Playing through Pain

Approx. 256 pp., 6.125 x 9.25

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8587-8
Published: May 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8586-1
Published: May 2025

Paperback Available May 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

Buy this Book

To purchase online via an independent bookstore, visit Bookshop.org

For many fans and casual observers, professional sports and violence are deeply connected. Violence on the field has real consequences for players, notably in the form of life-altering injuries from concussions. Off the field, in the last several decades, scores of athletes have committed violent acts, from domestic abuse and sexual assault to animal abuse and murder. Beyond athletes, sport also serves as a site of political and structural violence, from the displacement and hyperpolicing of everyday people for mega-events to the “sportswashing” of environmentally harmful industries.

Daniel Sailofsky examines the endemic violence in professional sports and argues that—while related to masculinity, misogyny, and individual factors like alcohol consumption and gambling—it is most intimately tied to capitalism and to capitalist modes of consumption and profit. Sailofsky explains how capitalism creates the conditions for violence to thrive and uncovers how sports leaders—coaches, league officials, and team owners—obfuscate these relationships to avoid accountability.

From minor league baseball exploitation to spectator hooliganism, Sailofsky shows the connections between the business of sports and violence, but also, more importantly, he imagines new forms of sport that are not places of harm.

About the Author

Daniel Sailofsky is assistant professor of kinesiology and physical education at the University of Toronto.
For more information about Daniel Sailofsky, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A detailed examination of the problems in sport caused by capitalism. Sailofsky takes the violence of capitalism as a central point around which to build his argument and continuously argues for a different form of sport in a socialist future. An important contribution to a field that seldom uses Marxist analysis, this is an approachable and engaging study, one that is perfect for scholars and students alike."—Munene Mwaniki, Western Carolina University

"Sailofsky examines the intersections of capitalism, violence, and professional and elite sports, placing capitalism as the culprit in creating violence and injury on the field and contributing to off-the-field domestic and sexual violence. Broadly appealing to many disciplines, Playing through Pain is an engaging study of how capitalism sours sports."—Billy Hawkins, University of Houston