There’s a saying that sport is just a game, meaning that it’s not that important if you lose. Although it is easy to dismiss this as a false statement, the essay argues, with the German philosopher Theodor W Adorno, that it is the fact that sport is a game, a play, that gives it a critical potential. Like all games sport has the power to reveal that what we regard as real and necessary could be different. Sport has the potential to release rationality itself from its forced instrumentality – in that sense it resembles art. However, since sport is captive in a larger instrumental project this potential can’t be realized. In Adorno’s perspective, a child’s play is different in that sense: it opens itself to a “beyond” in the most mundane things, which thus disclose a dangerous promise that everything might be different.