How is it diminishing sports to point out that they cause a hell of a lot more wear and tear (and involve a greater risk of injury) than sitting down for eight hours (for any reason) does?
And no, unless you are counting things like chess as a sport (and/or conflating exercise with sports), the vast majority of sports carry incredible risk of both minor and major injury compared to a sedentary lifestyle. Here[0] is a list of the Olympic sports for example; there isn't a single one that doesn't routinely cause injuries.
My point remains that if I get tendinitis or bursitis from playing soccer nobody clutches pearls about the sport but if I get the exact same injury from playing video games it's somehow more concerning - this is a reflection of how society values those things, not of their actual danger levels. Hell, I can get the same injuries from playing the piano but pretty much nobody leads a discussion about piano with "it wrecks your body".
100% of people who sit down for years will suffer damage that is very difficult to reverse. Unless they are proactive in counteracting.
< 100% of people who play sports will suffer damage of the same degree.
People don’t talk about soccer in this light because soccer players after retirement don’t have severe hip and glute mobility issues, they can also walk for more than 20 minutes without struggling. Are some of them dinged up? Yes. Some.
Soccer will absolutely leave you with mobility issues - it's a sport that puts immense and rather unnatural load on your hips, knees and ankles. The insistence that overloading your joints won't cause long-term damage when it's because of a sport but will cause damage when it's because of something "trivial" is pure magical thinking. I promise you your ligaments and bursae don't care if the physical stress they go through is "worthy" or not.
Also, it's rather disingenuous to (correctly) point out that long-term overloading of the lower spine and hips from sitting at a desk will develop into chronic conditions unless countered...and then completely dodge the fact that professional soccer players after retirement have had careers full of mitigation (from physiotherapy to outright surgery) paid for by their clubs[0] to counter the acute damage that they suffer. And even with that, plenty of professional athletes still develop issues like chronic ankle instability, because there is only so much you can "ding up" and repair an ankle before it simply loses its structural integrity. Those of us who do play sports know just how much damage there is to counter, and we don't all have a VC-sized budget backing us up to mitigate it.
For goodness' sake we colloquially name various conditions for sports ("golfer's/baseball elbow", "tennis elbow", "runner's knee", etc). I have zero idea how anyone would come to the conclusion that it's rare for sports played for significant amounts of time to damage the body - again, unless they are conflating them with more normal forms of exercise.
0. And yes, the fact that it's paid for by their clubs is important - as I implied in my original comment, the vast majority of employers who demand that office workers sit at their desks for hours at a stretch certainly don't take any responsibility for any serious medical issues that arise from that.
And no, unless you are counting things like chess as a sport (and/or conflating exercise with sports), the vast majority of sports carry incredible risk of both minor and major injury compared to a sedentary lifestyle. Here[0] is a list of the Olympic sports for example; there isn't a single one that doesn't routinely cause injuries.
My point remains that if I get tendinitis or bursitis from playing soccer nobody clutches pearls about the sport but if I get the exact same injury from playing video games it's somehow more concerning - this is a reflection of how society values those things, not of their actual danger levels. Hell, I can get the same injuries from playing the piano but pretty much nobody leads a discussion about piano with "it wrecks your body".
0. https://olympics.com/en/sports/