Paid game-playing - football, baseball, etc etc. is the opposite of sport, the opposite of fun. That today's system/s teaches us otherwise is the great success of advertising/profit system. It steals our critical thinking. Then they arrange to teach teachers to teach critical thinking, telling us we and our school children don't do it and need to learn it.
School is the foundational source of our alienation, subtracting our thinking we'd done from even before we're born, to replace it with adherence to accepting what we're allowed and made, termed ' taught', to think. This is our daily evidence of our self- and systemic colonization.
People do seek the comaraderie of yelling together at the games, and of coming down hard on children of the whole gamut of ages to perform as adults see required.
Commodification - everywhere, as you know.
Thank goodness for Zirin!, although he's too much caught up in certification of the present interactions, interjecting hard-hitting objections to so much of it it's surprising he hasn't gone the whole way and said this is no way to have pleasure, to deceive ourselves that this is pleasure.
If we lived reasonably instead of in service to our Owners' profiteering, wage slavery - emphasis on the slave part, we'd all play some here and there now and then or a lot, including we'd play pianos and xylophones and sing a lot.
Paul and Percival Goodman wrote in 'Communitas' decades ago, that if the available labor force were allowed to work - and that's an interesting challenge to the way things are right there - a 4 hour work WEEk would overproduce. In that challenge I see people who can get around at all - 2yr olds, 90 year olds, all being allowed to participate in production.
Clearly work would be altogether other than what it is now. Being part of production would be life, including enjoyment....
Can we iMAgine...!?