Children’s rights, human development and play – rejecting performance-orientated youth sport

This commentary is distinctly personal for us. We think it should be likewise for all scholars, leaders and organisers involved in youth sport. This is because, to our minds, at the core of most people’s ways of approaching and promoting these supposedly healthy activities to children and young adults, is an apparent well-meaningness which centres on wanting the best for current and future generations. Unfortunately, while we accept such good intentions are present, they do not negate the empirical reality that critical scholars of sport have been pointing towards for over five decades – that is, professional and performance focused sports are often socially, politically and ethically questionable enterprises. If central features of our argument in this direction are accepted, several problems in terms of children’s rights, health, and wellbeing become apparent as quite fundamental to the model of sport which is currently dominant in the Western imagination. To offer a path forward we outlined a focus on human development as the foundation upon which we build a series of clear recommendations. We conclude with the purposely pithy, populist and powerful statement that encouraging players to play, rather than thinking of sport as akin to work, should not be understood as some impossible task, but rather, a return to the ways that many of us were first drawn to the amazing potentials embedded in ‘sport’. We compel scholars to reflect deeply on their place in the subcultures we critique, and if after doing so, they find themselves complicit in maintaining a world of sport that damages young people, contributes to them dropping out, and otherwise reduces the fun, enjoyment and positive development they gain from physical activity, we hope they will join us in being part of the solution rather than continuing to be central to the problem.