Aristotle considered man to be political by nature. The sports’ governing bodies and modern nation-states are coercing him to be apolitical. The system has always asked sportsmen to be just one thing: a representative of the nation or a company, a symbol, a jersey, and nothing else. Not a citizen who watches what his government does and has something to say about it. Just an athlete. Stay in your lane. Perform. Be quiet.
Contrary to how sports are being sold and presented, it has never been a neutral venue. It has always been political, used by rulers, states, private companies, and institutions. A means, used by these actors, to project their power over another (in case of grand sporting events like the Olympics or World Cups) and serve the agendas that have nothing to do with the bat or ball.
Nothing from outside the world is disconnected from the world inside the stadium or the players’ social life. Everything is interconnected. The moment a sportsman steps onto that field, he is already inside a political structure. He did not choose that. It was built around him. And yet the same system that uses him politically turns around and tells him he has no right to speak politically.
This is blatant hypocrisy. To suppress a sportsman's political expression is not discipline. It is the immoral reduction of a human being to one aspect of his collective self, identity. And that, at the very least, is cruelty.
Politics involves making and enforcing decisions for a community in a way that gives different voices and interests a chance to be heard. It is the process of determining how to address issues that require collective choices.
Politics is a pervasive phenomenon that touches every aspect of our lives. Because political ‘authority’ potentially touches upon every aspect of human life. Even the act of setting limits to it, i.e., marking out spheres of personal freedom where political decisions cease to intrude, is itself considered a political act.
Sports, if we look at them in isolation, serve two purposes. First, it is the expression of competitiveness and the competition of excellence between athletes. The specific nature of a sport dictates the type of excellence showcased; for example, rule changes in American football intentionally shifted the focus to show that speed was more important than strength.
In other contexts, such as gymnastics or fencing, sport is used to strengthen and beautify the body according to a classical model rather than focusing solely on brute force. The end goal of every activity in sports is mostly to entertain the audience or to show that they are physically better than others.
In national sports, one nation competes with another just to show that they are better than the other.
This is how sports actually originated. In ancient Egyptian and Greek cultures, sports were part of their religious beliefs and rituals. For example, their sporting contests often took the form of funeral games intended to give pleasure to the souls of the deceased and serve as a "key factor in maintaining order" by honouring preceding generations.
In the context where the media and the politicians themselves seem to be in a bromance with each other, instead of checking on each other's misuse of their powers, players or artists are the alternatives who can serve as an instrument of counter-discourse in society
In Roman Colosseum culture, gladiators fought just to showcase their strength over another. On a global level, major countries hold each other's necks to host a global sporting event.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics are one of the examples of the propaganda platforms that countries use, which showcased the Nazi "Aryan superiority." Cricket has always been used as a diplomatic strategy between South Asian nations, particularly India and Pakistan.
The term cricket diplomacy was coined by General Zia in 1987 when he attended a test match in Jaipur. This was at a time when tensions between the two neighbours were very high. Cricket was used as an excuse to meet with Indian government officials in the hope of laying a foundation for reducing misunderstandings. In this era of soft power, cricket is undoubtedly employed as a public diplomacy weapon.
And the second purpose of sports, which is popularly known, has been its output of entertainment. Entertainment has always been political. Entertainment in the context of art, music, films, and any kind of sports.
Because the loss, pain, pleasure, or excitement that a citizen or a fan of any sport gets somehow imbues a certain emotion in him that influences his choices or makes him numb to the political problems that are around him.
It defines the norms of success, failure, and even virtues in a society. All of these values contribute to political consciousness.
We have seen it throughout the eras of kingships and today in democracies, that rulers use these games to distract people from satisfying their Maslowian needs.
As early as 1618, King James I saw sports as essential because they made the common and meaner sort of people more physically able for war. Theodore Roosevelt encouraged sports to develop what he called virile, masterful qualities necessary for a nation poised to conquer.
During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson insisted that college sports continue as a real contribution to national defence. On the plantation, owners actively promoted sports among slaves to direct their energies and create what Frederick Douglass called a thoughtless and contented slave.
The structure of sports itself, the factory model behind American football, for instance, was designed to teach order and obedience. Robert Lipsyte has described it as an infrastructure that acts to contain our energies, divert our passions, and socialise us for work, war, or depression.
Games have always been a means, a tool, a political tool, to achieve the purposes of the ruling parties. To ask a sportsman to stay out of politics while playing inside a system that was always political is, at the very least, a contradiction.
Now let’s understand at the individual level of this system, i.e., the player. Every individual has multiple shades of their identity.
Amartya Sen argues that every real human being belongs to many different groups through their birth, associations, and choices, and replacing this richness with the formulaic narrowness of a single category is both intellectually and ethically flawed.
There are a lot of aspects which shape that person, in addition to his being a representative of the nation in sports. Amartya Sen calls this the solitarist approach to human identity, seeing human beings as members of exactly one group, which he describes as a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world.
To label a sportsperson's identity as only one part of what makes the person what he is is a robbery of his selfhood. Sen even draws on Karl Marx's criticism of seeing individuals only as workers while ignoring their diversities as human beings.
Our mind is not halved by a horizon. To restrict a sportsman from expressing his beliefs is to participate in the very violence of illusion that Sen argues threatens our shared humanity.
And history has already judged what happens when this suppression is imposed. In the 1968 Olympics, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists during the medal presentation.
The U.S. Olympic Committee suspended them two days later. The suspension was a coercive reduction of them from Black men fighting systemic discrimination to mere athletes who must remain silent representatives of a nation.
Today, what was met with immediate backlash is now taught as a legendary act of courage and a famous gesture of resistance. Australian Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights pin in solidarity. History did not vindicate the committee. It vindicated Smith and Carlos.
The likes of Naseem Shah, Usman Khawaja, and all the sportspersons around the world who are punished for expressing their views on life around them are the victims of this hypocritical system, which uses them as tools for their political ends.
And by extension, the real victims are the laypersons. If the sport itself is completely political, if the person playing and watching the sport cannot be separated from politics, then it is unfair and illogical to impose the condition on the player to not express his political views or be political.
The views can be agreed with or disagreed with by the listener. It can be critiqued by the populace if found crossing a red line. But not allowing them to be uttered makes it a forceful imprisonment of the voices and identities of these athletes.
Especially in the context where the media and the politicians themselves seem to be in a bromance with each other, instead of checking on each other's misuse of their powers, players or artists are the alternatives who can serve as an instrument of counter-discourse in society.