Reading the recent article Is this the moment that will define cricket's future? by my former university lecturer and continued mentor, Chas Keys, reminded me how sport, once a shared expression of community, is again being redefined by money and media.

Typically, Chas focuses on his beloved cricket as he reports that our cricket captain Pat Cummins and Travis Head have each been offered around $10 million to abandon Test cricket for the international T20 circuit. This may well be cricket’s final surrender to commerce. Like Kerry Packer’s 1977 World Series revolution, it represents more than a shift in format, it marks another stage in the long transformation of play into performance, of competition into entertainment, and of community into commodity.

Cricket’s history offers a kind of mirror to the evolution of capitalism itself. The long form of the game, five days, pauses for tea, and the contemplative patience of strategy, belonged to a world that valued endurance, mastery, and shared ritual. The rise of one-day internationals, then T20 and now the franchise leagues, reflects the compression of time, the monetisation of attention, and the dominance of spectacle that define the neoliberal age. Sport has become just another entertainment product, optimised for screens, sponsorships and instant gratification.

Where sport once unified local communities, it now divides global markets. The fan is no longer a participant but a consumer. The player is no longer a representative of civic pride but a monetised brand. Stadiums have become theatres of distraction, high-tech cathedrals of consumption where everything, from a player’s emotion to the crowd’s roar, is packaged for sale. The local club, once sustained by volunteers and community pride, now survives as a corporate showcase, kept afloat not for its soul but for its brand value. Even the language has shifted: “performance”, “market share”, “return on investment”. Meaning has been replaced by metrics.

This transformation mirrors the wider logic of neoliberalism: everything of social worth is commodified, and the public is reimagined as a marketplace. Governments, corporations and even schools have adopted the same managerial vocabulary of efficiency, productivity, and growth. Sport, perhaps more vividly than any other human activity, reveals what happens when we confuse value with price.

The most glaring examples now come from the petrodollar kingdoms. Saudi Arabia’s purchase of global sports, from LIV Golf to English Premier League clubs, to boxing and Formula 1 is not philanthropy. It is the most extravagant public relations campaign in history. “Sports-washing” has become the modern method of laundering both image and conscience. By buying our heroes and our spectacles, authoritarian regimes transform human rights abuse into stadium applause. As one critic observed, it is not enough to own oil wells you must also own the applause.

Closer to home, Australia has its own versions of sports-washing. Mining magnate Gina Rinehart has used sport as a public relations platform, funding Olympic teams and high-profile athletes to soften the image of extractive wealth albeit most of these sponsorships are structured as business expenses rather than gifts, meaning they are tax-deductible, a public-relations investment underwritten, in effect, by the taxpayer.

When the national netball team dared to question the source of her company’s money, after revelations of racist comments attributed to her father, Rinehart abruptly withdrew millions in sponsorship. It was a vivid reminder that in the corporate age of sport, money speaks louder than conscience and withdrawal of money louder still.

The same dynamic drives Western corporations, television networks and even governments. Sport offers them moral camouflage and distraction. For fossil fuel empires, it’s a way to polish their global reputation; for governments, it’s a way to keep the population entertained while inequality deepens. The commercial circus is no longer merely tolerated, it has become politically useful. Every billboard, sponsorship deal and celebrity endorsement sustains the illusion of vitality while the social fabric quietly frays.

Golf, football and cricket all illustrate the same moral drift. The LIV Tour split the game of golf, not over principle, but price. Soccer’s aborted European Super League revealed the naked ambition of clubs and investors to monopolise profit and control. Tennis players crisscross continents in a relentless pursuit of ranking points and endorsement contracts, their bodies and souls sacrificed to the entertainment economy. In every case, the logic is the same: maximise spectacle, monetise identity and externalise the cost.

Meanwhile, the real sport, the sport of community, participation, and shared belonging wastes away. Junior leagues collapse under rising costs. Public ovals are sold for development. Volunteers burn out. Grassroots participation has been quietly replaced by subscription streaming services and replica jerseys. The spectacle at the top grows brighter as the base beneath it erodes. We are left with the illusion of sporting abundance masking a profound civic poverty.

This hollowing out is not accidental, it is structural. Neoliberalism has taught us that competition is the supreme virtue and sport has become its most seductive metaphor. “May the best team win” has replaced “may everyone play.” It flatters us with meritocratic illusions while obscuring the inequities that define access, opportunity and participation. In the neoliberal world, even joy must justify itself economically.

Yet sport, at its best, was never about profit. It was a rehearsal for democracy: a space where individuals could meet as equals, bound by rules, respect and shared purpose. It taught restraint, humility and empathy, qualities now dismissed as uncompetitive. The replacement of that ethic by celebrity, sponsorship and branding marks not just a cultural loss, but a moral one.

The philosopher Guy Debord warned that modern society would become a “spectacle”, a world where social relations are mediated by images. That prophecy has now reached the playing field. The boundary between athlete and actor, competition and advertisement, is dissolving. The new heroes are not those who endure but those who trend. In the glare of constant performance, sport no longer reflects who we are, it distracts us from asking.

In this sense, the petrodollar leagues and the neoliberal sporting order are perfect successors to the Roman Empire’s “bread and circuses”. Both offer distraction in place of reflection and both sustain power by turning public life into entertainment. The new emperors are not statesmen, but sponsors; their circuses fill calendar; their bread is televised. As long as the crowds are cheering, they will not ask who owns the arena.

When play becomes performance and competition becomes commodity, sport ceases to mirror our humanity and begins instead to mask it. The arenas glow while the culture dims and we call it entertainment.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.