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Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport
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In 2022, critical sports scholar Chen Chen uncovered a staggering statistic: The three leading academic journals in sports management (Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review, and European Sport Management Quarterly), with over 74 years of combined history between them, had published a grand total of 14 articles that mentioned the word “capitalism” more than once. An academic discipline ostensibly dedicated to studying the vast business apparatuses propelling its industry, sports management is evidently, per Chen’s findings, incurious about the economic system underlying its field. Capitalism has been a “ghost” in sports discourse, writes Chen; it is an “absent presence” that is always “speaking” but is seldom “spoken of.”
Chen notes there may be lingering remnants of McCarthyism: faculty members worry about the “career-threatening repercussions” of anti-capitalist rhetoric. And while many still surely adhere to this status quo, there are some notable writers and scholars giving us reason to be optimistic about the normalization of leftist critiques in sports: Chen Chen is breaking new ground on the symbiotic relationship between sports and imperialism, and critical sports scholars Derek Silva and Nathan Kalman-Lamb are making legible the exploitative dynamics of elite college athletics. Nation sports editor Dave Zirin has spent two decades eviscerating corrupt commissioners and mercenary owners, and Theresa Runstedtler is rewriting the narrative on the racialized undertones of basketball’s “Dark Ages.”
And in May 2025, Daniel Sailofsky—an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Toronto—officially joined the chorus of leftist sports critiques with Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport. A thrillingly ambitious Marxist analysis of the contemporary sports landscape, Sailofsky makes his goals for the text simple: “to understand how harm and violence manifest and continue to exist in sport, with the express purpose of driving social change toward socialism to eradicate this harm and violence.”
Over the course of eight doggedly researched chapters, Sailofsky argues that sports reflect capitalism’s inequalities, but they also serve as a vehicle to reproduce and legitimize them. He makes his case by detailing how the profit imperatives of elite athletics excuse, if not overtly encourage, in-game violence, and how these same tendencies manifest off the field in athlete-perpetrated violence and athlete-inflicted violence. He looks at the structurally coercive conditions that make dangerous sport seem like the only economically viable option for a lot of underserved communities, and he critiques the present-day prevalence of sportswashing among both Gulf petrostates and Western democracies. Finally, Sailofsky turns his attention to an idealized future where sports are more than just “a vehicle for profit or a toy for elites” but rather a “creative, aesthetic cultural form to be enjoyed by all.”
Violence Sells: The Profit Imperatives of Capitalist Sport
It seems only right to begin with the league that has staked its claim to the Lord’s day. “The NFL owns a day of the week,” declares Dr. Cyril Wecht (played by Albert Brooks) in the 2015 film Concussion, based on the true story of forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu’s (Will Smith) attempt to publicize his findings on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease stemming from repeated head trauma. It wasn’t until 2016, 14 years after Omalu’s initial findings, that the NFL finally acknowledged the link between football and CTE. While the NFL has instituted rule changes in recent years to promote player safety and to limit concussive blows, Sailofsky notes the savvy marketing the league deploys to frame concussion stats: When the number of concussions is down, the league claims the game “is less violent and causing less injury.” When the number of concussions is up, the league claims the “warrior culture around football is improving” because players are more likely to admit to, and teams are more likely to report, their injuries. This is “‘heads I win, tails you lose’ logic,” writes Sailofsky.
The capitalist profit imperatives underlying the NFL’s evasive concussion rhetoric are obvious: Violence sells; league-sanctioned suicide does not. A little less pronounced is how the sport’s violent consequences might further its profitability: “maybe it’s not actually that we ignore this pain,” writes Sailofsky, “but instead notice it, enjoy it, and to some extent, need it.” Sailofsky quotes fellow sociologist Nathan Kalman-Lamb, who says sport violence is “logically consistent with the fact that [sports] must have high stakes in order to entice fans to invest meaning and finances into the game.” A fan’s fervent backing of their favorite team is, in a sense, justified by the athletes’ putting their physical health on the line. “In sport,” writes Sailofsky, “harm and sacrifice are the point.”
Cruelly optimistic dreams of stardom allow for structurally coercive conditions among players, but it’s the promise of prosperity that paves the way for displacement and privatization among a large sporting event’s surrounding communities.
Such harm is not just conducive to high-stakes contests—it also has a purported socializing effect on athletes. “Proponents of the ‘civilizing effects of sports,’” writes Sailofsky, argue that athletic competitions can be places for “violent urges to be subdued in a less harmful way.” Unfortunately, it’s far from clear that “instrumental violence actually has any real violence-quelling effects,” and this tendency toward physical harm on the field has increasingly trickled off the field in the form of assault, battery, and violence against women (VAW). Sailofsky is a leading scholar in this area; he’s the first to study “the material effects of VAW arrests on player careers” in a “systematic way.” The most egregious incidents are well known, but the larger prevalence of the issue is very intentionally swept under the rug: “every case of violence is framed as an individual issue,” writes Sailofsky, “not a structural problem.”
In some cases, teams may even leverage a player’s poor behavior to their advantage, a sick inversion of the Michael Lewis–immortalized idea of “Moneyball,” where teams use in-depth statistical analysis to identify undervalued players. When decisions are “structured by the profit imperatives of capitalism,” writes Sailofsky, violent behavior becomes a “market inefficiency to be exploited by ‘savvy’ management.” It’s a grossly logical progression of racial capitalism: Players are turned into “assets” evaluated according to their “market value.” Why would teams prioritize an athlete’s lack of humanity in their off-field life when they never viewed them as human in the first place? Empty, symbolic gestures conceal disregard for actual, physical harm, and examples are made of offending replacement players to obfuscate the horrific behavior of stars. There’s an issue with a few bad apples, top leagues suggest, not a rotten orchard.
Structural Coercion and Cruel Optimism
There’s a narrow focus on individual wrongdoing at the expense of broader institutional critiques when it comes to assault charges in professional sports. Sailofsky identifies this as “neoliberal logic” built around freedom and personal responsibility, and we see a similar focus on individual autonomy when it comes to young athletes’ “choice” to sacrifice their bodies in pursuit of scarce college scholarships. Such athletes often come from minority communities in underresourced areas, and larger questions about the structural coercion guiding their dreams are ignored.
Sailofsky argues that football offers the best example of these coercive conditions: “for many youth in poor, often-Black American communities,” he writes, “[football is] framed as the main potential ‘way out.’” Structural coercion exists when “broader contexts act upon individuals” and compel them to “behave in a specific way.” A dearth of economic opportunity coupled with a pervasive gridiron culture means an athlete’s “choice” to get “hit in the head a bunch of times” isn’t really a choice. They’ve been structurally coerced into deeming it their only viable option.
On top of being constrained by structurally coercive conditions, athletes, and countless other workers in and around the sporting world, are seduced into submission by the “cultural mythology of the American Dream.” Sailofsky uses the example of poor Latin American baseball players put into baseball academies at a young age: “fully devoted to baseball since they were twelve or thirteen,” he writes, “[they have] no other skills or education and little family wealth to fall back on.” Lauren Berlant’s writing on the American dream’s “cruel optimism”—the idea that your aspirations can be an obstacle to your flourishing—is operating in such circumstances: Baseball players toil away in the minor leagues (MiLB) in the hopes of earning lucrative major league contracts while putting their health and future on the line for poverty-level wages, not to mention that only about one in 10 will be called up.
It is, however, important to note that MiLB players have made notable gains of late: In 2023, they played their first season as unionized workers, and minimum salaries more than doubled. “MiLB unionization is a case study in dialectics,” writes Sailofsky in one of the book’s more optimistic moments, as the horrid circumstances imposed by greedy MLB owners prompted the players to demand better conditions, and eventually to unionize. The best organizer is, after all, a bad boss.
Celebration Capitalism and Sportswashing
Cruelly optimistic dreams of stardom allow for structurally coercive conditions among players, but it’s the promise of prosperity that paves the way for displacement and privatization among a large sporting event’s—or a major sports team’s—surrounding communities. The most glaring examples are the World Cup and the Olympics, mega-events that, per Dave Zirin, serve as “neoliberal trojan horses” to accelerate gentrification and hyper-surveillance. Programs and developments stemming from mega-events are ultimately “done for the short-term tourists and for the cameras,” writes Sailofsky. Actual residents rarely see tangible benefits. They often see the opposite.
Borrowing from scholar Jules Boykoff, Sailofsky refers to the circumstances brought about by mega-sporting events as “celebration capitalism.” Disaster capitalism’s “affable cousin,” celebration capitalism breeds a state of exception where governments and corporations push neoliberal policies they “couldn’t dream of during normal times.” Draconian security measures are enacted, giving “police additional public order powers.” And there are “clean up the streets” initiatives that, unsurprisingly, often target low-income individuals: 720,000 residents were forcefully evicted in the lead-up to the Seoul Olympics; 30,000 Atlantans were displaced ahead of the 1996 Games. Things get especially bleak when you look at the displacement resulting from Brazil’s 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, in which communities were ravaged to make way for stadium complexes that, following the games, sat perpetually empty.
Organizations like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee hide these devastating impacts beneath a veneer of social and civic responsibility. This, writes Sailofsky, typifies “sportswashing,” the process of “state governments, organizations, and even individual people using sports to launder or ‘wash away’ their poor reputations.” “Political leaders use sports to appear important or legitimate on the world stage,” says Boykoff; they stoke sentiments of nationalism “while deflecting attention from chronic social problems and human-rights woes on the home front.” Sportswashing is a tool of soft power, whereby states use ostensibly nonviolent and noncoercive actions to shape values, beliefs, and public perceptions.
In the sporting world, physical violence, structural coercion, and state-sponsored reputation laundering have been normalized, and the athletes themselves have become increasingly commodified.
The most glaring examples of sportswashing emanate from Gulf petrostates. Qatar’s 2022 World Cup is the most infamous example, as the on-field product, and the mega-event being held in a country the size of Connecticut, deflected attention from the nation’s gross human rights abuses: Homosexuality is criminalized, free speech is restricted, and untold numbers of migrant workers died in the lead-up to the festivities. There’s also Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which has backed a PGA Tour competitor and a Premier League club to allay scrutiny over, among other things, murdering a Washington Post reporter. And the repressive UAE has attempted to burnish its reputation through Manchester City soccer, Formula 1 racing, and the NBA (the latter’s new in-season tournament is named after the state-owned Emirates Airlines).
Examples abound from the Middle East, but sportswashing isn’t just reserved for Gulf State autocracies. Sailofsky notes that Western nations “put on similarly expensive spectacles that distract from their wrongdoing.” There’s also the phenomenon of billionaires attempting to repair their image through American sports ownership: Joe Tsai, cofounder of Alibaba and current owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and the WNBA’s New York Liberty, has become a renowned champion of women’s sports; seldom do we now talk about his connections to questionable companies with horrific human rights records.
Sailofsky is right in reiterating that “sportswashing is not the work of any one type of government or business” but rather the “product of a system where profit is paramount.” And as inequality continues to grow under global capitalism, huge profit can increasingly be “extracted only through exploitation of either workers, the planet, or both.” Inevitably, “reputations need cleansing” and negative attention needs to be redirected.
The Road Ahead: Reimagining a Just Sporting Future
I’m stating the obvious when I say this is all so dispiriting. In the sporting world, physical violence, structural coercion, and state-sponsored reputation laundering have been normalized, and the athletes themselves have become increasingly commodified. It’s hard to not approach it all with a sense of resignation; there’s a pervasive cynicism looming over critical sports studies. And in a largely excellent book—a lucid, exhaustive addition to the critical sports discourse—I was a bit discouraged to find that Sailofsky, in his final chapter, “The Way Forward,” struggled to offer a substantive alternative to the bleak status quo.
In what is by far the shortest chapter in the book, Sailofsky concludes his critique with a “reimagining” of sport’s future. “We need revolutionary transformation soon,” he writes, “we also need harm reduction right now.” It’s the age-old debate: how to reconcile lofty utopianism with practical incrementalism? Sailofsky paints in broad strokes his own suggestions: external, independent regulatory bodies; worker unionization and collective action; a cultural shift from competition and dominance to community well-being and mass participation. While I certainly agree, actual sporting alternatives—both past and present—are given short shrift. Sailofsky writes about how events like the Workers’ Olympiad—the anti-Olympics for working-class athletes—have been “largely erased” from the cultural consciousness, and yet he dedicates all of one paragraph to restoring its memory. Also deserving of more attention are the labor- and community-focused sporting alternatives sprouting up today.
There’s plenty to like about the upstart women’s basketball league Unrivaled, for one example, an athlete-founded and partially athlete-owned offseason alternative to the WNBA. There’s also the fledgling Premier Lacrosse League (PLL), which boasts a comparable equity model and is reimagining our relationship to home venues and home teams. Rather than worry about building costly, community-altering complexes for its clubs, the PLL has instituted the kind of touring model usually reserved for individual sports: all its teams descend on the same city on the same weekend. On a larger scale, used by bigger leagues, a touring model would mean making use of existing venues rather than raiding city tax coffers to build carbon-guzzling, gentrification-accelerating stadiums (the case for sports stadiums as economic engines has largely been debunked). Opponents might argue that such a model would have a detrimental impact on a team’s ties to its local community, but the PLL still names its clubs after a particular market—the Maryland Whipsnakes; the Carolina Chaos—and the “home” team plays extra games during their tour stops, stirring up regional interest.
Both Unrivaled and PLL are single-entity leagues, meaning the league and its clubs are all under one umbrella. There are also examples of independently owned teams providing promising blueprints of a different variety: there’s the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, a nonprofit with over 500,000 shareholders and one of the richest histories, and smallest hometowns, in American sports. And there’s the 50+1 rule in the German Bundesliga, which ensures that teams are majority owned by their members—usually fans—as opposed to by external investors.
I’ve also been encouraged by the organizing taking place in Nevada: a teachers’ group filed a lawsuit challenging the $380 million in public funding allocated toward building a new MLB stadium for the (formerly Oakland-based) Athletics. There’s been similar mobilization in Los Angeles through NOlympics LA, a coalition of community organizers fighting to keep the 2028 Olympics out of their city. (As an LA resident, I do remain groundlessly hopeful about the city following through on its promised public transit improvements ahead of the games, though LA’s current pace of gentrification means high-use transit riders (i.e., lower-income individuals) may not benefit.) NOlympics makes an appearance in Sailofsky’s book, and he notes that similar activist groups have sprouted up in Chicago, Calgary, and, most notably, Boston: The grassroots organization No Boston Olympics was instrumental in ending the city’s 2024 bid.
None of these models are perfect. Many of them are more progressive variations on capitalist sport than they are an outright break with our reigning economic reality. A staunch Marxist critique might argue that something like limited player equity pools, for example, are more symbolic gestures meant to appease players and butter up the media than they are concerted attempts at labor-forward practices. And while there’s a lot to like about community-owned sports clubs, the tenuousness of such models has been made clear: Real Madrid’s supposedly member-run structure has been upended by a power-hungry president who, thanks to undemocratic election eligibility requirements, repeatedly runs unopposed.
And yet the above examples still represent steps, however painfully incremental, in a less exploitative, extractive, and ruthlessly profit-driven direction. We can build upon the good: expand player equity pools and community ownership; tour with existing facilities rather than build new ones. And abscond with the bad: sportswashed owners, greenwashed fossil fuel companies, tax-subsidized arenas. Daniel Sailofsky has constructed a thrilling, comprehensive Marxist critique of the violent underpinnings of contemporary sport, but he’s more focused on concretizing the capitalist logic propelling the current industry than he is on devising a clear path forward. The ghost of capitalism in sports is, finally, being named. It’s time to build on precedents past and present to start devising an answer to a hopelessly simple, impossibly complex question: What comes next? 
