"David Rowe argues that, contrary to what might have been expected, international sport does not contribute to a process of ‘comprehensive globalization’– by which he understands a process through which global forces dissipate local differences until the latter are all but lost. Widely-watched televised mega-sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics, which are sponsored by global consumer brands (Adidas, Nike, McDonalds, Budweiser, etc.), might suggest that sport is ‘globalization’s most attentive handmaiden’. Rowe notes, however, that in these cases, the local cannot be so easily written out of the picture. In the case of sports, the nation remains an essential touchstone and symbolic register: even if everyone is watching the World Cup, they are usually cheering for their own national team. ‘Sport’s dependency on the nation’, Rowe argues, ‘always reinserts the restrictive framework of modernity into the fluid workings of post modernity. In doing so – in a highly emotional manner – sport operates as a perpetual reminder of the social limits to the reconfiguration of endlessly mutable identities and identifications’.."