“Money rules the world,” Roger Domeneghetti 

Roger Domeneghetti has just published his latest book “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” a social history of 1980s Britain, told through the sport of the time. Speaking to the Sports Gazette, the author talked about some of its central themes – sport and politics, racism and violence and the reputation of sport journalists. 

Roger Domeneghetti is originally from Leicester, now living in Durham. Following a 20 year career in journalism, he made the leap into academia. He has recently completed his PhD and is currently Assistant Professor in Journalism at Northumbria University. When he’s not teaching, he is typically writing books and features on sport and popular culture.  

“I’d say I am a writer and a journalist who also works as an academic, not an academic who writes” said Domeneghetti, which is reflected in his output for an eclectic range of newspapers and magazines, including the The Blizzard, The New European, BBC History Magazine, TLS, Wisden Cricket Monthly and The NightWatchman.  

He first book published back in 2015 “From the Back Page to the Front Room” about the history of English football media was shortlisted for the 2015 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for Sport History. 

His second book, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”  published by Yellow Jersey Press in May 2023 has been well received.  “I’ve been thinking about the book for maybe 10 years. I did a writing proposal in 2019. The writing process of the book was probably about 18 months.”

Despite his years of journalism experience, he still found the interview process challenging.

“I interviewed people and you want them to be relevant to the subject and knowledgeable. Sometimes you email someone and they’ll ring you up almost immediately and sometimes it can take weeks and then it comes to nothing.”

Writing long features for years has helped to see the process of writing a book as a series of smaller texts. 

“If you’ve got a chapter of 8000 words, it’s got 5 sections of 1500 words, and I just see that as five. It could be quite daunting if you just thought I need to write 100,000 words. So I think of it in small chunks, so this chapter is about this and I want to talk about that. So I’m gonna split it into 5 topics, but they’re all related but then I just tackle them like a newspaper article.”

The mixture of sport and history and his personal relation to the 1980s are the main motivations behind the book.

“Sport can tell us much more about the world in which we live and help us to understand it. It’s a reflection of society. I wanted to tackle the history of Britain from that kind of perspective. I grew up in the 1980s, it’s a decade I know well. If you ever go back and look, it is a very transitional decade.”

Explaining history through sport is key for understanding both society of the past, as well as today’s.

“It’s a reflection of that society. There are things that we can see from the 1980s that are still relevant today, like the attitudes towards race, gender, sexuality even, but also things like the influence of politics within sport.”

One of the key topics in the book is the intertwined relationship between politics and sports. 

“Sports and politics have been mixed for centuries, you could go back to ancient Greece and sport and politics was mixed. That’s not anything new. You can look at the Moscow Olympics. The British government did not want our athletes to go to  Moscow in 1980 because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.”

This is a reflection on the current panorama of today’s sports with the participation of certain countries. 

“We’re seeing similar debates today about Russia and other countries. Sports and boycotts are illegitimate, tactical or not, and what kind of pressure there should be or responsibility. Should athletes be in the political arena? Is it an athlete’s responsibility to not attend an event if it’s being held in a country?”

The relevance of the topics originated in the 1980s are still relevant in contemporary society. 

“The point about the 1980s is we’re grappling with today, particularly about social identity and race. It is more apparent because you began to have a lot of black athletes representing Britain. They were second generation immigrants and they started to represent Britain. So questions about what it meant to be British became. And then who really was British or who really is British? These sorts of questions became what we’re still having today.  Became more pertinent or more present in discourse around sport.”

The 1980s forced sports journalists to change their way of working and seeing the world, evolving alongside the society mentality. 

“People began to see sport as real content for TV. So before the 1980s you really had only a few events that were seen as worthy of coverage and those were usually defined by the BBC, which had a very kind of Oxbridge. A lot of people who worked in the BBC came from Oxford and Cambridge, and came from a political kind of social class.”

The emergence of  the independent television networks, such as ITV, and with it the eyes were on different sports being televised. 

“Sports went from being pub sports that got very little coverage to being major sports within the space of less than 10 years. Obviously that has an impact and ramification on sports journalism because there’s more sports to cover and sports seen as more important. Specific sports have been previously overlooked, and are starting to come to the fore.”

For Domeneghetti the reputation of sports journalists comes alongside the publication they work for. 

“It probably equates more to which publication you work for than the fact that you’re a sports journalist. But I don’t think things were as bad as they were in the 1980s. Sports journalists maybe had a little bit of a less, a less good reputation. I think that some people would see if you work for X publication. The particular publication will have a certain kind of politics, and that will be more important to people than whether or not you’re a sports journalist or a news journalist.”

The representation of the LGBT+ community and its progression in sports is a debate that is at the centre of discussion everyday. 

“The representation of gay and lesbian sports, men and women. How much has that changed? I think it’s perhaps easier now for sports women who are gay, than it is for sports men. I guess you could argue there’s been some progression there, but we still only have one openly gay male professional football player in this country. You have to ask how much progress have we made and why haven’t we made progress in that particular area?”

Internet and social media has been one the biggest changes in the last decades, completely altering the way of communicating and the methods that journalists use. 

“In the 1980s we only had four TV channels. Reporting from abroad was still quite a difficult thing to do. As I say, we didn’t have the Internet, we didn’t have social media. So those I think would have been the biggest differences.”

Social media has brought up multiple debates and raises awareness to critical issues, such as racism in sports. Recently, it was pointed out in La Liga with racist chants against the Real Madrid player, Vinicius Jr. 

“Journalists are now more aware because of things that happened very recently like Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement. I think there is more awareness of the importance of these things as well. We have to acknowledge that.”

The reality is that even though there is forty years of difference between the 80s and nowadays, it is not possible to divorce politics from sports. 

“It’s always going to be mixed because you have international competitions where people represent countries against other people who represent different countries, and you play national anthems. The issues are very similar but there’s that 40 or 50 years of difference.”

The title of his new book is “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, but who rules the world for Domeneghetti? 

“Money rules the world.”