Abstract
The resources placed into the participation in and consumption of sport seem to continually rise. From record-high ticket prices (Bushnell, 2025) to $15USD beers to rapidly escalating television package rights fees, there’s a massive amount of sunk cost in sports and services ancillary to them. To wit, a $13 train ride to New Jersey’s MetLife stadium will balloon to $150 when the 2026 FIFA World Cup is occurring there. Subsumed within all of these costs is the tacit belief within them: all of this investment must be worth it. To quote legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, “the price of victory is high, but so are the rewards.”
And yet the level of investment sport often incurs is far beyond the financial aspects. Sport is often organized around visibility: the game, the result, the performance, the spectacle. Yet what remains less visible and less examined are the human costs that make sport possible. Beneath the public drama of competition lie quieter communicative processes of labor, care, injury, resilience, and identity negotiation. From youth sport to elite performance to life after retirement, sport is sustained by relationships and systems demanding emotional investment, physical sacrifice, and ongoing communicative labor. There are many outstanding pieces in this issue, but within the first half-dozen of them you will witness a variety of different angles for exploring the cost of participation in (and work within) the sporting sphere.
This issue turns attention toward those less visible dimensions, asking not simply what sport produces, but what sport requires (and takes) from the people inhabiting it. There are pieces regarding concussions (Hartman, 2026; Lappin et al., 2026) intermingled with pieces about mental health (Zengaro & Carmack, 2026) and resilience (Feder, 2026). How much does sport ask of us? Consider some of these article titles, including Manley et al. (2026) noting that sport-based data work is “an incredibly painstaking, time taking domain to work in” (p. TBD) or Zengaro and Carmack’s (2026) title: “it’s your whole life” (p. TBD).
Taken together, the articles at the beginning of this issue illuminate the human infrastructure of sport across multiple stages of the athletic lifecycle. They examine how parents and children communicate about concussion risk, how sport media can responsibly shape public understanding of injury, how athletes and coaches co-construct resilience and participation in everyday interaction, and how sport labor extends beyond the field into the often-unseen work of analysts and support personnel. Just as importantly, this collection of works confronts the enduring question of identity and wellbeing after sport, exploring how former athletes navigate mental health and identity once elite performance no longer structures their daily lives. Clearly, sport is not only a site of competition and entertainment, but also a site of vulnerability, care, and consequence, with communication scholarship shaping not only performance, but survival, recovery, and meaning.
For sport communication scholars, this shift in focus is significant. At a moment when sport is increasingly commercialized, mediatized, and accelerated, the physical and emotional pressures to perform have intensified across the sporting ecosystem. Understanding communication within sport subsequently requires understanding the practices through which people endure, resist, and make sense of those pressures. In foregrounding these dynamics, the opening pieces in this issue contribute to a growing recognition that the most important questions in sport may not be about winning or losing, but about wellbeing, responsibility, and what remains when the game is over. I hope you find them as insightful as I have, with the remainder of the issue offering a wide buffet of topics, national foci, and epistemologies that you have grown to expect in Communication & Sport.