Sportswork – Towards a Notion of Good Work for Athletes

This paper explores the idea of professional sport as a form of labour. While research on everything from performance statistics to sports rights and technology had proliferated, what players think about sport as work deserves greater attention. The inequalities and exclusion of sports are evident and we need to understand the drivers of this, but we also need to understand why working in these industries matters to people, how they experience it and what values it has for them. In order to do this, I want to draw on critical cultural labour studies, and the paper argues that applying this lens to work in sport could help develop a notion of what constitutes ‘good work’ for athletes. The aim of the paper is to both to consider the landscape of sports labour research and to propose a future research agenda.