“Also in sport the unthinkable happens”

Monday afternoon October 3, on the day of the German reunion, the seventh Play the Game conference opened at the German Sports University in Cologne. Around 140 speakers will be addressing the conference over the next four days.

In his opening speech, Play the Game's International Director, Jens Sejer Andersen, drew a parallel between sport and the GDR and a seemingly untouchable communist system that suddenly crumbled in a few months:

“Also in sport, the unthinkable happens. On 3 October last year, who would have dreamt that later the same month politicians worldwide would start questioning the way FIFA handles the affairs of world football?

Who would have believed that the endemic corruption in FIFA, which investigative journalists and whistleblowers have raised at Play the Game conferences for more than a decade, would suddenly become general knowledge for the average football fan?

Last but not least, who would have thought that the most efficient amplifier of the wrongdoing in football politics would be the top leadership in FIFA itself by the way it mismanaged the elections of World Cup hosts and of the FIFA president?,”  Andersen said.

Extensive programme with focus on solution
Welcoming the 330 participants, he stressed that the conference will not only pay attention to the wrongdoings in sport, but also try to bring about solutions and encourage creativity and constructive action.

“This is why, at the end of this conference, we shall for the first time suggest a conference conclusion which we so far call The Cologne Consensus,” Andersen announced.

Once published, the draft will be discussed among the participants on the conference before the debate culminates on the ‘Change in Sport Day’ this Thursday, which will include a discussion on how sport can best solve its different corruption problems.

Before that, the conference will focus on a number of main themes:

• the legacy of mega-events
• the need for anti-doping reform
• the struggle to create growth in grassroots sport
• the discrimination of women in sport
• the use of hi-tech tools to optimize performance
• an international debate on the links between sport and the Arab spring

As Jens Sejer Andersen concluded in his opening speech, there are a wide range of opportunities in sport to engage – quoting the 93-year old French former diplomat Stéphane Hessel, who co-authored the Universal Declaration of Human rights and recently wrote the immensely popular leaflet ‘Time for outrage’:

“Faced with the variety and magnitude of the challenges that sport is facing, we can make Stéphanes concluding slogan ours: To create is to resist, to resist is to create.”
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Follow the debates from the plenary sessions live on playthegame.org