Sports are about as important as shopping for groceries. It's an important part of national life but less pressing than say providing the most useful education a child could dream of possessing, and the most caring and accessible health service on the planet.
Those two examples are social issues that the people are united on and the so the power elite degrade health and education through bureaucratic burdens that favour systems over people. This is a measurable claim as pupils know less than before and patient satisfaction plummets precipitously.
Administrative sclerosis is a basic method to keep people downtrodden without being challenged as it is natural over time to learn to tolerate poor quality. However it's crucial to distract the people from thinking clearly. Distraction is the most effective technique. It is hardest to ignore and easiest to accept when sanctioned by the State. Elites have studied us carefully and know intimately that we are most easily distracted by food, sex, celebrity, scandal, divisiveness, money and property to name a few. For this reason, these stories are given the least resistance to mass media carpet bombing and are framed as normal in order to train us to have the lowest expectations of our species, the maximum distrust of each other, the most shallow ideals of our capabilities and to gush when elites use our money for their own ends.
However the war on conciousness is incomplete without the two powerhouses of total mind control: They are sports and war. Sports and War. Sports & War.
Both sports and war are given special mass media programming privileges. The news is one long preparation plan for the next war. By the time NATO have knocked up another falsely attributed Syrian massacre the public are so beautifully conditioned to demand that something must be done and that the threat of inaction is perilous. The precise details are, we then learn, a matter of national security. That's Elite national security not your national security. The public would erupt if it could digest the scale it is being lied to and of the carnage carried out to sell violence in its name. For this reason all references to military are given the deference language of whispers and choked up tears. It is a pride so rare it is only seen spontaneously by rare beneficiaries of personal acts of life saving heroism.
Sports is given its own sacred segment in this most hallowed section of mass media. Attention grows wherever it is directed and so the most banal of distractions is elevated to the highest of praise and celebration. The narratives of sport have no social commentary compared to the excavation of history through ballet and opera. These actually had something to say on the events of the day but sports viewing is of no more consequence than video gaming though it is less popular so the reasons for giving it mass media airtime is very telling of elite agendas.
The interests of Government and Sport have now merged so closely and so shamelessly it has become evident to the ordinary human mind that corporate brands are self serving vehicles of exploitation no different from the profit driven ideals of the perpetual war machine. The rows of empty seats at the 2012 military Olympics punctuated by soldiers miserably drafted into events out of GovCorp desperation is more than a snapshot of British sporting life it is a visual obituary. It speaks for itself.
