conclusion. He provides an empirical basis for debunking the conventional wisdom—that the commercialization and globalization of sports is an unmitigated disaster for the poorer clubs and countries.
Two years ago, I wrote a book on the very subject of this essay. I began with the assumption that the beautiful game is the ultimate example of globalization on this planet. It therefore makes for the ideal laboratory for studying how politics, economics, and culture will emerge in our increasingly integrated world. That is also the starting point for Milanovic’s essay. He aims to study what soccer, with its increasingly international labor market, reveals about inequality.

Not long ago, soccer was hardly an emblem of globalization. The labor market in international club soccer was...