When Michelle Wie announced that she was turning pro, she received commercial endorsements worth 38 million making her the richest 16 year old in the sporting industry and even made it to the cover of the fortune magazine.

Since its formative years, sport has had a commercial value to its operation. As early as the 590 BC, Greek athletes were financially rewarded for an Olympic victory. However in no previous time period have we seen the type of growth in the commercialization of sport that we have in the past decade or so. Today, sport is a big industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars and provides jobs to millions of people worldwide. The involvement of big businesses and wealthy people has doubles and tripled with the latest of the former Thai PM buying and then selling the English club, Manchester City. This goes to show the involvement of rich heads in the sport today. It would not be wrong to compare the athletes in major spectator sports as marketable commodities. Sports teams are traded on the stock market, sponsorship rights can cost billions and television rights to broadcast matches and cover major events are something to be fought for ensuring an inflow of millions into the sporting industry as a whole. The merchandising and licensing of sports goods is a major multi national business. These trends are not just restricted to professional athletes and events, many of them are equally applicable to the so called amateur sports.

However, Joseph Blatter, president of FIFA believes that big businesses and big money poses a threat to future of sport especially football. Writing in the financial times the head of footballs governing body said that there was too much greed in the game. “Football,” he says, “is a multibillion dollar global industry. Unfortunately, the haphazard way in which the money has flowed into the game-reminiscent of a misguided Wild West style of capitalism-is having some seriously harmful effects.”

Blatter is concerned with the immensely rich individuals with little of no interest in the game, buying up football clubs; of players abetted by greedy agents demanding and getting huge sums of money to join their clubs and play; of clubs that are more interested in the players performance rather than their welfare; and of the huge disparity between the earnings of the star’ players and the rest of the team, not to mention the thousands of players in other teams and clubs who earn a pittance.

Commercialization has ruined sport to say the least. Athletes are more interested in the big bucks than the game itself. Much to say that these endorsements and the money factor has bought drugs into sport. Why would anyone want to lose out on an endorsement worth millions due to underachievement? The pressure to succeed in order to obtain money benefits has pushed the athletes to use all means necessary even if it means resorting to drugs. Are we ready to stop this impending doom by devising a system to ensure that money flowing into the industry is checked so that the quality of the sport as well as the athletes is maintained or have we already accepted our defeat to this menace?