On the duplicity of sports: escapism, battleground, and the theater of empire.
People love to say that “sports are the opiate of the masses.” It’s a tidy cliché, but it doesn’t fit. Opiates dull pain. They sedate. Sports don’t sedate — they electrify. They’re not morphine, they’re cocaine: jittery, emotional, unpredictable, the thing that makes people feel alive in a world that otherwise feels static and gray.
Think about it. Nobody crowds around the TV to watch C-SPAN. Nobody gets goosebumps from a parliamentary debate or erupts in joy when a think tank publishes a new white paper.
Politics, as most people encounter it, is dead air — flat, lifeless, detached from anything that feels real. But put the Edmonton Oilers in the playoffs, announce a stacked UFC card, or kick off a Champions League final, and suddenly entire cities breathe in unison. Families gather, bars fill, coworkers turn into rivals, and strangers high-five in the street. That’s not escapism in the cheap sense. That’s energy, meaning, story.
Sports have become the cultural grammar through which people process life in this stagnant world. They are the language of pride, heartbreak, betrayal, and hope. They’re how we talk about ourselves when everything else feels impossible to talk about.
And that’s why it’s a mistake — especially on the left — to dismiss sports as “just games” or to condescend to fans as if they’ve been duped into caring about something frivolous. To do that is to miss where people’s real emotions actually live.
This is why I’m pivoting toward sports in my own work. Not because I want to sneer at fans or declare sports “problematic.” Not because I think we should cancel the NHL, the NFL, or FIFA.
Quite the opposite: I love sports. I’ve spent my life immersed in them. I know the rush of a comeback, the absurdity of a blockbuster trade, the poetry of a perfectly timed strike. Sports matter to me because they matter to millions of us. And that’s exactly why they deserve a closer look.
Because behind every wrist shot and spinning backfist, behind every logo and anthem, there are politics. Sports are not neutral. They’re business, statecraft, propaganda, spectacle — and also joy, memory, identity. They’re the one arena left where collective feeling still bursts out in the open. Which is why those in power work so hard to control what that feeling means, to police how it gets expressed, and to make sure it never threatens the structures that profit from it.
So no, I’m not here to drain the fun out of sports. I’m here to pull back the curtain. To show how the game on the ice, on the field, in the octagon, is always tied to the larger game of empire. You can be a fan and still see the politics. In fact, if you really love sports, you can’t afford not to.
Why Sports Matter More Than Politics
If you want to understand why people care more about the Edmonton Oilers than they do about their local MP, start with the simple fact that one offers them a story and the other offers them nothing. Politics, at least as it’s practiced in North America, is bureaucratic theater: scripted debates, empty gestures, and carefully managed outrage. Most of it is designed not to move people, but to pacify them. Sports, by contrast, still know how to make you feel something real.
When Connor McDavid dangles through an entire defense or Leon Draisaitl hammers in a power play goal, it’s not just a tally on a scoresheet. It’s an eruption — strangers hugging, entire bars roaring, a city vibrating in unison.
When a UFC underdog lands a knockout punch, it’s an instant legend, replayed a million times, folded into the collective imagination of everyone watching. When the Champions League anthem echoes in a stadium before the final, it’s goosebumps, tears, and a sense that this moment matters.
And that’s the point: it matters. Sports matter in a way that politics, as it’s been stripped of meaning, no longer does. Ask the average person to name the last five parliamentary bills debated in their country, and you’ll get a blank stare.
Ask them to name the last five playoff collapses or championship wins, and they can tell you where they were when it happened. Sports live in memory because they demand emotion. They’re not about policy; they’re about identity, pride, belonging, and heartbreak.
This is why it’s wrong to dismiss sports as “just games.” They’re not trivial pastimes — they’re the emotional infrastructure of everyday life. They are the closest thing many people have to ritual, to collective meaning, to something larger than themselves. In a stagnant, dead-end political culture, sports are one of the last places where people can still feel together.
Consider how fans talk about their teams. They say we won or we lost even though they never stepped on the ice or the field. That little word — we — is everything. It turns an individual spectator into part of a collective body. It creates an emotional stake in something bigger. And in an era when so many people feel powerless, invisible, or atomized, that feeling of we is intoxicating.
This is also why the stakes of sports feel so high. A playoff run isn’t just about hockey or basketball. It’s about civic pride, about a city proving it matters, about a region standing tall against rivals. When Montreal beats Toronto, it’s not just two teams on the ice; it’s centuries of cultural rivalry being played out in three periods. When Argentina wins the World Cup, it’s national catharsis, a story of survival and triumph that transcends the game itself.
Sports compress all of this into a form that’s legible, emotional, and easy to invest in. That’s why people remember miraculous comebacks and devastating collapses long after they’ve forgotten what legislation was passed in the same year. Sports are how people process the highs and lows of life when politics has nothing to offer them but technocracy and disappointment.
But here’s the catch: the reason people throw themselves so fully into sports isn’t just because they’re fun to watch. It’s because the rest of our culture has collapsed. Work is joyless. Politics is meaningless. Religion has withered. Community has been gutted. Sports fill that vacuum. They are memory, identity, and myth all at once. They are where people rehearse feelings of pride and belonging in a world that otherwise feels hollow.
And this is why sports matter more than politics. They aren’t just entertainment — they’re the terrain where emotions that no longer fit anywhere else get to live. The stadium, the rink, the octagon: these are the new cathedrals of collective life. And like cathedrals, they’re not innocent. They’re built on land, on labor, on power. They’re shaped by ownership and capital, even as they provide real meaning for the people who gather there.
So when someone says sports are apolitical, that’s the real myth. Sports are where politics happens when politics itself has stopped working. They are the site where pride, pain, anger, and hope get expressed, managed, and sold back to us. Which means if we really want to understand the culture we live in, we can’t afford to shrug off sports as “just games.” They’re not games — they’re grammar. They’re how we tell the story of who we are when everything else has gone quiet.
The Missing Left Critique
If sports are where our emotions live, then sports media is the filter that decides what those emotions are allowed to mean. And in North America, that filter is broken. On one side you have the liberal media types who pat themselves on the back for every rainbow decal or “heritage night,” treating symbolic gestures like moral revolutions.
On the other, you have the hardened neoliberal model: bowl games sponsored by weapons contractors, military flyovers before kickoff, endless ads for oil companies and banks. One side sells you empty virtue. The other sells you power as normal. Neither asks why things are the way they are.
Take a look at the coverage around Pride Nights in hockey. The conversation never goes beyond who wore the jersey and who didn’t. Pundits moralize over “values” while ignoring the fact that the arena itself is built on stolen Indigenous land, financed by public money, and surrounded by neighborhoods gutted by gentrification. In other words: the team’s politics aren’t contained in a rainbow patch, they’re baked into the concrete beneath the rink. But that critique never makes it to air, because the media’s job isn’t to expose contradictions — it’s to manage them.
Or look at the other flavor: the ‘apolitical’ branding of major American leagues. The NFL markets itself as family-friendly entertainment while partnering with corporate sponsors like Budweiser, and regularly featuring military flyovers and tributes arranged in coordination with the U.S. Department of Defense.
The NHL slaps “Hockey is for Everyone” on the boards while paying players starvation wages in minor leagues. SportsCenter will tell you which team leads in mindfulness, inclusion, or “diversity initiatives,” but you’ll never hear about the wage theft in combat sports or the extractive land deals behind new stadiums.
This is why I say there is no real left sports media in North America. There are plenty of voices, plenty of shows, plenty of fan-driven communities, but none that dig into the ownership structures, the political economy, the settler colonial mythmaking that define the games we watch. Compare that to other parts of the world.
In Europe, there are radical sports culture podcasts that openly dissect the politics of ownership and organizing. In South America, anarchist supporter groups put out zines that link their clubs to broader struggles against fascism and exploitation. Fans don’t just consume the game; they contest it. They understand that the stadium is a political space.
Here, we get pundits like Steve Dangle — a guy who built an empire out of yelling into a webcam about how the Leafs hurt his feelings. I don’t say that to pick on him personally. He’s good at what he does. But what he does is catharsis, not critique.
He takes fan frustration and loops it back into a cycle that benefits team owners, sponsors, and networks. He’s not unique; he’s the model. Sports media in North America is less about analysis and more about managing discontent — offering a release valve so fans can vent without ever demanding structural change.
That release valve is the perfect neoliberal product. It keeps fans invested, it keeps sponsors happy, and it keeps politics out of the frame. Which is exactly why I want to do something different. I’m not interested in being the left-wing version of a rant channel, just flipping the jerseys but keeping the format. I’m not here to moralize over who clapped, who booed, or who wore what patch on their sleeve. I want to ask the harder questions: what is the system clapping for, and why?
Because sports don’t just reflect culture — they shape it. They naturalize militarism, they launder corporate reputations, they enforce settler myths, and they package all of it as entertainment. And unless someone names that process, fans are left yelling into the void, shadowboxing with symptoms instead of seeing the cause.
So that’s the gap I want to fill. I’m not against fans. I’m not against joy. I’m not against catharsis. But I’m not satisfied with it either. I want to trace frustration back to structures — to show that the anger fans feel at a team’s collapse, or at a league’s hypocrisy, isn’t just bad luck or bad leadership. It’s the product of systems that were never designed to give us anything else.
That’s the missing left critique. Not a release valve. Not a sermon. But an attempt to connect the joy and heartbreak of sports to the material conditions that produce them. Because if sports are the cultural grammar of our time, then we need to learn how to read them properly — not as distractions, but as the battlegrounds where empire plays out in real time.
Sports as Statecraft & Propaganda
If you want to see how sports are tied up with state power, you don’t need to look any further than Edmonton. The new arena, Rogers Place, was sold as progress — a sleek temple to hockey, a revitalization project for the city’s core. But what it really represented was a $613.7 million publicly subsidized project, framed as civic renewal while functioning as a corporate fortress for billionaire ownership.
The city leaned heavily on public resources — Community Revitalization Levies, ticket surcharges, lease revenues — to bankroll a space that directly enriched private owners.
Meanwhile, critics have shown how Rogers Place accelerated gentrification and displacement in surrounding neighborhoods, contributing to Edmonton’s worsening housing crisis.
Scholars have gone further, describing the project as part of a larger pattern of settler-colonial urbanism, where public space and Indigenous land are reshaped into monuments to capital under the guise of community.
And yet when the ribbon was cut, the narrative wasn’t about extraction or erasure. It was about “bringing the community together.”
That’s how sports function as statecraft. They launder exploitation into civic pride. An arena isn’t just a building; it’s a performance of power. Political leaders and owners pose as benevolent providers of culture, while in reality they shift public resources upward, lock in debt, and stamp over Indigenous sovereignty. The hockey game is just the product. The arena is the real deal: a monument to the fusion of capital, politics, and spectacle.
And when fans push back, even in small ways, the media works overtime to police what counts as “acceptable.” A crowd boos a politician during a pregame ceremony — suddenly they’re “classless.”
A player refuses to wear a themed jersey — the story is spun as personal drama, stripped of any structural context. Fans toss a jersey on the ice — it’s treated like vandalism or even a hate crime. Dissent is never read as dissent. It’s framed as bad manners.
This is deliberate. Sports are one of the last spaces where people gather en masse, where raw emotion bursts out in public. That energy can’t be allowed to spill beyond the script. So media normalize and neutralize it, making sure boos and jeers are seen as poor etiquette rather than resistance. The unwritten rule is clear: cheer when you’re told, clap for the branding exercise, and if you break character, you’ll be scolded until you fall back in line.
Meanwhile, the deeper injustices remain untouched. Labor exploitation is rampant across sports. Minor league hockey players and baseball prospects grind for poverty wages while ownership rakes in billions.
Combat sports churn through athletes’ bodies like disposable commodities, dangling the dream of a title shot while most fighters live paycheck to paycheck. College athletes in the U.S. generate fortunes for their schools and media partners while being denied fair pay for years. This is wage theft dressed up as entertainment.
Then there’s the settler mythmaking baked into sports culture. Teams and stadiums co-opt Indigenous imagery while ignoring Indigenous land rights. National anthems frame every game as a miniature exercise in patriotism. Military flyovers and “support the troops” nights turn sports into recruiting campaigns. The supposed “innocence” of the game is always overlaid with ritual performances of state power.
Corporate reputation-washing ties it all together. Oil companies buy ad space to present themselves as community champions. Weapons manufacturers sponsor halftime shows. Banks slap their logos on jerseys, stadium seats, and scoreboards. By embedding themselves in the spectacle, they borrow the joy and belonging that sports generate — and use those emotions to cleanse their image. Fans don’t cheer for fossil fuel firms or arms dealers, but when their logos flash during moments of victory, the association does its work.
This is why it’s not enough to say sports are “political.” They’re not just political — they’re propaganda. They’re how empire sells itself as fun, as pride, as belonging. The trick is that the feelings are real. The joy of a buzzer-beater or a comeback win isn’t fake. It’s ours. But the structures surrounding those moments — the stadium deals, the land theft, the branding campaigns — are designed to capture that joy and funnel it back into the machinery of power.
So when I say sports are statecraft, that’s what I mean. They’re not just games. They’re how empire shows its face in everyday life, draped in a jersey, holding a microphone, smiling for the cameras. And unless we learn to see through the spectacle, we’ll keep cheering for the very structures grinding us down.
Watch the Game, Know the Game
Sports will always be both. That’s the duplicity you can’t escape. They’re joy and propaganda, escapism and battleground, poetry and power play. The goal, the knockout punch, the last‑second buzzer-beater—those moments are pure, electric, human. But the structures around them—ownership, land deals, branding—are anything but innocent. Sports don’t just reflect empire. They’re one of empire’s favorite stages.
Nowhere will that duplicity be clearer than when the World Cup arrives on Canadian soil. On the surface, it’s pitched as a celebration of multiculturalism—a feel-good showcase of unity and global spirit.
But underneath the slogans, the machinery looks the same as always: governments undercut labor protections to fast-track construction; neighborhoods are reshaped into “fan districts”; corporations scrub their image with rainbow decals and greenwashed ad campaigns; and stadiums rise on territory where Indigenous claims were long disregarded. It will be empire dressed in confetti—progress overshadowing extraction.
Even now, human rights watchdogs warn of serious risks. The Sport & Rights Alliance and Amnesty International urge that host countries adhere to labor, immigration, and civil liberty standards—highlighting threats ranging from visa restrictions to crackdowns on dissent and marginalized communities.
But amid those risks, officials point to “inclusion” gestures as proof of progress. Vancouver, for example, signed a memorandum of understanding with Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations to co-plan and co-host World Cup matches.
On paper, it looks like a historic step toward Indigenous partnership in a mega-sports event. In practice, it risks becoming the same kind of reputation-washing we saw during the 2010 Olympics, when Vancouver wrapped itself in reconciliation rhetoric while Indigenous land defenders were criminalized and displacement accelerated. These agreements often serve less to redistribute power than to sanitize extraction with the language of partnership.
Most people will cheer. Some will grumble. Very few will name what they’re actually seeing. That’s why this work matters. Because you can love sports and hate the system that exploits them. You can be swept away by the beauty of the game—and still ask: who profits from this spectacle, and what stories are buried beneath the roar?
To dismiss sports as “just games” is a mistake. But so is pretending they’re only innocent fun. They are both—which is what makes them powerful, dangerous, and worth fighting over. That duplicity is why fans keep showing up, stadiums keep filling, and sponsors keep slapping logos on every available surface. Sports remain one of the few places where people still feel something real together—and because of that, they’re among the most contested cultural battlegrounds of our time.
So the call isn’t to turn away. The call is to watch differently. Watch the game—but know the game. Follow the poetry and skill, yes—but also follow the money, the land, the branding, the statecraft. See empire in the jersey, not just the player wearing it.
If nobody names what’s really happening, the lie wins by default. The spectacle goes unchallenged, and the emotions that make sports beautiful keep getting captured and sold back to us.
But if we call it what it is—if we trace the joy and heartbreak back to the structures behind them—then sports can become more than a release valve. They can help us understand who we are, how we’re controlled, and how we might break free.
The games will go on. The stadiums will roar. The question is: will we be watching with our eyes open?