ABSTRACT
The leisure and entertainment industries became increasingly significant components of transnational capitalism in the late 1980s and have also, arguably, ‘helped generate popular consent for the current gospel of free trade, deregulated markets, economic competitiveness, and the privatizations of public goods and services’ (Gruneau and Whitson, 1997: 360). In the networks of transnational flows of capital and information, these industries are integrated players for cities now competing intensely for spectacular urban entertainment as a strategy for growth and re-imaging as world-class cities of culture. Major League sports and sport mega-events are prime commodities of growing importance in this international entertainment economy. In many cases, they are central expressions of the contemporary mobilization of spectacle as they merge with an entrepreneurial urban economy in the economic and socio-cultural regeneration of cities.
