Sport Management and Sustainability: An Impossible Theorem?

This conceptual paper extends the debate about sustainability and sport management by transcending the dominant natural environmental perspective and offering a systems approach. Addresses the question, ‘Is sustainability in sport management possible?’ The nature of sustainability in sport management is discussed in the context of the tensions between the current growth model of sport, sport management research and teaching, and the sustainability imperative. Sustainability in sport management is concerned with a composite problem, and its goal is to understand and shape the interactions between complex adaptive natural systems and sport organizations as soft socio-economic entities at individual, organizational, and societal levels. A key feature that distinguishes sustainability in sport management from its current mainstream understanding and practices based on the ideology of growth ought to be its explicit prioritization of all types of sport participants as citizens, as opposed to treating them as consumers. At present, sustainability in sport management remains an impossibility.