Jay Scherer

When the Rogers Place arena opened in downtown Edmonton in September 2016, no amount of buzz could drown out the rumours of manipulation, secret deals, and corporate greed undergirding the project. Working with documentary evidence and original interviews, the authors present an absorbing account of the machinations that got the arena and the adjacent Ice District built, with a price tag of more than $600 million. The arena deal, they argue, established a costly public financing precedent that people across North America should watch closely, as many cities consider building sports facilities for professional teams or international competitions. Their analysis brings clarity and nuance to a case shrouded in secrecy and understood by few besides political and business insiders. Power Play tells a dramatic story about clashing priorities where sports, money, and municipal power meet. Foreword by Richard Gruneau.

In 2011, New Zealand rugby fans erupted in celebration as the All Blacks narrowly defeated France to win the Rugby World Cup - the team's first title since New Zealand hosted the inaugural tournament in 1987. In the years between these victories, the sport of rugby has been radically transformed from its amateur roots to a professional, global entertainment 'product'. This book explores these developments and focuses initially on the New Zealand Rugby Union's key deals with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s. The new pay-per-view era has curtailed the traditional 'viewing rights' of rugby fans to have live, free-to-air access to All Blacks test matches on public television. Adidas, meanwhile, has relentlessly commodified aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity in pursuit of local and global markets while exploiting labour in developing countries. Escalating merchandise costs and ticket prices have, at the same time, pushed the sport further out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders.All of these issues, however, have not gone uncontested, and the authors argue that rugby remains a contested terrain in the face of a new set of limits and pressures in the global economy.

Although New Zealand exists as a small (pop. 4.3 million), peripheral nation in the global economy, it offers a unique site through which to examine the complex, but uneven, interplay between global forces and long-standing national traditions and cultural identities. This book examines the profound impact of globalization on the national sport of rugby and New Zealand’s iconic team, the All Blacks. Since 1995, the national sport of rugby has undergone significant change, most notably due to the New Zealand Rugby Union’s lucrative and ongoing corporate partnerships with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas. The authors explore these significant developments and pressures alongside the resulting tensions and contradictions that have emerged as the All Blacks, and other aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity, have been steadily incorporated into a global promotional culture. Following recent research in cultural studies, they highlight the intensive, but contested, commodification of the All Blacks to illuminate the ongoing transformation of rugby in New Zealand by corporate imperatives and the imaginations of marketers, most notably through the production of a complex discourse of corporate nationalism within Adidas’s evolving local and global advertising campaigns.