Qatar, Saudi Arabia: Sport Is Also a Means to Accumulate Power and Build Control

Opinion piece by Simon Chadwick States have long played a role in sport, sometimes in promoting participation and at other times in helping governments to achieve political ends. This role is often perceived as being positive, for instance in the way it is intended to address public health challenges. Though states’ engagement with sport can be for malign reasons, indeed there are many examples of sport being deployed for propaganda purposes. Such is the potential for states to exert their influence over and through sport that, for example, football’s governing body FIFA explicitly prohibits states from intervening in national associations.

Paris 2024: A Unique Geoeconomic Opportunity for France

Opinion by Jean-Baptiste Guégan | The Paris 2024 Games are about more than mere sporting excitement. They carry with them major economic stakes for more actors than the host city alone. An ideal opportunity to recall the growing importance of the geoeconomy of sport.

Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms: Ethics and Fair Cooperation between AI and Human Intelligence

by Claude Revel & David Fayon | With the recent buzz surrounding generative artificial intelligence since the launch of ChatGPT, it has been impossible to escape this tsunami which is likely to disrupt a whole range of human activities for blue-collar workers, but also for white-collar workers who had so far been spared from automation and robotics. The questions that arise are whether algorithms are ethical, depending on how they are trained and reinforced, the data sets they use, their possible biases and whether or not they are inclusive. It is also important to question the role of humans. Does big data require the systematic use of AI, or is human processing sufficient and/or preferable?

Broadcasting the 2023 Women’s World Cup: A Chance To Make a Difference

by Jean-Baptiste Guegan | Why should we buy the rights to the next FIFA World Cup? The Cup will take place from July 20 to August 20 in Australia and New Zealand. A unique opportunity to "bring women’s soccer to the forefront and show that it is just as important as men’s football", as FIFA General Secretary Fatma Samoura recently put it. And yet, not everyone will be able to see it. Even today, some broadcasters are unable or unwilling to finance the rights to broadcast the event, thus depriving millions of spectators of the event. France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, all historic footballing hotspots, are among the absentees.

As the World Goes Meta, Will Sporting Events Follow?

In this article, Simon Chadwick (SKEMA Business School) & Rauf Mammadov (PwC) aim to explore the prospect of the metaverse platform in the sporting arena, arguing that although the market size of the metaverse is predicted to grow exponentially over the next few years, effective adoption, and utilization of metaverse platforms for sporting events will require addressing unique challenges.

Sport in Europe Faces Governance Challenges As the Growth of Multipolarism Confronts It

By Simon Chadwick | Global sport is changing. Organised around the Global North since it originated, international sport governance is increasingly influenced by countries of the Global South. Europe, once at its centre, saw its hegemonic position challenged first by North American hyper-commercialisation of sports, and now today, by the strength of the Global South’s geopolitical aspirations. How can European sport overcome these challenges?

CSR and governance: the importance of implementing self-regulation

The governance landscape has changed in recent years, due in particular to the influence of new corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards that have emerged. These two concepts, governance and CSR, now appear to be inextricably linked and are part of a new reality in business management.

Metaverse: Bubble 3.0 or the Future of the Internet?

by David Fayon | The metaverse has been getting a lot of press coverage since the Facebook company changed its name to Meta a year ago. While nascent solutions were already available, such as Second Life, a 3D virtual world launched in 2005 when the term Web 2.0 appeared, virtual reality headsets, NFTs, blockchain technology, and faster internet speeds have reignited interest in the metaverse. But between fantasies, a new eldorado for brands and reality, what is the truth of the meta?