Sport is unequivocally understood as inherently good and widely beneficial for all. The Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector has grown exponentially over the past two decades based on just such an idea. Sport has attained an embedded and exalted status. It is found throughout various international bodies across the United Nations and beyond as a singularly flexible and ideal tool for striving to meet the Sustainable Development Goals. Thus, sport is ideal as a development tool. Such logic however obscures the ideologies that underpin how children are inculcated into specific forms and ideals of playing sport for development purposes. In doing so, this paper challenges the supposed liberating qualities of play and its surrounding rhetorics by illustrating how alleged freedoms are actually ideological constraints. This paper draws on seven years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the SDP sector to examine how specific implicit ideologies suffuse throughout international development projects that shape the ways “sport” is used to “develop” the participants of SDP programmes. The end result then is that sport experienced in Sport for Development and Peace is not the liberating empowering force it claims to be. Instead, the power of sport is used to reinforce existing hierarchies that maintain the marginalized in positions socioeconomic marginalization.