Sport as a Site of Meaning Discovery in Frankl’s Existential Psychiatry

1. Introduction

Meaning has become an established topic in sport and physical activity research. It appears in work on athletic identity, transitions and retirement, existential distress, spirituality, and the search for purpose in coaching and participation (Ronkainen & Nesti, 2015; Ronkainen & Nesti, 2019; Schmid et al., 2024). The term often functions as a bridge between psychological outcomes and wider questions about what makes a life worth living. That breadth partly explains its appeal. It also creates a problem, because the same word is used for subjective satisfaction, narrative coherence, moral purpose, vocation, social contribution, and transcendence. Recent scholarship reflects this spread. Philosophical work has asked how sport can form part of a meaningful life, while empirical and interpretive studies have examined vocation in coaching, spirituality in sport and exercise, and the relation between physical activity and meaning in life (Breivik, 2022; Ronkainen et al., 2020; Ronkainen & Nesti, 2019; Schmid et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). The field is, therefore, productive, but conceptually uneven.

A plausible anchor is Viktor E. Frankl’s philosophical anthropology and existential analysis. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher who developed logotherapy and a wider existential analysis, produced a systematic account of meaning that has shaped psychotherapy, moral psychology, and positive psychology (Frankl, 2006; Bailey, 2024). Yet his relevance to sport has remained fragmented. Sport scholarship often cites Frankl as a general authority on purpose, suffering, or self-transcendence, but it seldom reconstructs the internal logic of his meaning theory before applying it. This matters because Frankl is not simply a source of inspiration. He offers a set of distinctions about value, responsibility, self-transcendence, and the by-product character of fulfilment that can sharpen sport theory when they are used with precision (Frankl, 1978, 2006, 2010). The present article treats Frankl as a theorist of meaning and human existence whose concepts can clarify, but not settle, current debates in sport and physical activity. Frankl is treated here primarily as a theorist of meaning grounded in psychiatry but used for conceptual work in sport studies, which is why the argument draws on his clinical anthropology without turning the study into a psychotherapeutic or psychological model.

This reconstructive focus does not imply that Frankl is the only serious interlocutor in current research on meaning in life. Neighbouring work by Schnell conceptualises meaningfulness in terms of coherence, significance, orientation, and belonging, while distinguishing meaningfulness from crisis of meaning; other philosophical discussions emphasise clusters such as mattering, purpose, and sense-making (Schnell, 2025; Martela & Steger, 2016; Metz & Seachris, 2023). These approaches are acknowledged here to locate the study’s scope rather than to reorganise it around a comparative survey. In this respect, Schnell’s work and that of Martela and Steger are especially helpful for mapping the descriptive dimensions of meaningfulness, whereas Frankl explains more directly how meaning is tied to value-response, responsibility, and self-transcendence; Metz and Seachris, by contrast, clarify the philosophical range of the concept more than its practice-facing structure in concrete situations. The present argument remains narrower. It reconstructs Frankl’s account and then asks what that reconstruction contributes to sport studies.

Three aims guide this article. The first aim is to construct a coherent account of Frankl’s theory of meaning that is fit for conceptual work in sport. The second aim is to show how this construction clarifies current meaning discourse in sport by offering criteria, rather than exhortations, for when sport can be meaning-bearing. The third aim is to locate Frankl’s discussion of sport and coaching within this framework, avoiding treating sport as a mere illustration. The article complements rather than competes with existing existential approaches in sport psychology and sport studies, because it targets a different level of analysis (Ronkainen & Nesti, 2015; Nesti & Ronkainen, 2020). It offers a theory of meaning that can be used to interpret sport experiences and to assess meaning claims, without converting theory into advocacy.

The purpose of this study is to answer one question: what conceptual resources does Frankl’s meaning theory offer for theorising meaning in sport and physical activity, and how can those resources be reconstructed without either diluting Frankl into generic existential language or inflating sport into a universal source of meaning? A second, subordinate question concerns application. It asks how Frankl’s own remarks on sport constrain, enable, and qualify such a use. These questions are addressed through reconstruction of Frankl’s core claims and a focused reading of his essay on sport, “Sports – The Asceticism of Today,” published in The Unheard Cry for Meaning (Frankl, 1978).

The contribution is limited and specified. It offers a reconstruction of Frankl’s meaning theory and derives criteria for analysing meaning claims in sport. It does not claim to measure meaning, to diagnose athletes, or to recommend sport promotion as such. So, the argument addresses conceptual clarity and interpretive adequacy. Claims about prevalence, effects, or intervention value are treated as questions for later empirical work. This narrower statement of contribution is deliberate. The study is intended as a systematic reconstruction of Frankl for sport studies, not as a comprehensive review of meaning-in-life theory.

Frankl is worth reconstructing in this domain because his account links meaning, values, responsibility, suffering, and self-transcendence within a single conceptual structure. That structure is especially relevant to sport, where commitment, discipline, injury, ambition, recognition, and loss often appear together but are not always well distinguished conceptually. A reconstructive approach is justified not by the claim that Frankl supersedes competing approaches, but by the claim that his vocabulary can sharpen description, interpretation, and critique in a field where meaning is already widely invoked.

2. Conceptual Orientation and Materials

This article is a conceptual reconstruction of Frankl’s meaning theory for use in sport and physical activity studies. The approach is interpretive and analytic. It proceeds through close reading of Frankl’s published arguments, the extraction of recurrent distinctions, and disciplined reconstruction of their internal relations. For example, the distinction between self-transcendence and self-actualisation is treated not as a slogan but as a relation of conceptual priority, in which fulfilment depends upon orientation beyond the self. The goal is not merely to recapitulate Frankl’s work in summary form, but to organise its central claims so that later uses in sport preserve the same commitments. The article is, therefore, neither a phenomenological study of lived experience nor a narrative inquiry, and it does not attempt a general account of existential approaches in sport.

The primary materials are Frankl’s major synthetic statements on meaning and existential analysis, with particular emphasis on The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Man’s Search for Meaning, and The Feeling of Meaninglessness (Frankl, 1978, 2006, 2010). These texts were selected because they contain Frankl’s most concentrated accounts of self-transcendence, value-realisation, responsibility, and the by-product structure of fulfilment. They also include his most explicit comments on sport. A focused source base is appropriate here because the argument is reconstructive rather than encyclopaedic. The task is to specify what Frankl means by his central terms, how those terms connect, and where his own remarks on sport fit within that structure. Secondary sources are used selectively to stabilise interpretation and to situate Frankl within contemporary discussion without redefining his position. Pytell’s intellectual biography clarifies the wider development of Frankl’s project, Author’s analysis helps specify how Frankl’s existential psychiatry relates to broader debates about meaning and will to meaning, Davenport clarifies the relation between worthwhile ends and derivative fulfilment, and Kipke is useful in showing how Frankl can be brought into contemporary philosophical discussion without dissolving his psychiatric origins into generic existential vocabulary (Pytell, 2016; Bailey, 2024; Davenport, 2007; Kipke, 2018).

3. Conceptual Clarifications

Several terms require clarification at the outset because the same vocabulary carries different meanings across psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and sport studies. In the present study, meaning refers neither to a transient feeling nor to any positively valued experience. It refers, in Frankl’s sense, to the significance of a concrete possibility that calls for responsible response. Value, in this Franklian usage, refers to a worthwhile possibility disclosed in a situation, not merely to a preference, outcome, or socially rewarded state. Responsibility names the obligation to answer that possibility through action, restraint, or stance. Meaning in life differs from the meaning of life. The former concerns situation-bound possibilities of value-realisation; the latter concerns an ultimate meaning that exceeds finite grasp. This distinction matters in sport because participation can become a central site of meaning in life without becoming the total meaning of a life.

Self-transcendence names the movement beyond preoccupation with the self towards tasks, persons, values, and goods that are not reducible to immediate self-feeling. It is not identical with altruism, because it can include disciplined commitment to an impersonal task; nor is it identical with self-actualisation, because, for Frankl, fulfilment follows as a by-product of orientation beyond the self. Transcendence is used here in this restricted existential sense. It does not by itself imply a religious claim, although it can include religious forms of meaning. This narrower usage is important in sport, where neighbouring literatures sometimes describe non-religious spirituality, verticality, or movement as a carrier of meaning. Those formulations identify adjacent phenomena, but the present study retains Frankl’s own vocabulary so that the reconstruction remains conceptually stable (Ronkainen & Nesti, 2019; Schnell, 2025). They are treated here as partial overlaps rather than as near equivalents, since Frankl’s account remains more explicitly ordered around value-response and responsibility than around vertical orientation or expressive movement as such.

The existential vacuum is likewise used in a restricted Franklian sense. It denotes not simply distress, low mood, or burnout, but a more basic condition of frustration of the will to meaning, often expressed through boredom, cynicism, conformity, compensatory pursuit, or empty stimulation. Finally, sport is treated here as a working category rather than a self-evident one. The argument addresses organised and semi-organised practices of training, competition, and disciplined movement, while recognising that the boundaries between sport, exercise, physical education, recreation, and other movement cultures remain contested. The study adopts this working definition for present purposes and does not attempt to resolve borderline disputes, including those surrounding e-sports. This acknowledgement is sufficient for the present purpose, which is to stabilise the study’s scope rather than to resolve debates about the nature of sport.

Sport is treated as a field of conceptual test cases. Here, “sport” refers primarily to organised and semi-organised competitive or training practices, while some claims are extended to exercise and non-competitive physical activity when the same value tensions are present. Performance striving, injury and rehabilitation, coaching relations, and commercial framings are used because each makes visible a distinct tension in meaning discourse. The cases are used to clarify concepts and boundary conditions, not to generalise about populations. Empirical studies are cited only when they exemplify the phenomenon under analysis, such as identity fragility during transition, vocation in coaching, or the experience of meaning in sport and physical activity (Ronkainen et al., 2020; Schmid et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). The evaluation standard is textual adequacy, internal coherence, and the precision of the conditional claims derived for sport settings.

The reconstruction is justified by argumentative coherence and by its capacity to reduce category error. It aims to separate meaning from nearby constructs such as enjoyment, motivation, coherence, and recognition, which are often treated as overlapping in contemporary sport scholarship (Breivik, 2022; Schmid et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). It also aims to keep normative claims proportionate by treating sport as a practice that can realise meaning under specified conditions, but can also deform it under identifiable pressures.

Methodological limits follow from this design. The reconstruction cannot settle empirical disputes about the psychosocial effects of sport participation. It also cannot adjudicate between Frankl and alternative frameworks on the basis of outcome data. Its justification is conceptual rather than causal. That is, the account stands or falls by argumentative coherence, fidelity to the selected texts, and usefulness in reducing category error within current sport discourse. Contemporary research on meaning in sport is heterogeneous in both method and construct definition. Conceptual work cannot replace that literature, but it can clarify what exactly is being claimed when sport is described as meaningful, and what kinds of evidence would be needed to support stronger applied claims.

The reconstruction proceeds in three steps. First, key terms are specified, including meaning, value, self-transcendence, responsibility, and the existential vacuum. Second, the study identifies the inferential role each term plays in Frankl’s arguments, so that later uses in sport contexts preserve the same commitments. Third, the Franklian distinctions are used to re-describe recurrent themes in sport literature, such as purpose, identity, vocation, and adversity, without treating any one empirical study as decisive. Limited signposting to neighbouring accounts is used only when it helps specify the boundaries of Frankl’s position. The resulting account is offered as a framework for interpretation and critique rather than as a diagnostic instrument or an intervention manual.

4. Results

Frankl’s theory begins from a claim about the structure of human existence. Human life is characterised by a capacity for self-distance and self-transcendence, which allows a person to take a stance towards inner states and towards external conditions. Meaning is not treated as a psychological state to be produced at will. Meaning is treated as something to be found through responsiveness to demands that arise in concrete situations. This demand structure is mediated by conscience, which functions as a fallible organ of meaning disclosure rather than as a rulebook. The claim is compatible with an existential description of lived experience, but it also adds a normative dimension, as it implies that not every preference or satisfaction is a candidate for meaning in the relevant sense (Frankl, 2006).

Frankl distinguishes three main routes through which meaning can be realised. Creative values refer to what a person gives to the world through work, making, and responsible action. Experiential values refer to what a person receives from the world through encounter, love, nature, art, and a receptive relation to reality. Attitudinal values refer to the stance a person takes towards unavoidable suffering or constraint, in which meaning is realised through the quality of the response rather than through control over outcomes. This tripartite scheme is not a typology of activities. It is a typology of value-realisation, which means it can be applied across domains, including sport, without reducing meaning to participation itself (Frankl, 1978, 2006).

A further discipline follows from Frankl’s “by-product” claim. Fulfilment and happiness cannot be reliably pursued as direct objects. They arise as by-products of engagement with meanings that are not reducible to the self’s current emotional state. Davenport (2007) makes a related point in existential terms when he treats meaning as a derivative effect of committed striving towards worthwhile ends, rather than as an end that can be targeted directly. This claim is central to sport because it often cultivates the pursuit of internal states, including confidence, enjoyment, and “flow,” and links these states to performance outcomes. A Franklian frame supports a sharper separation. It asks whether an athlete’s orientation is towards tasks, persons, and goods beyond the self, or towards the management of experience and reputation as ends in themselves. This separation provides a basis for analysing both flourishing and pathology in performance cultures, including anticipatory anxiety and the fixation on success (Frankl, 1978).

Frankl also insists on the distinction between meaning in life and meaning of life. Meaning in life concerns the meaning of a particular situation and its demands. Meaning of life concerns an ultimate meaning that cannot be captured within finite understanding. The practical implication is a strong anti-totalising stance. Sport cannot be identified as “the” meaning of life without conceptual error, because meaning demands are plural and situation-bound. At the same time, sport can become a central arena for meaning in life when it supports value-realisation and responsible response. This framing avoids a familiar oscillation between romanticising sport and dismissing it as mere entertainment. It treats sport as a domain whose meaning depends on how it is lived and what it enables (Frankl, 1987, 2006).

Frankl’s account can be summarised through a linked set of theses that are especially important for later application to sport. Meaning is a matter of responsible responsiveness to concrete possibilities, rather than an abstract property of life or a subjective feeling-state. The will to meaning is treated as a basic human orientation, and frustration of this orientation is associated with what Frankl calls an existential vacuum, often expressed through boredom, cynicism, and compensatory pursuits. Meaning is not equated with success, pleasure, or self-fulfilment, even though these may accompany meaningful action as by-products. Self-transcendence has priority over self-absorption within this framework, since meaning is located in tasks, persons, and values that exceed the self.

Frankl’s typology of creative, experiential, and attitudinal values is central for sport because it offers a way to separate sporting excellence from moral worth, and to describe how meaning may be preserved when performance is constrained by injury, ageing, deselection, or failure. Sport can involve all three value pathways, but it can also bypass them when reduced to distraction, status, or compulsory compliance. This point is important for later discussion. It means that sport is not meaningful by virtue of participation alone. It is meaningful, if at all, through the form of value-response that participation makes possible. Table 1 offers a summary of this reconstruction and as a guide to later interpretation.

The framework condenses the reconstructed account into analytic categories. It is offered as a summary of the reconstruction, not as an empirical model, diagnostic instrument, or measurement framework.

5. Discussion

Frankl discusses sport in several places, including The Unheard Cry for Meaning, where he treats sport and coaching as examples of modern value confusion and as potential fields for value realisation (Frankl, 1978). The discussion is not a sport philosophy in the narrow sense. It functions as an application of his reconstructed claims about self-transcendence, value-realisation, responsibility, and the by-product structure of fulfilment. For that reason, the themes highlighted below are not free-standing topics selected from outside the argument. They are derived from the internal architecture of Frankl’s account. The first concerns hyper-intention, because the by-product structure is directly threatened when success becomes an end in itself. The second concerns value-confusion under commercial and status logics, because meaning depends on value order rather than on external reward. The third concerns coaching, because responsibility in Frankl’s account is disclosed relationally and practically, not abstractly.

A concentrated point of entry is Frankl’s 1972 Olympic congress study, later published as “Sports – The Asceticism of Today.” Sport is defined there as a “human phenomenon” that should be approached in its “authentic” form, rather than through nationalism or commercial misuse (Frankl, 1978, pp. 105–106). The theoretical move is immediate. Motivation theories organised around equilibrium and “tension reduction” are rejected in favour of self-transcendence, where “self-actualisation” is treated as a by-product of being directed beyond the self (Frankl, 1978, p. 106).

On this basis, sport is interpreted as a socially available practice for reintroducing meaningful tension in conditions of low external necessity. Frankl proposes that human beings require a “specific tension” structured between the person and “a meaning he has to fulfil” (Frankl, 1978, p. 107). He then argues that affluent societies can erode both tolerance for tension and the capacity for renunciation, which, in turn, invites voluntary, self-imposed demands. Sport is offered as an exemplar because it allows people to “build up situations of emergency” in which tasks, standards, and risks are temporarily real again (Frankl, 1978, pp. 108–109). This point helps explain why sport can attract people even when its external rewards are modest or uncertain. It can organise seriousness, effort, and attention around publicly recognisable standards, and it can do so in ways that are neither reducible to utility nor exhausted by entertainment. In this respect, Frankl’s argument has an affinity with philosophical work that treats sport as part of a meaningful life without collapsing meaning into simple pleasure or preference satisfaction (Breivik, 2022).

Two constraints follow from the same text. First, the interpretation is not a claim that sport is intrinsically meaningful. It is a claim about a function sport can serve under certain social conditions, and only when sport remains oriented to self-transcendence rather than status display. Second, Frankl explicitly resists the “catharsis” assumption that aggression is safely drained through sport. He cites evidence that successful enactment of aggression can increase subsequent aggressive responding, which cautions against justificatory narratives that treat violent sport as harmless discharge (Frankl, 1978, p. 110).

First, sport illustrates hyper-intention and anticipatory anxiety. Hyper-intention describes a situation in which an outcome is pursued with such directness that the pursuit undermines its own conditions. In sport, the object may be winning, ranking, selection, or the experience of confidence. The athlete becomes preoccupied with the self-as-performer rather than with the task and its demands. A Franklian reading predicts that this orientation amplifies anxiety, narrows attention, and increases the likelihood of performance collapse. The same structure can appear in recreational physical activity when the point of participation becomes the production of a state, such as happiness or stress reduction, rather than engagement with a practice and its goods. This analysis provides a conceptual bridge between existential claims about meaning and sport psychological accounts of choking and pressure, while preserving Frankl’s caution about making pleasure and success primary aims (Frankl, 1978). The point matters because hyper-intention reverses the by-product structure: fulfilment is no longer allowed to follow engagement, but is pursued directly and thereby destabilised.

Second, sport illustrates value-confusion under commercial and status pressures. Frankl treats modern settings as vulnerable to a displacement of values, where instrumental goals acquire the status of ultimate goods. In sport, the displacement may occur when market value, fame, or institutional rewards replace the intrinsic goods of practice. This does not imply that competition and achievement are meaningless. It implies that achievement is conceptually secondary to meaning, and becomes corrosive when treated as the ground of worth. This point aligns with existential accounts of fragile athletic identity and existential distress during transition, since the loss of sport status can collapse a life structure that was never organised around plural sources of meaning. The conceptual implication is that sport policy and practice should distinguish between success as a legitimate aim and success as an identity foundation (Ronkainen & Nesti, 2015; Frankl, 1978).

Third, sport illustrates the moral texture of coaching. Frankl’s framework treats responsibility as central because meaning is disclosed through demands that call for response. Coaching is a site where one person shapes another’s possibilities for value-realisation, including creative, experiential, and attitudinal values. A Franklian analysis frames coaching as more than performance optimisation. It frames coaching as a relational practice that can support self-transcendence, since the athlete’s development depends on commitment to tasks, teams, and standards beyond immediate self-feeling. This is consistent with contemporary work that treats coaching as a vocation, and it also clarifies why purely instrumental coaching models can undermine meaning by narrowing the horizon of value (Frankl, 1978; Nesti & Ronkainen, 2020). The point can be sharpened further by recent work on coaching meanings. These claims about coaching are interpretive extensions of the reconstruction, not direct elements of a coaching theory developed by Frankl himself. When coaching is treated chiefly as a hobby or career, personal reward and self-development can become the dominant justificatory language. When it is treated as a vocation, tradition, duty, care, and legacy become more salient (Ronkainen et al., 2020). Frankl’s framework does not eliminate these differences, but it helps explain why vocation-like descriptions carry particular conceptual weight: they place the coach’s activity in relation to goods and responsibilities that exceed immediate self-interest.

Sport and physical activity can be seen as potential fields for the realisation of creative value. Training and performance can be construed as craft-like projects in which skills are cultivated and embodied, and in which standards of excellence are pursued within rule-governed practices. This framing is consistent with philosophical accounts that treat sport as a distinctive human good rather than merely a health technology (Breivik, 2022). It also aligns with applied and narrative studies in which participants describe sport roles as callings or vocations that orient life projects beyond immediate rewards (Ronkainen et al., 2020). A Franklian reading, however, resists making vocation claims automatic. The relevant question is whether the sporting project is connected to values that can be justified as worthy, and whether it supports responsibility rather than dependence on outcomes (Frankl, 1978).

Sport can also support experiential values. This includes experiences of shared attention, trust, recognition, and embodiment that emerge in coaching relationships, team practices, and forms of play. Work on meaning and spirituality in sport has argued that sport can function as a context for transcendence, confrontation with finitude, and reflection on what matters, across both elite and recreational settings (Ronkainen & Nesti, 2019). In this context, transcendence need not imply a religious claim. It can refer to movement beyond immediate self-concern towards persons, practices, values, or wider horizons of significance. Schnell’s account is useful here because it reminds us that neighbouring discussions of meaning often invoke coherence, significance, orientation, and belonging, including vertical and horizontal forms of coherence (Schnell, 2025). Schnell’s framework is broader and more descriptive of how meaningfulness is organised, whereas Frankl is more exacting about why such experiences count as meaningful only when they are anchored in value-response beyond self-absorption. The present study does not substitute that vocabulary for Frankl’s, but it does acknowledge that these neighbouring formulations identify phenomena that partly overlap with Frankl’s experiential and self-transcending account. Frankl’s contribution is to connect such experiences to a more explicit theory of value-response and responsibility.

A third route concerns attitudinal values. Sport exposes participants to limits. These include pain, loss, exclusion, and the end of athletic careers. Frankl’s emphasis on the attitude taken towards unavoidable suffering provides a way to interpret sporting adversity without romanticising it or treating it as required for growth (Frankl, 1978, 2006). The concept of “tragic optimism” can be used to describe how meaning may be maintained in the presence of defeat, chronic injury, or bodily decline, when the person can still orient towards values through response and interpretation (Frankl, 2010). This stance is compatible with existential applied work that treats crises in sport as occasions for reorientation, but it also warns against normative pressure that frames adversity as a moral test (Nesti & Ronkainen, 2020; Ronkainen & Nesti, 2015).

Boundary conditions remain important. Sport can also function as a site of meaninglessness when it becomes detached from responsibility and reduced to external validation. This can occur through hyper-intention, where meaning is pursued as an outcome and thereby undermined, or through institutional logics that convert participation into a status economy (Frankl, 1978). It can also occur through exclusionary cultures, coercive training, or practices that treat bodies as instruments. These are not peripheral concerns. They affect whether the participant encounters sport as a field of value-response or as a system of compliance, surveillance, and conditional worth. For that reason, questions of access, dignity, and institutional form are internal to any serious discussion of meaningful sport. The present account, therefore, does not claim that sport is inherently meaningful. It claims that Frankl’s distinctions help specify the conditions under which meaning talk in sport remains conceptually coherent and ethically defensible (Zhang et al., 2025).

An additional point of discipline concerns the use of Frankl in sport scholarship. Frankl’s meaning theory is often introduced through the clinical label with which it later became associated, which can encourage a therapeutic reading that is not required for conceptual work (Bailey, 2024; Wong, 2014). This discussion, therefore, treats Frankl primarily as a psychiatrist with a philosophical anthropology and a theory of human existence, rather than as a provider of techniques. This matters because the sport domain invites quick translation into interventions, motivational slogans, and programme rationales. A Franklian reconstruction is distorted when it is treated as a set of tools for producing desirable psychological states, or when it is taken to justify sport participation as such. The central claims instead concern the structure of meaning as responsiveness to value-demand, the priority of self-transcendence over self-absorption, and the by-product character of fulfilment. These are conceptual constraints. They can refine empirical and applied discussion, but they do not by themselves validate measures, interventions, or policy designs.

Existential approaches in sport studies have provided rich descriptions of meaning as lived experience. Phenomenological and narrative work has clarified how athletes and exercisers make sense of commitment, suffering, identity, and change, and how sport can function as a site of spirituality and existential learning. The Franklian reconstruction adds a different layer. It offers criteria for distinguishing meaning from adjacent constructs, including happiness, motivation, coherence, identity stability, and mere positive affect (Bailey, 2024). At the same time, fairness to neighbouring work matters. Breivik places more weight on plural value integration, while Sosis and Kiper attend more closely to ritual, symbolism, and communal meaning-making (Breivik, 2022; Sosis & Kiper, 2022). So, Frankl should not be treated as the sole existential lens available to sport theory. His advantage lies in conceptual sharpness about value-response, responsibility, and the by-product structure of fulfilment. Other approaches may remain preferable when the main question concerns lived texture, communal symbolism, or narrative identity formation. Put differently, Schnell’s work and that of Martela and Steger are better at differentiating facets of meaningfulness, and Metz and Seachris are better at exposing competing philosophical definitions, but Frankl is especially helpful when the task is to explain how concrete practices orient persons towards values, responsibilities, and self-transcending demands.

A second addition is Frankl’s explicit account of the by-product structure of fulfilment. Much sport psychology seeks to cultivate desirable inner states. This is often justified in instrumental terms, because inner states are linked to adherence and performance. A Franklian account does not deny the value of these states. It relocates them. It treats them as indicators and consequences of engagement with meaningful tasks, rather than as the direct objects of pursuit. This relocation has implications for how meaning is measured and discussed in sport research. It suggests that meaning claims should be evaluated by reference to value orientation and responsibility, rather than solely to subjective reports and satisfaction (Frankl, 1978; Wong, 2014). This is also where caution is needed. Existing empirical work on meaning in life among athletes, and on physical activity and meaning more generally, identifies associations, profiles, and recurring themes, but it does not yet provide a settled operational model of Frankl’s distinctions (Schmid et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). The present reconstruction can therefore guide interpretation and future conceptualisation, but it should not be presented as if it had already been converted into a validated empirical framework.

A third addition is a conceptual discipline about normative claims. Sport is often presented as a general good that should be promoted because it is meaningful. A Franklian frame resists this inference. It treats meaning as conditional on how sport is lived, which means sport can also be a site of meaninglessness when it supports conformism, fatalism, or success fixation. The implication is not that sport should be rejected. The implication is that meaning discourse in sport requires careful specification of mechanisms, boundary conditions, and counter-cases. This stance supports more credible interdisciplinary dialogue among philosophy of sport, sport psychology, and public health, as it avoids reducing meaning to a slogan (Frankl, 2006; Frankl, 2010). It also helps explain why some applied claims overreach. A programme can increase participation, satisfaction, or social contact without yet showing that it has enhanced meaning in a Franklian sense. That stronger claim would require evidence that participants are responding to valued possibilities in ways that reorganise responsibility, orientation, or the place of sport within life as a whole.

This study therefore extends a Franklian account of meaning into sport and physical activity by constructing a disciplined conceptual vocabulary. Existing sport scholarship has developed existential and meaning-oriented approaches, and has begun to map associations between meaning in life and physical activity, but it often treats meaning as a broad positive label rather than an analytic construct (Ronkainen & Nesti, 2015; Ronkainen & Nesti, 2019; Zhang et al., 2025). Frankl’s work adds a structured set of distinctions centred on value-realisation, self-transcendence, responsibility, and the by-product structure of fulfilment. The resulting account clarifies both what a Franklian framing adds beyond general existential sensibilities and what it does not claim. It does not replace phenomenological, narrative, religious, or social identity approaches to sport. It supplies a particularly useful set of boundaries for distinguishing meaningful participation from simple gratification, status dependence, or motivational rhetoric.

Implications should be stated with care. The analysis does not recommend sport as a remedy for meaninglessness, nor does it imply that meaning can be engineered through participation programmes. It identifies sport as one domain in which meaning can be realised through creative, experiential, and attitudinal values, under conditions that protect dignity and avoid coercion (Breivik, 2022; Frankl, 1978). Future work could test whether these distinctions improve empirical measurement or qualitative interpretation in sport settings, including coaching, athlete transitions, and recreational physical activity. Such work would also need to specify competing accounts, to clarify when Frankl’s framework is explanatory and when it is only heuristic (Ronkainen et al., 2020; Wong, 2014). It would also need to address issues of access and exclusion, since the possibility of meaning-realisation in sport depends not only on inner orientation but also on whether institutions make valued forms of participation available without humiliation, coercion, or narrow status sorting.

6. Conclusion

Meaning discourse in sport and physical activity is likely to intensify, because sport is increasingly used to address mental health, well-being, social cohesion, and life skills (Schmid et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). This trend is valuable, but it also increases the risk of conceptual drift. Frankl remains useful in this context because he separates meaning from satisfaction, treats meaning as discovered through responsible response, and insists on the by-product structure of fulfilment. While neighbouring accounts analyse meaning through coherence, significance, orientation, belonging, mattering, or sense-making, the present article has argued that Frankl offers a particularly stringent vocabulary for connecting meaning to value-response and self-transcendence (Schnell, 2025; Martela & Steger, 2016). The contribution of the study is therefore limited but clear: it reconstructs Frankl’s theory for sport studies and uses that reconstruction to stabilise meaning claims in this domain. It is best used as a clarifying lens within a wider field of existential and philosophical approaches, not as a comprehensive theory of meaning in sport.

The reconstruction offered here proposes a way to use Frankl in sport studies without reducing his work to inspiration. It should be read alongside, not instead of, neighbouring existential, narrative, spiritual, and philosophical approaches. Its advantage lies in conceptual discipline. It keeps meaning distinct from satisfaction, identity support, and motivational rhetoric, and it clarifies why sport can illuminate creative, experiential, and attitudinal values without becoming the total meaning of a life. The central claim remains conditional: sport can be meaning-bearing when it functions as a vehicle of value-realisation and when it supports self-transcendence rather than self-absorption. It does not claim that sport is inherently meaningful.

Boundary conditions should be stated plainly. The reconstruction applies to sport and physical activity only as practices that can support self-transcendence and responsible value-realisation. It is less suitable for analyses that treat meaning solely as coherence, subjective satisfaction, or social identity. It also cannot adjudicate between rival metaphysical accounts of ultimate meaning. These limits mark the scope of the contribution and indicate where alternative existential and narrative approaches remain preferable. They also remind us that sport can be personally significant without thereby becoming morally serious, and that meaningful participation depends as much on the organisation of practices and relationships as on the participant’s inner stance. Frankl’s distinctions are most useful when they sharpen questions, expose category errors, and interpret claims with greater restraint. They are less useful when they are converted into a universal theory of sport or a ready-made justification for participation policy.

Acknowledgments

None.

Funding information

This work received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author contributions

Richard Peter Bailey: Conception and design of the study; acquisition of data; analysis and interpretation of data; manuscript preparation; and obtaining funding.

Ethics approval and informed consent

Not applicable. This is a conceptual analysis and uses no human participants or identifiable personal data.

Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.