Sport is not industry: bringing sport back to sport management

“Sport is not industry: bringing sport back to sport management.” That is the title of a wonderful paper by Hallgeir Gammelsæter, of Molde University College in Norway. The paper argues that sport management, as a discipline, has become overly focused on the management or business aspect, pushing the sports industry into competing as any other form of entertainment.

This raises questions about who sport is supposed to serve, as both athletes and fans have arguably become commodities for shareholder gain and authentic intangible community bonds are lost in the name of international growth. Crucially this trend seems to be self-reinforcing, as more investors, middlemen, and marketeers come in trying to carve out some revenue for themselves.

Hallgeir joins us to discuss all of this and builds on it with insights from his other lines of work, including the incompatibility between elite sport and environmental sustainability - and how the professionalisation of sport is trickling down all the way to children's sport, meaning things at youth level are no longer just fun and games, when perhaps they still should be.