The End of Sport

Johanna and Nathan are joined by Dionne Koller, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore, to discuss her fascinating new paper "Identifying Youth Sport." The conversation explores the historical development and particularities of the US youth sport system, and the ways in which US youth sport can be theorized through a Marxian framework as a...

Nathan is joined by Joshua Myers, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University and author of Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition and  We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989, to talk about Cedric Robinson, racial capitalism, and how we cannot understand football without grappling with intertwined histories of racial...

In this catch up episode, Nathan, Johanna, and Derek talk about what they have been up to for the past six months before diving into some of the latest issues in sport and society, including the downfall of Twitter, the NLRB regional office in Los Angeles’ ruling that USC, the PAC-12, and NCAA are joint employers of revenue-generating football and basketball players (and it’s direction to pursue u...

In the newest episode of our EOS Panels series, Johanna and Nathan talk to Tyler Shipley and Nikhil Pal Singh about what imperialism is, why it is a crucial concept for our understanding of the world system today, and how imperialism advances and is advanced through capitalist sport.  Tyler A. Shipley is a Professor of Society, Culture and Commerce in the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber Co...

In this third episode of our End of Sport Panels series, Johanna and Derek sit down with Amanda Mull, Steven Salaita, and Kevin Gannon to explore how some of our favorite anti-racist/anti-capitalist critics, folks whose focus in their work is not on sport, come to engage with sport and experience fandom. The conversation explores what the panelists get out of their engagements with racial capitali...

In this second episode of the End of Sport Panels series, Johanna and Derek are joined by current and former college athletes to discuss the changing dynamics of the US college sports system and to explore how they would change college sport if they could. Kaiya McCullough is a former UCLA and Washington Spirit soccer player, Chairwoman of the Anti Racist Soccer Club, and Athlete Ally Ambassador....

This special 100th episode of the show marks the beginning of a new series on The End of Sport: EOS Panels. The EOS Panels are meant to capture the very best of the academic conference panel--free-flowing discussion among experts on a common theme, but without the cursed academic conference paywall that inhibits access. In the first of this series, we had the pleasure of being joined by Louis Moor...

This episode is quite different from our normal releases – rather than an interview or monologue about harm in contemporary sport, we are actually publishing a panel session on the importance of public sports scholarship, particularly in the context of a global pandemic. This episode was recorded in Montreal on April 22, 2022 at the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of...

SB Nation writer Ben Natan joins Nathan to discuss the NFL Draft, how it suppresses wages, and the ways in which the process generally dehumanizes and exploits players. The conversation also roves into some current issues in college sports, including a potential partnership between universities and the military to subsidize scholarships in exchange for service and the newest moral panic around NIL...

Well, it's been a minute! In this episode of The End of Sport, Nathan, Johanna, and Derek catch up on some recent cases of harm in sport, including a preview of our latest piece for The Guardian on how many of our esteemed institutions of higher education are *refusing* to pay entirely permissible academic bonuses for campus athletic workers, abuse and harm in Gymnastics Canada, and the recent put...

In this catch up episode, Johanna, Nathan and Derek sit down to talk about recent developments in the world of capitalist sport, including the failures of the UCLA athletic department to protect gymnasts from targeted racism (and the brilliant social media mobilization to shed light on it), the racist culture in the Iowa football program, and (at long last) we offer some of our critical thoughts o...

In this episode, Johanna and Derek sit down with Karleigh Chardonnay Webb to talk about the transphobic moral panic surrounding Lia Thomas, exclusionary practices and discourses of ‘fairness’ and ‘competition’ in capitalist sport, and how allies and put in the work to make sport an inclusive space for trans folks.   Karleigh Chardonnay Webb has been working as a sports journalist including for ESP...

In this episode, Johanna, Derek, and Nathan catch up on the last week of sports and politics. Of course, it isn't really your typical 'catch up' on the week of sports podcast. Tune in as we discuss the normalization of the pandemic and the role that sport plays in it, the so-called 'Freedom Convoy' in Canada, and the illogic of the anti-trans movement in sport (and the trend of seeking ally ship w...

In this rather searing episode, Derek and Nathan sit down with former San Francisco 49er and Wisconsin Badger Chris Borland to discuss the football industrial complex. Chris explains why he decided to retire at the very beginning of an exceptionally promising NFL career, how the Care Consortium is profoundly understating the danger of football in concussion research, and what makes college footbal...

On this episode of The End of Sport, Johanna and Nathan sit down with Kim Shore for the first part of a two-part episode to talk about different forms of abuse that persist in Canadian gymnastics as well as how we as fans, parents, and onlookers can prepare for it and prevent it. Kim Shore is a certified Corporate Leadership Coach, Workshop Facilitator, former member of the Gymnastics Canada Board...

In this episode, all three hosts are joined by University of Oregon Assistant Professor Courtney M. Cox for a wide-ranging conversation about the ethics of the sports industry. Courtney interrogates the ever-proliferating surveillance practices in the world of sport and the ways they are connected to exploitation and harm for athletic workers. She also dives into her fascinating experiences inside...

Johanna, Nathan, and Derek are joined by Johnny Stanton, a Cleveland Browns fullback and Athlete Ally ambassador, to discuss the politics of football, from gender and sexuality in the locker room, to race-norming in the concussion settlement, and exploitation at the college level. We also engage the always difficult topic of what it is like to perform a job that comes with such exceptional physica...

On this very special episode, Johanna and Nathan are joined by the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Jennifer Abruzzo to discuss her September 29 memo entitled “Statutory Rights of Players at Academic Institutions (Student-Athletes) Under the National Labor Relations Act.” That memo has been widely interpreted as open season for the organizing of campus athletic workers,...

In this episode, all three hosts sit down to discuss where athletic labor fits in the flurry of labor action that has been called "#striketober." Among other things, we delve into the place of athletes in the labor movement as a whole, the vaccine mandate debates in the context of sport, and concussion consensus statements in relation to the occupational health and safety conditions of athletic la...

In this episode we are joined by former minor league baseball player and executive director of Advocates for Minor Leaguers Harry Marino to discuss the unconscionable working and living conditions minor league baseball players are subjected to. We discuss the impact of the pandemic on minor league baseball, recent developments around housing, and how Advocates for Minor Leaguers are trying to orga...

In this episode, Nathan draws from a recent discussion at the American Studies Association to lay out his conception of the coercive conditions that frame participation and resistance in college sport. Derek and Johanna respond with their own meditations on the future of college sport and the challenges that continue to confront campus athletic workers. Check out our recent Guardian piece on why N...

Johanna and Nathan are joined by Max Alvarez, editor-in-chief of The Real News and host of the Working People podcast, to break down the state of the labor movement and class warfare in the United States. Max walks us through the intricacies of some of the most prominent strikes this month and situates them within political economic developments in recent US history. He also draws on his experienc...

In this week’s episode, Nathan and Derek are joined by Citations Needed co-host Adam H. Johnson to talk about sports media within the broader landscape of US media commodity spectacle, problems within the exploitative NCAA athletic system and the complicity of sports media, pandemic sport, and, of course, how Adam reconciles all of these problems within the context of his own fandom.   Adam H. Joh...

In this episode, Johanna and Nathan interview one of our favorite critical sports journalists,  Britni de la Cretaz, about their tireless work spotlighting trans and non-binary athletes and critiquing sporting discrimination. They have written for a phenomenal array of outlets, including the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and many more, and have a co-au...

In this episode, Johanna and Nathan are joined by historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique to issue blistering critiques about how universities are full-fledged corporations whose number 1 aim is to exploit the labor of graduate students, all faculty (not just contingent ones), and athletic workers—as well as students’ loans—to earn profits. After walking us through his research on how the British empire...