The Great Game Lab at Arizona State University explores the global convergence of sport, media, and geopolitics, as well as America’s ever closer sporting relationship with the rest of the world as we prepare to host the world’s biggest sporting event during the nation’s 250th birthday celebration in 2026, and an Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles two years later.
About
Great Game Lab Inquires
The Great Game
Sport’s globalization continues to accelerate as a result of numerous factors increasing its importance as a geopolitical, cultural, economic, and mediatic force, and as a considerable source of what the political scientist Joseph Nye termed “soft power.” Sport is now the most powerful force in entertainment and mass media and one of the foremost cultural phenomena that connect people to each other, and to their geographies. And although sport can at times be exploited for questionable purposes, the Great Game Lab is founded on the belief that cross-border sporting ties are an inherently positive force in our world, creating empathy, mutual respect, and understanding.
A protagonist off the bench
The United States is experiencing a sporting revolution, shedding our historical isolationism as to the games we play and follow. We are exporting our homegrown sports leagues and expanding their markets, but the more momentous trend is the rise of the world’s default sport within the United States and the unexpected rise of the U.S. within this default sport. Soccer, once deemed as dubiously foreign as the metric system, has been naturalized American over the past generation by a motley alliance of Title IX-empowered collegiate women players, immigrants, a generation of kids playing EA Sports’ FIFA computer game, and U.S. brands whose marketing needs transcended the reach of of our domestic leagues.
Sport as Media
American sporting interests are now eager to attain as global a reach as other pillars of American pop culture, such as music and film, have long enjoyed. They have a considerable gap to close. While most Super Bowl viewers these days are still within the United States, Hollywood blockbusters are typically watched by far more people overseas. The recent creation of multinational conglomerates that field teams in different sports and on different continents is an effort to address this shortfall. Roughly half the clubs in the English Premier League, the most followed league on the planet, are now U.S.-owned, including two crosstown London rivals that share owners with the LA Rams and the LA Dodgers.
Let’s connect
At ASU, the Great Game Lab will provide commentary and commission research, create courses, and convene forums and other programming on these themes and how they might strengthen America’s ties to the rest of the world. The Great Game Lab will be active on ASU’s campuses in metro Phoenix, our centers in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, as well as in Mexico City. In advancing our mission, the Great Game Lab is eager to partner and collaborate with public and cultural diplomacy agencies, other academic institutions, media, sports leagues and their clubs around the world, and athletes themselves.
