Athlete Voice & How It Influences Sports Governance A Big Issue In decade Ahead, Says Play The Game Boss

The Athlete Voice in the coming decade

“One of the most important challenges of the next decade will be to develop the forms in which athletes can best express their individual and collective visions, negotiate their disagreements, and influence the decisions that decide the future course of sport.”

That’s the conclusion of Jens Sejer Andersen, International director of Play the Game, in his decade-ending note on the state of world sport.

Play the Game is an initiative run by the Danish Institute for Sports Studies (Idan), “aiming at raising the ethical standards of sport and promoting democracy, transparency and freedom of expression in world sport”.

The International head ends 2019 predicting what will happen next as the appetite for influence in the way sports are governed in a trillion-dollar-a-year business grows apace.

“It was not primarily the athletes that drove the radical change of the sports agenda in the past decade,” says Andersen.

“But there are many recent signs that professional athletes have a growing appetite for influencing their own arena and society at large. Sporting icons like NFL player Colin Kaepernick, and football players like Megan Rapinoe and Mesut Özil have spoken up against racism, discrimination and persecution of minorities. At the bottom of the competitive pyramid, athletes have voted with their feet for more than a generation, seeking health, fun, and good company far well outside the classic sports system. Athletes of all kinds will likely be at the heart of the sports political agenda of the 2020s, and their working range may stretch well beyond sport itself.”

“It was not primarily the athletes that drove the radical change of the sports agenda in the decade we leave. But there are signs that athletes will be at the heart of the agenda of the 2020’ies”, writes Anderson as he recalls “ten turbulent years in world sport”.

Photo Courtesy: PlayTheGame.org

In the article in full, Andersen asks the reader to think ten years back and ask what you would have concluded ‘If someone had told you, at the doorstep of 2010, that the following decade would:

show at least one million of Brazilians taking to the streets, combining their outrage over government policies with protests against the FIFA World Cup, and sending shock waves through the Olympic movement
have 15 cities around the world withdraw their bid for hosting Olympic Games after referendums, or out of fear for how taxpayers and voters would react
reveal a long-term, systemic doping programme orchestrated by one of the world’s most powerful nations in sport and politics, the Russian Federation, forcing prominent whistleblowers to seek asylum elsewhere and causing deep divisions in international anti-doping
see the U.S federal police raid a FIFA congress in Switzerland, exposing unknown corruption scandals worth hundreds of millions of US-dollars, eventually imposing huge fines and long jail sentences to numerous football officials
grant one of the two largest sporting events in the world to a tiny desert state, unleashing a global debate about slavery-like work conditions in Qatar and other Arab countries, and human rights violations in sport at a general level
see a Vice-President of the International Olympic Committee arrestedduring the Olympic Games, with cameras rolling, and a handful of other members of the inner Olympic power circles retire due to criminal investigations across the world
hear over 150 women testify on the massive sexual abuse they were exposed to over two decades by a physician of the USA Gymnastics team and Michigan State University, adding their stories to dozens of similar cases affecting the lives of boys and girls, in the UK, France, Norway, Nigeria, the Netherlands…

Would you have found such predictions for international sport credible?

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