Commercialization processes within Swedish child and youth sport – a Deleuzioguttarian perspective

Abstract

In the Nordic countries sport has a particular connection to civic society, and this is reflected in the Nordic governments ‘sport for all’ policies. The region also includes large voluntary non-profit sport organizations with an implicit monopoly on competitive sport. During the last decade scholars in Sweden have noted that commercial entrepreneurs have emerged in the child and youth sports landscape. However, empirical research on this phenomenon is scarce. Hence, in this article the aim is to map different commercial businesses and the services they offer on their websites. We make use of a Deleuzioguttarian inspired theory and method and a post-qualitative research practice, which is informed by an ontological (re)turn to realism(s) in social theory. We present four different commercial de-territorialization processes and discuss how they affect the Swedish Sport Confederation in different ways.

Keywords:

• Child and youth sports
• commercialization entrepreneurialization
• desire
• de-territorialization

Introduction

The Nordic countries are regarded as having a special model of social, political and economic relations, which is also reflected in the relation between sport and civic society. The society model has been highlighted as having social features that are based on a strong welfare state with numerous civic society organizations. In sport, this model is associated with the Nordic governments’ ‘sport for all’ policies, which include national networks of non-profit sport clubs and associations (Giulianotti et al. 2019). It is also associated with an implicit monopoly on organized competitive sport and significant governmental involvement (Bergsgard and Norberg 2010). Recently, there have been speculations that the Nordic model is losing ground due to neoliberal and other global policy influences (Giulianotti et al. 2019). One of these speculations regards the acknowledged yet rarely empirically researched trend of the emergence of commercial entrepreneurs in the Swedish child and youth sports landscape (Norberg and Redelius 2012; Carlsson and Hedenborg 2013; Wagnsson and Augustsson 2015). This commercial entrepreneurial process could be argued as being part of the neoliberal policy influence highlighted by Giulianotti et al. (2019). With an increasing intensity since the mid-1980s, the Western world has changed from an industrial economy into an entrepreneurial, knowledge-based economy that promotes the needs of entrepreneurs and small scale businesses (Marttila 2013; Brown 2015; Bröckling 2016). Inspired by Deleuzioguttarian insights into how change occurs, the aim of the article is to map different commercial businesses and the services they offer on their websites and in this way generate knowledge about this new and emerging landscape of commercial child and youth sports. Even though the focus is on Sweden and Swedish child and youth sports, insights into how commercial interests are emerging in this landscape could also be useful in other contexts.

Background

The commercial entrepreneurialization of child and youth sports

Turning our attention to child and youth sport, research on the influence of commercial interests is scarce in both an international and a Swedish context. International studies of the commercialization of child and youth sports have tended to focus on the outsourcing of health and physical education. For example, attention has been paid to how physical education curriculum work has been outsourced to market alternatives and how this has affected physical education in Western schools (Macdonald, Hay, and Williams 2008; Griggs 2010; Evans 2014 Powell 2015; Parnell et al. 2017; Sperka and Enright 2018). Within this research field there has been a focus on mapping the landscape of outsourcing services (e.g. Mangione et al. 2020; Petrie et al. 2014). Petrie et al. see four strands dominating in New Zeeland. Businesses offering development of movement skills was the most occurring, then businesses offering personal health and physical development, the third was businesses offering safety and risk management in relation to personal health and physical development, the fourth strand was linked to other curricular achievement aims.There has also been a general interest in how commercialization has changed more or less every aspect of [men’s] sport (e.g. Peterson 1989; Andrews 2004; Gruneau 2017).

Few scholars have explored how commercialization impacts child and youth sports. One exception is Coakley (2010), who provides a general description of how commercial entrepreneurs affected youth sports in the US. He argues that cuts in the public budget during the 1980s made it impossible to maintain public youth programmes, which paved the way for commercial entrepreneurs to enter the child and youth sports landscape. In order to secure a year-round salary they convinced parents and young athletes of the necessity of specialization to make it to the elite level. This led to year-round activities and participation and also annual membership payment. In this case, commercialization, professionalization and specialization went hand in hand.

The Swedish sport model and the Nordic sport models have not been targeted by public budget cuts such as those in the US (Giulianotti et al. 2019). Rather, the opposite is the case. In the last decade the Swedish government has increased its funding. In 2018, the non-profit Swedish Sports Confederation (SSC) received 235 million USD in funding from the state and the municipalities in which the local non-profit clubs were located. The largest sum of 122 million USD was for ‘Activities of a common nature within the sports movement and grants for local children and youth activities’ (The Swedish Research Council for Sport Science 2018, p. 13). This budget post includes the state activity support (LOK-stöd) that non-profit clubs can receive for arranging activities for children and youth between the ages of 7–25 (The Swedish Research Council for Sport Science 2018). However, even though non-profit clubs are funded by the government, it does not mean that children’s participation in sport is free. The clubs usually charge a membership fee and training costs that need to be paid annually. The Swedish sport model has proved to be influential, given that almost 90 per cent of all children are or have been involved in a sports club at some time during their upbringing (Thedin Jakobsson 2015). On the other hand, many children drop out of sport at an early age, and sport participation is stratified in relation to socio-economic conditions.

In exchange for funds, the state anticipates that SSC and non-profit clubs will contribute to the promotion of public health, provide meaningful leisure time activities and promote democratic processes such as equality, integration and participation. Recently, the government agreed that the funding should support Sweden’s international competition standard, with the proviso that SSC remained a voluntary, independent and democratically popular movement (The Swedish Research Council for Sport Science 2018). Perhaps due to SSC’s historically strong foundation in Swedish society, the sports arranged by the different special sport federations (SSF) and their non-profit clubs are often the only way in which organized competitive sport can be carried out in Sweden. One argument, advanced by Carlsson and Lindfelt (2010), as to why this sport model has been successful and not attracted market forces is that it has been recognized as more playful in nature with a strong connection to idealism, voluntarism and leisure, rather than professional sport. The authors also argue that this picture is now changing, especially as different professional interests and commercial actors have started to establish themselves in the Swedish sport landscape and entered the Nordic sport field in a more advanced degree (Carlsson and Lindfelt 2010). One of these commercial actors that have been acknowledged by Swedish sport scholars are commercial entrepreneurs selling sport services within the child and youth sports landscape (Norberg and Redelius 2012, Carlsson and Hedenborg 2013).

One of the factors behind this change could be the transformation that the Western world’s economy in general, and the Swedish economy in particular, has undergone as part of advanced capitalism. Scholars argue that the Western world has become a knowledge-based economy, where entrepreneurial skills are deemed vital in order to increase the chance of employment or to start new businesses (Marttila 2013; Brown 2015; Bröckling 2016). This entrepreneurial process in Swedish child and youth sport has not been studied to any great extent, although Cardell (2009) and Norberg and Redelius (2012) were among the first to highlight this new phenomenon in the Swedish sport landscape. Cardell (2009) studied how a large sport camp in Sweden tried to use child and youth sports to create long-term business loyalty to its parent company. The authors also illuminated how different actors benefit from these sport camps, for example by providing extra jobs in the community and activities for children and youth.

The reflections of Norberg and Redelius (2012) relate to the kind of future challenges that SSC might face, such as commercial child and youth practices. Taken to the extreme, they argue that the emergence of commercial entrepreneurs implies that Swedish sports clubs are unable to deliver the joyful sport for all that is their hallmark. They also point out that commercial sport entrepreneurs focus on training rather than competition, provide opportunities for children to try out different sports instead of specialization, and seem to welcome all children regardless of their earlier experiences of sport.

In relation to this, when interviewing and surveying the guardians of children who had participated in commercial alternatives, Wagnsson and Augustsson (2015) showed how the participation/membership fees for non-profit clubs had risen. Almost half of the parents involved in the study highlighted that they felt too much engagement and work was requested by the non-profit clubs, which they did not always have time for. The guardians also indicated that their children might be able to develop more in the commercial alternatives than in the non-profit clubs and thereby reach their goals. Another aspect that was highlighted was that commercial alternatives could activate children during the school holidays when parents needed to work and non-profit clubs had a break in their activities. Most of the guardians in the study were positive about the development of commercial child and youth sports in Sweden. At the same time, they saw a risk that some children could be left out of sport due to the higher prices of the commercial entrepreneurs and their competition with non-profit alternatives. The parents highlighted the importance of having both the non-profit landscape and the commercial landscape and thought that the commercial landscape would continue to blossom. However, the most prominent conclusion after reading Wagnsson and Augustsson’s (2015) study is the complexity of the emerging commercial landscape of Swedish child and youth sports, in that different commercial businesses seem to have different orientations.

In this article the aim is therefore to map different commercial businesses and the services they offer on their websites in order to untangle some of this complexity. The questions guiding this study are: What kind of services do commercial entrepreneurs in Sweden offer in relation to age, sex, distribution and price? By mapping the commercialization process we want to analyse and discuss how the process may transform Swedish child and youth sport.

Theoretical considerations

The collaboration between the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari from 1969 to 1991 has been influential in many areas of research, e.g. education and pedagogy (Taguchi and St. Pierre 2017), posthumanist studies (Braidotti 2013), social science (Hardt and Negri 2000) and, in a minor way, sport studies (Markula 2019). Although Markula (2019) has to some extent used a Deleuzioguttarian framework, studies interested in analyzing sport and society have often been inspired by a functionalistic ontology (Guttmann 1978) or, more recently, by a Western Marxist theoretical point of departure (e.g. Andrews 2004; Gruneau 2017). These theoretical approaches have been fruitful when analyzing and creating an understanding of the relationship and transformation of sport and society in different ways. What we want to do by turning to a Deleuzioguttarian theoretical framework is to add a perspective to these theoretical considerations in order to produce more perspectives on sport and society in general, or as in this case, commercial child and youth sports in Sweden.

The Deleuzioguttarian approach, which is also influenced by Marx, does not take its point of departure from the base and/or superstructure. Rather, it is a reworking of these concepts and of the Marxist bond with Freudian inspired psychoanalysis that influenced Western Marxists of the Frankfurt School. Deleuze and Guattari argued that ‘the only means of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx [is] by discovering how social production and relations of productions are an institutions of desire, and how affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000, 63).

In psychoanalysis stemming from Freud, desire is regarded as something that humans lack and is therefore something that we want or strive towards. For Deleuze and Guattari (2000), desire is something that is both positive and productive. They argue that there is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand and a desiring-production on the other. Rather, social production is desiring-production under determinate conditions and means that social fields, or territories, are invested by desire: ‘There is only desire and the social, and nothing else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000, 28). As there is only desire and the social, desire works as a positive stream of difference and becoming(s) between productive connections (Colebrook 2010). In our case it is the connections between commercial entrepreneurs and their customers that produce the commercial child and youth sports landscape. In other words, in our reading of desire as productive, we see it as the connection, or synthesis, of commercial entrepreneurs’ desires to work with child and youth sports and children’s and youths’ (and their guardians) desires to engage in sport, not because the children lack something, or that anything is lacking anywhere, but because sport is seen as something positive in these social fields. We will elaborate on this view in the discussion section of this article. We call this connection between commercial entrepreneurs and their customers a connection between desiring production and desiring machines, which is also part of the Deleuzioguttarian vocabulary (Deleuze and Guattari 2000). In this sense, commercialization as a phenomenon becomes something relational.

In a Deleuzioguttarian approach, everything from bodies to societies are different forms of territories that are produced through flows of positive and productive desire. But beside every territorialization is a force of de-territorialization, which is understood ‘as a movement or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory’ (Patton 2000, 101). Every de-territorialization process involves at least two elements: the territory that is being left behind and the de-territorialization element. In our case, these elements consist of the SSC territory and the de-territorialization element of commercialization. Patton (2000) also highlights that a de-territorialization process is always attached to a correlative re-territorialization, where the original territory changes and either becomes something different or modifies the old. It is this new territory or commercial de-territorialization element in the landscape of child and youth sports that we investigate and map in this article. In the article we refer to this process as a commercial de-territorialization process. In other words, our understanding of how things transform and change relates to how desire connects and produces and/or transforms new/old territories. That is part of the analysis of the commercial de-territorialization process conducted here.

Method

There are different methods that could be used in order to answer our research question, such as Howards’ (2002) network ethnography, used by e.g. Mangione et al. (2020). But in order to connect our theoretical considerations with our methodological approach, we have chosen a more Deleuzioguttarian approach. The Deleuzioguttarian philosophy has namely led to a different way of thinking research which goes under the umbrella term of post-qualitative research. This is described as a different form of qualitative research and is informed by an ontological (re)turn to realism(s) in social theory (Le Grange 2018). It is with these insights that we turn our attention to the services that are available on the internet, given that it is a major, but not exclusive, part of our daily lives (Giroux 2001).

In the post-qualitative research agenda, the human is placed on an immanent plane and stripped of its ontological privilege. What follows is an insight that what is provided is a selective, partial and inexhaustible view of the commercialization process in the Swedish child and youth sports landscape that is based on the services offered by commercial entrepreneurs through their websites. In this way, ontology is brought closer to everyday life. It is not about revealing a deep, hidden sphere of the truth, but about affirming existence as it is (Eriksson 2005). In line with this, Deleuze’s philosophy encourages the development of new concepts and methodologies that are specific or relevant to the problem being addressed (Coleman 2008). At the centre of Deleuzian thinking is multiplicity: ‘The essential thing, from the point of view of empiricism, is the noun multiplicity, which designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to each other. Every “thing” is made up in this way’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, vii). These authors argue that what counts when thinking multiplicity is not the terms or the elements, but what is ‘between’ the between - a set of relations that are not separable. The methodological undertaking is therefore to enter the middle, the between and relate (Ringrose and Coleman 2013). For this task, a particular style of empiricism is required: ‘one where the abstract does not explain but must itself be explained, [and where] the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, vii). This empiricism starts by extracting the conditions of things in such a way that no pre-existent concept can be extracted from them. In this sense, we deviate a little from Deleuzian methodology, in that we start from the pre-existing concept of commercialization as a de-territorialization element in relation to non-profit SSC clubs. However, it is from these insights that we have constructed a research method that is designed to map the multiple commercialization processes in the Swedish commercial child and youth sports landscape.

Although this is the ontological outset, there are still methodological considerations to take into account, especially when researching information on the internet, such as sampling. We have been inspired by the Deleuzian concept of encounter when sampling. O’Sullivan (2005) highlight that an encounter is something that forces us to think and operate as a rupture of our established modes of being and our established subjectivities. We argue that this concept of an encounter is close to the researcher’s meeting with the (empirical) world. In order to identify the kind of services that commercial entrepreneurs located in Sweden offer through the internet, we used Svensson’s (2016) appendix in his master’s thesis as our starting point, in which he lists 151 commercial businesses in the landscape of child and youth sports. Svensson’s thesis was conducted in 2016, while our encounter with the websites started in autumn 2018 and was completed in the first few months of 2020.

The first author visited all the websites in order to gain an overview of the businesses in Svensson’s study. From here, the first author gained insights regarding that some businesses’ websites were no longer functional and that some did not offer any child or youth sports at all. He also acknowledged that many of the businesses listed in the appendix specialised in dance or equestrian sport, which are already partly commercialised in the Swedish child and youth sports landscape. Other businesses in the appendix only offered online sport services and that some businesses’ websites were listed more than once in the appendix because they offered different sport services under different names. When arranging these businesses, the second author encountered a commercial business through advertisers on her social media platform that fitted our study. Our criteria were that the businesses should have a working website and offer sports services to children and youth. In total we included 50 different commercial entrepreneurs’ businesses: 11 businesses offering children’s gymnastics (at least as one of their services), 1 parkour business, 14 ice hockey businesses, 8 football businesses, 11 tennis businesses, 2 floorball businesses and 3 businesses offering multiple sports. We downloaded all the website pages to an external hard drive to ensure that the pages did not update. Appropriate ethical considerations have been made during different parts of the study. Since all the information we have gathered is published on public accessible webpages and do not include any sensitive or harmful information about individuals, we have chosen to publish the names of the businesses. In that sense we have followed the guidelines that the Association of Internet Researchers (2002, 5) contends: ‘One broad consideration: the greater the acknowledged publicity of the venue, the less obligation there may be to protect individual privacy, confidentiality, right to informed consent etc.’ [italic in original].

Encounters with the businesses’ websites

The questions raised in the encounters with the businesses’ websites included who they were orientated towards in relation to age and sex, what kind of sport services they offered, whether they also offered other services, how they were distributed throughout the country and what kind of prices were offered. The answers to these questions formed the point of departure for the investigation into how commercial businesses de-territorialize in relation to SSC and its non-profit clubs. With regard to the relation between age and gender, we noticed two different commercial de-territorialization processes in relation to SSC. The first process consisted of businesses that were primarily orientated towards children who were younger than those that non-profit clubs generally received governmental support for, i.e. below the age of seven. The second process was primarily orientated towards the children and youth that non-profit clubs generally provided activities for.

The next step was to sort the kind of sport services and extra services that were offered. Here, the commercial de-territorialization process consisting of businesses primarily orientated towards younger children became even clearer, in that many offered similar kinds of sport services. However, our aim was to focus on the understanding of multiplicity, meaning that even if there were some similarities between the businesses, there were also differences that were important to note. With this focus, new commercial de-territorialization processes emerged due to them not offering the same kinds of extra services and that their presence throughout the country varied. The same procedure was conducted on the businesses offering sport services orientated towards children and youth that non-profit clubs generally provided activities for. In this procedure, we noticed two different commercial de-territorialization processes: one consisting of businesses offering sports camps during the school holidays, and primarily during the summer holidays, and different sports to choose from, and the other consisting of businesses offering sport camps specializing in one particular sport. These businesses also offered a greater variety of services - both consultancy and training packages. They were also orientated towards individual players, coaches and non-profit clubs, which the businesses offering sports camps during the school holidays did not. We also noticed another commercial de-territorialization process within the process of businesses offering services to players, trainers and non-profit clubs. This consisted of businesses offering special training services to children and youth that they selected and invited, which differed from the other commercial de-territorialization processes.

Having created these four different processes, the third step was to estimate the costs of the different sport services. The calculations are based on one service provided by each business and should be regarded as price indicators. We also constructed tables which includes an overview of the questions raised in the encounters with the websites.

Result

The physical activity commercial de-territorialization process

The physical activity process is a commercial de-territorialization process that we understand as something that occurs beside SSC. The businesses partly offer their services to children below the age of 7, which is the age that non-profit clubs can begin to apply for grants for their participation, and partly to older children and adults. However, their main services are orientated towards children below 7 years. The businesses do this within the same binary gender system as competitive sports, but with a mixture of boys and girls. Guardians are allowed to participate with the youngest children. Some of the businesses also offer family services, where the consumers can train together with family or friends. All this creates a commercial de-territorialization process that differs from how the non-profit clubs usually organize sport. But as it is orientated towards girls and boys, it still territorializes sport within the binary gender system, just as competitive sports, thus excluding children who do not identify themselves within contemporary gender norms.

As seen in Table 1, some sport services occur more frequently, such as dance, gymnastics, football, parkour and a sports mixtures in which children are able to try a new sport each practice.

Table 1. The physical activity commercial de-territorialization process.

Sport services	Businesses offering the service	Age	Sex	Location	Average price/session (USD)
Acrobatics	2	4-16	Girls & Boys	Scattered	14
Alpine ski-school	1	3-10	Girls & Boys	1 city- 1 place	30
Baby-gymnastics	2	4-33 months	Girls & Boys	3 cities- 3 places	18
Ballet	1	4-11	Girls & Boys	1 city- 4 places	13
Capoeira	1	4-12	Girls & Boys	1 city- 2 places	10
Dance	3	2- 14 (family)	Girls & Boys	Scattered	16
Football	3	2-9	Girls & Boys	Scattered	19
Gymnastics	8	2-15 (adults)	Girls & Boys	Scattered	12
Parkour	3	4-17 (adults, family)	Girls & Boys	2 cities- scattered	16
Sport mixture	5	2- 16	Girls & Boys	Scattered	18
Street dance	1	6-11	Girls & Boys	1 city- 2 places	13
Tennis	1	4-18 (adults, family)	Girls & Boys	1 city- 3 places	16
Track & field	1	3-10	Girls & Boys	1 city- 2 places	30
Extra services
Babysitting & kids parties	3		Girls & Boys
Bachelor, bachelorette parties & Business events	2
Circus, theatre, drama, music, instrument, singing, obstacle course,	1		Girls & Boys	1 city- scattered
School collaborations	2
Online advertisement	1
Sport Camps	2		Girls & Boys

The average price for attending one practice ranges between 10 and 30 USD, with an average cost of 17 USD/practice. However, none of these businesses sell single training sessions and instead offer a set of training sessions, where the smallest set we identified was 4 training sessions and up to 14 practices. In these calculations we excluded one business as we were unable to identify the number of practices offered.

However, in order to understand more about this process and how it de-territorializes in this commercial form, we also need to highlight the differences. In this physical activity de-territorialization process we encountered two businesses that stood out in relation to their presence throughout the country - Be Sporty and Sweden Sport Academy. Be Sporty is localized in 405 different places and Sweden Sport Academy in 248 places. This is why we have coded the location in Table 1 as scattered. These businesses offer the same services of gymnastics, football, dance and a mixture of sports, and are orientated towards almost the same age group. In Sweden Sport Academy’s case, the activities are for the ages 2–6 and in Be Sporty’s case from 2 to 8 years. The only sport that is available to older children is dance, which is available for children up to 12 years of age in Sweden Sport Academy’s case and 14 in Be Sporty’s case.

Other businesses offering a number of activities are also present in one or two cities, such as Ivra Kurser, Stockholm Sport Academy and Lidingö Gymnastikskola. Others that do not offer as many sporting services for children are Minigymnasterna and Barngymnastik in Landvetter and Mölnlycke. There are also differences between how many and what kind of extra services the businesses offer, which makes this commercial de-territorialization process even more complex. For instance, Sweden Sport Academy and Be Sporty do not offer non-sport related services. Ivra Kurser, on the other hand, offers a lot of different non-sport related services, such as piano courses for children, youth adults and primary schools - an orientation that is shared with Quality Movement in this commercial de-territorialization process. Another non-sporting service that we encountered within this process is babysitting, children’s parties, bachelorette and bachelor parties. We also encountered a non-sporting extra service provided by Stockholm Sport Academy that required visitors to its website to register an e-mail address in order to view its pages. Advertising spots were then sold to businesses by means of information mails sent to potential customers who had visited the website. All these are examples of commercial de-territorialization processes within the physical activity commercial landscape. These connections construct new combinations in the child and youth sports landscape that are driven by commercialization, which makes the emergent commercialized landscape even more complex.

This commercial de-territorialization process is not in itself a homogeneous field, despite some services being offered more frequently than others. Another complexity in this commercial de-territorialization process that is worth highlighting is that Stockholm Sport Academy and Sweden Sport Academy also offer sport camp services that connect to another commercial de-territorialization process of child and youth sports, namely the fusion commercial de-territorialization process, which we present after the sport development process.

The sport development commercial de-territorialization process

If complexity and multiplicity can be summed up as the lead motives in the previous commercial de-territorialization process, the same can be said for the sport development commercial de-territorialization process. This process is territorialized by businesses orientated towards youth players, trainers and non-profit clubs in one particular sport, i.e. those over the age of 7. As with the physical activity de-territorialization process, the businesses orientate themselves towards girls and boys, thus excluding other genders. Some ice-hockey businesses do not provide any gender descriptions, but as boys and men are more represented in ice-hockey, our impression from these websites is that they orientate towards boys and that this is something that does not need to be spelled out.

In Table 2 we have listed all the services offered by the businesses specializing in one sport. The sports represented by the businesses are (7) football, (13) ice-hockey, (10) tennis and (1) floorball business.

Table 2. The Sport development de-territorialization process.

Sport service	Businesses offering the service	Age	Sex	Location	Average price/service (USD)
Fixed services
Single training (specific theme)	2	7- senior	Girls and boys	1 city- 1 place	25-30/training
Training packages (specific theme)	4	6- senior	Girls and boys	1 city- 1 place	29-100/training
Shorter day camps (1-2 days)	13	8- senior	Girls and boys	Often 1 city- 1 place	117/day
Longer day camps (3-7 days)	17	8- senior	Girls and boys	Often 1 city- 1 place	98/day
Shorter acc camps (1-2 days)	2	11-15	Girls and boys	1 city- 1 place	92/day
Longer acc** camps (3-8 days)	10	8- senior	Girls and boys	Often 1 city- 1 place	106/day
Longer acc* camps abroad (3 days)	2	11-21	Girls and boys	1-2 cities − 1 place	175/day
Training groups	7	3-18	Girls and boys	1 city- 1 place	X
Consulting services
Personal training	16	X	Girls and boys	X	X
Player development plan	2	X	Girls and boys	X	-
Coach education	8	X		X	X
Trainings/ training camps for non-profit clubs	21	X	X	X	X
School collaborations	3	Elementary to upper secondary	X	X	X
Mentorship	6	X	Girls and boys	X	X

X- No data since these services seems to work through mutual agreement between the business and the customer.

Table 2 shows that shorter day camps (without accommodation for 1–2 days), longer day camps (3–7 days) and longer accommodation camps (3–8 days) are the services that are offered most frequently. One business offered these services for 8-year-olds, although they are more commonly orientated towards children and youth from the age of 10–11. They are offered to both girls and boys, except for some of the ice-hockey businesses stated above. The average price for attending one day of these camps is 117 USD and they are located in one city and in one place in that city. These day camps are offered throughout the year. It is also worth highlighting that if a business offers shorter day camps it does not mean that other services are not offered as well. The longer day camps or the longer accommodation camps are often held during the school holidays. One day at a longer day camp has the average price of 98 USD. The average price for attending a longer accommodation camp is 106 USD. These services are located in one city in one place.

In Table 2 we have listed a number of consultancy services; the most frequently offered being training camps or training sessions by non-profit clubs. The orientation toward non-profit clubs was shared by the ice-hockey and football businesses but not by the tennis businesses or the floorball business. Personal training sessions were more commonly offered by tennis businesses but were also offered by some football and ice-hockey businesses. It is difficult to estimate the cost of these consultancy services because very few businesses provided this information on their websites. These services seems to work through mutual agreement between the business and the customer. In relation to the more fixed services, these consultancy services appear to be nomadic in the sense that they are staged where they are needed. Another consultancy service worth highlighting is the elementary to upper secondary school collaborations. Although we only encountered two businesses orientated towards schools, it shows that this commercial de-territorialization process, like the physical activity de-territorialization process, some businesses also tries to territorialize in the Swedish school system.

In sum, this commercial de-territorialization process has a clearer re-territorialization process back to non-profit clubs than the physical activity de-territorialization process. The services in this process are based on the logic that players, coaches and even entrepreneurs will move back and forth between the non-commercial and commercial landscape of child and youth sports.

The sport fusion commercial de-territorialization process

We have called the third commercial de-territorialization process, which includes businesses offering sport camps, the sport fusion process. In relation to businesses in the sport development de-territorialization process, which only focus on one sport, these businesses offer a variety of sports during the summer months. Stockholm Sport Academy offers camps throughout the school holidays but is the only business that does not offer accommodation in this process. The other businesses - Sweden Sport Academy, Sports Heart, Stadium Sport Camp and Care of Sport - we encountered in this process offer day camps along with their accommodation camps. The day camps are orientated towards children between the ages of 7–11. As highlighted in the physical activity process, Stockholm Sport Academy and Sweden Sport Academy de-territorialize from that territory and also re-territorialize in this sport fusion commercial de-territorialization process.

As seen in Table 3, we encountered classic sports, such as football and handball, under the same roof as e-sport, singing and mixed sports, which means that they cater for children and youth both within and beside SSC’s non-profit clubs and are therefore a fusion between the physical activity and sport development commercial de-territorialization processes.

Table 3. The fusion de-territorialization process.

Sport camp	Businesses offering the service	Age	Sex	Location	Average price/ day (USD)
Adventure & outdoor	1	10-14	Girls & boys	1 city	114
Badminton	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
Bandy	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	58
Basketball	2	11-15	Girls & boys	2 cities	47-58
Bowling	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
Cheerleading	2	9-16	Girls & boys	2 cities	47-84
Chess	1	12-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
Climbing	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
Gymnastic	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
Dance	3	9-16	Girls & boys	6 cities	47-82
Dance sport	1	13-16	Girls & boys	1 city	90
Electric hockey parasport	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
E-sport	2	11-15	Girls & boys	3 cities	47-58
Figure skating	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
Floorball	3	9-16	Girls & boys	5 cities	47- 8
Floorball pro	1	13-16	Girls & boys	1 city	90
Football	3	9-16	Girls & boys	6 cities	47- 78
Football pro	1	13-16	Girls & boys	2 cities	90
Golf	2	10-15	Girls & boys	3 cities	47- 14
Handball	3	9-16	Girls & boys	6 cities	47- 80
Ice-hockey	2	11-15	Girls & boys	2 cities	47-58
Mountainbike	2	11-15	Girls & boys	2 cities	47-58
Para-sport	1	11-15	Girls & boys	2 cities	19
Parkour/tricking	4	6-16	Girls & boys	4 cities	47-90
Sing	1	12-15	Girls & boys	1 city	58
Sport- mixture	2	6-16	Girls & boys	3 cities	47
Swimming	2	9-16	Girls & boys	4 cities	47-90
Rugby	1	11-15	Girls & boys	1 city	47
Table tennis	2	11-15	Girls & boys	2 cities	47-58
Tennis	2	5-17	Girls & boys	3 cities	110
Track & field	2	11-15	Girls & boys	2 cities	47-58
Weight lifting	1	11-15	Girls & boys	2 cities	47

In Table 3 we illustrate the range of sport offered by the different businesses during their sport camp weeks. It also shows that they are orientated towards children and youth in the binary gender system, in other words boys and girls aged between 5 and 16 years, excluding other genders. Even though Stockholm Sport Academy’s camp services does not offer accommodation they do not have the lowest average price. For instance, the average price for one day at its tennis camp is 73 USD. Instead, the sport camps offered by Stadium Sport Camp have the lowest day price of 47 USD, but last for 7 days. Sports Heart’s camps last for 6 days and the average day price is 58 USD. Sweden Sport Academy’s prices for its camps differ depending on the kind of sport camp you are interested in. The camps are 5 days long and the football camp costs 78 USD per day, while the tennis camp costs 110 USD. Care of Sport has 5-day sport camps that are orientated towards adventure and the outdoors, which include sporting activities such as climbing, mountain biking, kayak paddling. One day at their camp costs 114 USD. It also has golf camps priced at 114 USD.

When it comes to multiplicity, the difference within this commercial de-territorialization process is that Stadium Sport Camp and Sweden Sport Academy are localized in more than one city. Stadium Sport Camp is localized in 2 cities and offers sport camps over a period of 4 weeks in one and 2 weeks in the other. Sweden Sport Academy’s sport camps are localized in three cities and its camps are offered over a 3-week period in each city. Neither of these organizations offer all their sport camps during all the weeks or in all the cities. The other businesses’ sport camps are localized in one city.

Another difference within this fusion commercial de-territorialization process is that Sweden Sport Academy offers “pro camps” in dance, football and floorball which focus more on development than physical activity. This creates yet another de-territorialization process within the commercialization de-territorialization process. Stadium Sport Camps also creates another commercial de-territorialization when offering para-sport camps for disabled children and youth.

The player invitation commercial de-territorialization process

We have called the fourth and last commercial de-territorialization process that we encountered the player invitation process. This invitation process goes hand in hand with the commercialization de-territorialization process of sport development and has a clear re-territorialization process back to SSC. The invitation commercial de-territorialization process does not mean that businesses do not offer services that are open to everyone, but that one service is for the children and youth that these businesses invite. In this presentation, we focus on these player invitation services.

For instance, the tennis business Good to Great Tennis Academy in Stockholm has developed an academy in which girls and boys in secondary and upper secondary schools can apply directly to the business. If they are accepted, they live and study on the academy’s campus and have daily tennis practice sessions. In addition to applying and being accepted, the fee is 37,000 USD per annum.

Another example of an encounter in this invitation commercial de-territorialization process is the floorball business Selected Player, which is orientated towards girls and boys from the age of 8. Selected Player has developed a selection system as its business plan, which means that local 4-day training camps are arranged in 20 different places in Sweden. The camps cost 230 USD, exclusive of accommodation, making a daily price of 58 USD. During these camps, youths are scouted and then selected and invited to a five-day regional camp. These camps are 500 USD, exclusive of accommodation, making the daily price 100 USD. Another selection procedure takes place in which the children are invited to the world camp and compete against international competitors. In other words, this is similar to the national selection process, the difference being that children are younger and the procedure is based on commercial rather than national interests.

Another kind of invitation process comes from the ice hockey business BB Goalie, which is orientated towards male goalkeepers. The players can apply for a position in the special training group that runs throughout the year. Yet another example comes from the football business, Stahre Academy, which invites players to its academy (like a training group) to play friendly games and participate in tournaments in Sweden and abroad. Like BB Goalie, this business only seems to be orientated towards boys. These two businesses do not give any prices for their selected services. Both businesses are located in the Stockholm area.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article we have shown and disentangled the complexity of the commercial child and youth sports landscape that has been acknowledged but seldom empirically researched. We have done this by mapping the services that are offered by commercial entrepreneurs through their websites. We argue that even though these businesses are part of a commercialization process of child and youth sports in Sweden, they de-territorialize differently within the Swedish child and youth sports landscape. In this article we present four commercial de-territorialization processes: the physical activity process, the sport development process, the sport fusion process and the player invitation process. There are also processes within these four processes, where commercial businesses orientate themselves differently to create new connections and new landscapes, such as school collaborations, family services, although like organized competitive sport they are still trapped in a binary gender system or a ‘boys only’ system, thereby excluding other genders. This is also done by businesses that do not have the same connection to organized sport.

By aligning with Deleuze’s notion that everything that exists incarnates a problem (Patton 2000), we can start to reflect on what kind of problem and solution these different commercial de-territorialization processes embody, or what kind of desire that connects. Starting with the physical activity process, it seems that these businesses incarnate the problem and solution to a healthy lifestyle that guardians/children or desiring-machines connect to. Johannisson (2008) argues that a highly desired trait in our market culture is to emit good health, which is a signal of control, ambition, strength and self-discipline. In other words, being physically active and having a healthy lifestyle are regarded as positive and desirable in contemporary society. Choosing a healthy lifestyle is also regarded as the most important choice that guardians can make today (Gleichmann 2004). In this sense, the commercial de-territorialization process of physical activity seems to embody the solution to the problem, in that it is generally orientated towards children below the age of 7, with 7 being the age at which non-profit clubs can access governmental funds for children’s participation. Furthermore, as these businesses do not have competition as their focus, they embody different solutions for children who are old enough for SSC’s non-profit clubs but who do not want to compete, by offering services like mixed sport alternatives and family training alternatives. In other words, they offer different solutions to the problem of being physically active and living a healthy lifestyle and do not in a direct way re-territorialize within SSC. Rather, this commercial de-territorialization process emerges in parallel with SSC and competes with it indirectly with regard to children, trainers, training grounds etc. It also offers and uses child and youth sports when constructing other income generating services, such as advertising or babysitting. As there is no re-territorialization directly back to any non-profit club in SSC, we could be tempted to think of this process as something that takes place outside, rather than inside SSC. However, as SSC and commercial businesses are part of the same society, it is more correct to say that they both emerge from inside society and offer different solutions to specific problems, with the possibility that the children and youth who are targeted by the commercial entrepreneurs will one day be part of SSC. The possible consequences are that the market will expand and become a bigger competitor when it comes to child and youth sports in the future.

The sport fusion process seems to work in a similar way. However, this commercial de-territorialization process has a clearer re-territorialization back to SSC’s non- profit clubs than the former commercial de-territorialization process, in that children can be part of a sport camp service and then go back to their non-profit club. As highlighted by Wagnsson and Augustsson (2015), this gives us an insight into the kind of problems and solutions they are orientated towards – in this case commercial sport alternatives like “babysitting”, as in having something to do during school holidays when guardians are at work, or want to enjoy free-time away from the children. They therefore orientate towards as many children and youths as possible, both those wanting to develop in their particular sport and those wanting a healthy lifestyle.

The other two commercial de-territorialization processes of sport development and the player invitation processes only seem to emerge through the connection of the desiring machines of performance development. These two processes seem to be more in symbiosis with the desires of non-profit clubs, trainers and players to develop/win/become as successful as possible in one particular sport. The sport development- and the player invitation commercial de-territorialization processes also put the spotlight on SSC and non-profit clubs in a different way than the physical activity- or fusion commercial de-territorialization processes. The sport development- and the invitation commercial de-territorialization processes carry with them the question of whether the desiring-machines of elite sports have affected other sporting values, such as sport for all and, if that is the case, how. There is no simple answer to this, especially as SSC has over 18,000 non-profit clubs and our focus is on football, hockey, tennis and floorball businesses. Nevertheless, in its re-territorialization, every de-territorialization process carries all the values and norms that have the potential to transform the old territory. In the study conducted by Wangsson & Augustsson (2015), the guardians were most concerned about these developments, especially when non-profit clubs brought in ‘expert coaches’ – a move that could increase the membership fees and exclude children from lower-income families. In this way, the sport development- and invitation commercial de-territorialization processes affect the ‘sports for all’ ideals of SSC in a different way than the two other processes.

However, these concerns can be stretched to include questions about all these entrepreneurs and who they create services for. In other words, who can afford these services and whose desires are to be satisfied? The answer to this question is probably that it differs since the price of the diverse services vary, as well as the price in relation to each commercial de-territorialization process diverge from each other. But in the cases where the commercial de-territorialization processes re-territorialize back into the non-profit clubs of SSC these services could be seen as add on to the fee paid to the non-profit club. This probably exclude children and youths from families from lower-income households to participate in these commercialized services. In relation to the one that do not directly re-territorialize back to the SSC, the physical activity commercial de-territorialisation process, it could lead to, as argued above, that the market might expand in the future. The overall consequences of this market expansion is hard to speculate about but based on the result of this study it seems that (some) children will be orientated towards sports at a much younger age than today. One consequence of this is that the overall cost for children and youth sport may increase if children start at an earlier age.

In conclusion, we argue that these commercial de-territorialization processes within the Swedish child and sports landscape differ from what is happening in the school market and the outsourcing of health and physical education (Macdonald, Hay, and Williams 2008; Griggs 2010; Evans 2014, Powell 2015; Parnell et al. 2017; Sperka and Enright 2018; Mangione et al. 2020), as few of these businesses offer school collaborations and there is no outsourcing of sport, but rather new services developed for those who can afford them. They also differ from the description that Coakley (2010) provides from the US setting, in that the Swedish sport model has not been a target of public budget cut such as those in the US (Giulianotti et al. 2019) and can only be partly understood as driven by professionalization. In this sense we would like to invite sport scholars to follow the desire-production of sport and the desiring-machines that connect to it, i.e. the infrastructure of sport, and investigate how these connections intersect with class, gender, sexuality, religion, disabilities and age and from this perspective look at what kind of sporting bodies emerge from these connections. This in order to explore what implications commercialization of child and youth sport have in other contexts than the Swedish, and how these implications connects to the ones highlighted in this paper. We argue that a Deleuzioguttarian framework has the potential to focus on the relational aspect of commercial child and youth sport and the consequences that might follow. If we go back to the Deleuzian insight that everything that exists incarnates a problem, we need to ask what today’s sports are solutions to, why child and youth sports are connected as solutions to those problems, and why commercial entrepreneurs are connected as solutions to those problems. Future research could focus on how these commercial entrepreneurs communicate on their websites in order to attract potential customers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.