Sport, surveillance and the data economy: an expanding horizon for research and governance

Sport has undergone a data revolution. The unrelenting extraction of athlete data has become a topic of controversy and the focus of recent public campaigns and policy proposals. However, research and governance are lagging in addressing the full scope and complexity of sport’s data ecosystem and the commercial assemblage involved in the generation and subsequent exploitation of athlete data. This paper examines the need to move beyond the current emphasis on the role and use of data as a product of situated surveillance practices in the sporting workplace to the capitalist orientation at the centre of a burgeoning data economy. In so doing, two interdependent theoretical concepts–surveillance culture and surveillance capitalism–are introduced as an analytical framework to shape future research, policy and debate aimed at understanding and protecting the rights of athletes in the light of their exposure to highly surveillant digital technologies used in the production of elite performance, and sport as a multi-mediated form of consumption.