Anne Brus & David Ekdahl
Department of Public Health, Aarhus University
Esports is often portrayed as a rapidly expanding cultural field, yet its global development has been marked by an increasing concentration of commercial power. As publishers, media platforms, and tournament organisers consolidate control over competitive infrastructures, the space for non-professional forms of esports appears to narrow. This article critically examines the institutionalisation of organised amateur esports within DGI, Denmark’s second largest sport association, through a qualitative case study using documents and interviews. The aim of the study is to understand how DGI employs institutional isomorphism dynamics and logics to legitimate esports within its associative, health oriented, and community-based values. In this regard, persistent tensions between esports’ market and performance-driven logics and DGI’s traditional associational ideals reveal the limits of such an adaptation. Membership uptake remains below expectations. In addition, the legal recognition of esports as a sport that serves the public interest, exemplified by the VAT exemption case, relies on strategic alignment rather than intrinsic conformity with associational norms. These findings suggest that institutional integration of a novel, digitally rooted sport may achieve formal legitimacy but, in this case, cannot fully resolve underlying conflicts between commercial global esports logics and DGI’s amateur logics.
Click to access this peer review article in Scandinavian Sport Studies Forum, Vol. 17, 2026
ANNE BRUS received her PhD from Roskilde University in 2015. She has worked as a research assistant and postdoctoral researcher on projects concerning digital literacy, children’s everyday lives with computer games, esports, gaming policy, and the institutionalisation of esports at Roskilde University, the University of Copenhagen, and most recently Aarhus University. She has also participated in several international collaborations and secured multiple competitive research grants.
DAVID EKDAHL is an assistant professor at Aarhus University specializing in embodiment and virtual worlds. His esports research focuses on how professional esports players experience and inhabit virtual environments.
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