What if the players controlled the game? Dealing with the consequences of the crisis of governance in sports

Abstract

“It is difficult to find anything else in the world quite so badly governed as international sport” (Katwala, 2000). Little has improved since Katwala’s comment, and governance problems are now evident in national sport organisations, professional sports, and educational sport. These problems are related to the effects of globalisation, institutionalisation, and commercialisation on sport; processes and forces that have acted to produce a cultural hegemony – a global sport monoculture in which the democratic involvement of participants is restricted, and which limits what Roland Renson refers to as ludodiversity. When states do not consider sport seriously as a subject of concern for policy and regulation, “Sports … take place in a sort of separate [autonomous] sphere, detached from normal rules and regulations in society” (Bruyninckx, 2011). My work has an ongoing concern with the effects of cultural hegemony on various forms of physical culture, and with examples of resistance to that hegemony. In an attempt to resolve the crisis of governance in sport, I will follow the trajectories of various alternative and grassroots sports in order to speculate what sports would look like if they were truly democratised; in other words, if their form and meaning were controlled by the participants.