Introduction: Sport and Protest

Abstract

On the 30th January 2016, the news agency Reuters carried a story about a Greek second division football match between AEL Larissa and Acharnaikos in the Thessalian city of Larissa. The match was about to begin when all 22 players sat down on the pitch. They, along with the two clubs’ coaches and substitute players, remained seated while the following announcement was read out over the public address system: ‘The administration of AEL, the coaches and the players will observe two minutes of silence just after the start of the match in memory of the hundreds of children who continue to lose their lives every day in the Aegean due to the brutal indifference of the EU and Turkey. The players of AEL will protest by sitting down for two minutes in an effort to drive the authorities to mobilise all those who seem to have been desensitised to the heinous crimes that are being perpetrated in the Aegean’ (Reuters 2016). This incident suggests at least two things: first, that, even in the postmodern twenty-first-century sports, people can recognize that there are more important things in the world than sport and, second, that sport remains—indeed, given the vast swathes of mass media now given over to sport, it is perhaps more than ever—a significant forum for political protest. Some of this protest, as on that day in Greece, uses sport as a platform upon which to highlight an issue outside of the immediate purview of sport. Equally, some protest is levelled at the institutions of sport itself and the governance thereof.