Exploring the Missing Link Between the Concussion “Crisis” and Labor Politics in Professional Sports

Abstract

This study focuses on connections between labor struggles in professional sports and the epidemic of concussions among athletes, specifically in the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL). Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we explain how popular media presents concussions in ways that are informative but often avoid a more politicized discussion of the athlete as a manual worker whose body succumbs to use and abuse of sport. We found two recurring themes in the North American popular press, including a tendency to (1) rely on a trope of “millionaires-versus-billionaires” to explain (and minimize) recent labor lockouts in the NFL and NHL and (2) shift focus on league deniability to athletes’ self-responsibility in the concussion “crisis.” Despite the urgency in which sports concussions and brain injuries have been reported in recent years, the two narratives work to discourage readers from recognizing how such health issues arise under specific relations of production, and that an athlete is a particular type of worker whose body is subjected to decline and disposability like so many other bodies under late capitalism. As we argue, working conditions are inseparable from concussions in professional sports, a phenomenon that requires further development within the popular press.