The power of play? Climate crisis, capitalism and the necessity to reimagine sport

Concerns related to the climate crisis and talk of environmental ‘sustainability’ are increasing amongst people working in, researching and doing performance-sport. Yet this appears at odds with the current practices across the sporting industry—business strategies oriented around economic and material growth, hosting mega-events, increasing travel, vast resource use, sponsorship deals with big oil companies and suchlike. In this essay, I argue that these material and ecological contradictions may be best understood via a focus on capitalism. That is, performance-sport, like many other social and cultural activities, is deeply embedded within capitalist structures, logics and practices that are full of tensions and inconsistencies concerning environmental sustainability. I contend that this ought to be the focus of far more attention and reflection when discussing performance-sport and the climate crisis. The pressing task at hand is to imagine and enact an alternative to the ecologically unsustainable, capitalistic model of performance-sport. To that end, I discuss the potentials of shifting from performance to play as the key organising principle for sport. This conceptual shift would directly challenge capitalist ideologies and practices. As such, sport that is oriented ecologically, economically, culturally and personally around ideas of public good and sustainability, as opposed to private capital accumulation and indefinite growth, may be more readily enabled.