Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

In recent decades scholars have noted a trend in Swedish child and youth sport, namely that businesses are emerging parallel to the Swedish Sports Confederation (SSC), Sweden’s leading ideally driven sports organisation. Despite this recent trend of businesses starting to organise child and youth sport, research on the phenomenon is as yet scarce. This is also true for the overarching research area of the commercialisation of youth sport. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to analyse how commercially driven child and youth sport in Sweden functions and how leading representatives from child and youth sport businesses perceive Swedish child and youth sport.

The thesis consists of four sub-studies. Three of the studies are based on data from different child and youth sport business websites, while the other is based on data from interviews with leading representatives from different child and youth sport businesses.

The results identify four different commercial de-territorialisation processes that have been established, or territorialised, in Sweden. These four de-territorialisation processes consist of businesses that target their services to different potential customers groups. They also identify how the different businesses produce immaterial values regarding child and youth sport in order to attract potential customers. These values are enunciated differently depending on the kind of de-territorialisation processes the businesses stem from. Furthermore, the thesis illustrates that in their website images the businesses often visually represent their ideal customers as white boys and girls who are actively pursuing some kind of sport. It also shows that the leading business representatives position themselves and their services as passionate sport enthusiasts, child and youth sport actors and actors in a changing society.

The conclusion is that the commercialisation of child and youth sport functions in four different ways and creates boundaries between ideally- and commercially driven sport. The challenge for ideally driven sport is to keep control over sport as a social and cultural product. This is especially important in a post-industrial society, where businesses aspire to take control of the social and cultural content of sport and make it profitable