Populist Elements of SINGO Discourse and Practice: Unravelling the Undercurrents of the Popular Cultural Event

This chapter explores the rhetoric and the discourse of the SINGO (sport-based international non-governmental organisation), the organisational form of sport governance as typified in the two mega-SINGOs, the IOC and FIFA. The core of the discussion focuses upon how the SINGO’s long-established rhetoric has survived through seismic political, social, and cultural shifts and asks whether that survival can be better understood as a form of globally pitched populism. The rhetoric of FIFA and IOC leaders is examined as a mode of address in which an assumed collectivity is claimed, a universality of appeal (though often restricted to the male constituency) in the name of a purported universality of sport. With reference to several cases of mega-sport events - for instance the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, to be staged in 2021; the FIFA Women’s World Cup staged in France in 2019 - the chapter makes a case for the recognition and conceptual development of a “sportive populism”, and for deeper and wider analysis of where and how such forms of populism arise and are sustained.