Cultural Differences

Introduction

Ideally, sport promotes many of society's desirable character traits, including fair play, sportsmanship, obedience to authority, hard work and dedication toward a desired goal, and a commitment to excellence. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Members of ethnic or cultural groups see themselves as culturally different from other social groups, and are perceived by others as well. There are several characteristics that may serve to distinguish some other ethnic groups, but the most usual are language, history or ancestry (real or imagined), religion and ways of dressing or adornment (Cerulo Pp. 98-121). Minority groups that are culturally different are often physically and socially isolated from the rest of the Community. They tend to concentrate in certain neighbourhoods, cities or regions within a country. There are few marriages between members of the majority and the minority, or between minority groups. The minority people sometimes actively promote endogamy (marriage within the group) to keep alive their cultural peculiarities. This voluntary isolation could even be felt in sports like basketball and soccer. This paper presents insights from cultural differences expressed by Appiah and Foer.

Discussion

Attempts to “Americanize” soccer are evident in sports history. Recently, Major League Soccer (MLS), the newest professional sports league in North America, was deliberately structured so that it would resemble a single entity. All teams are owned by the league, with investors/operators having very limited control over the actual decision making. Many predicted that this would be a new model for successful US sports leagues, but this aspiration is still uncertain. In Fraser v. Major League Soccer, a federal appeals court did not rule, as had been hoped, on the question of whether the MLS structure passed the 'unity of interest' test of Copperweld, but rather decided the case on other grounds (Cerulo Pp. 98-121). Then. in American Needle. Inc. V. National Football League, the Court unanimously refused to apply the single-entity defense to bar the applicability of the Sherman Act and the normal RuIe or Reason under it in determining the validity of an exclusive license granted by National Football League Properties NFLP for the manufacture and sale or apparel bearing insignias of the constituent teams of the NFL.

In his essay “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Kwanie Anthony Appiah's attempts to reconcile cosmopolitanism with local, regional and national patriotism. It is very much about the pragmatic and practical cosmopolitanism inaugurated by members of the African diaspora such as Olaudah Equiano ...