Politics for Losers: The Rhetoric of Sports Tanking as a Practice of Liberal Citizenship

The rise of illiberal structural and behavioral political cultures prompts communication scholars to consider alternative discursive models for maintaining healthy liberal democracy and promoting productive public deliberation. Our essay offers a novel contribution to that end. We introduce sports tanking as an intentional, systematic, and strategic practice of fielding non-contending athletic teams to lose games in the short-term to improve the chances of winning in the long-term. We analyze a range of mediated discourses to unearth a shared pattern across the rhetoric of sports tanking and liberal democracy marked by four points of formal correspondence: potentiality; pluralism; publicity; and prospectivism. We conclude by discussing the implications of this formal pattern for communication scholars, as well as fans of professional sports and a functioning liberal democracy.