Full bibliography

In this article, I pursue the ‘desperate athlete’—a familiar figure for me, a basketball coach and trainer—by arguing serious organised team sport athletes are neo-indentured labourers by illustrating the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport. This article contributes the original analogy ‘indentured’ to the philosophy of sport which is a stronger claim than what other scholars have argued, and in turn provides the neo-indentured desperate athlete as a framework and mode of understanding and to make sense of how serious organised team sport athletes are constructed, explained by way of Foucauldian concepts of objectification, discursive power relations and bio-power. It is an effort to introduce the original concept of the neo-indentured ‘desperate athlete’ and develop that figure as an important subject deserving of scholarly inquiry into the philosophy of discipline in team sport. To ignore the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport would be an example of sport discourse dismissing the inconvenient; so too would be ignoring the ‘desperate athlete’.