Our capacity for intentional action, or agency is fundamentally linked to the meaningfulness of the world in which we operate. Across domains this meaningfulness is being undermined, thwarting creative potential. Utilising examples from youth and senior football, I theorise around the question where are we now? I highlight how we are immersed in an ideology where, with standardisation as a device, the abstract knowing about is prioritised over the primary experience of knowing of the environment one inhabits. This is silently shaping even our ‘best’ intentions, compromising agency and creative endeavour. We need to bring agency back to the table. Foregrounding creativity and agency as a relational phenomenon, where creativity and agency are distinct but linked, it is recognised that creative actions are agentic, but not all agentic actions are creative. Within this phenomenological experience affordances “solicit” (or thwart) actions in a way that is sensitive to both the individual’s capacities and the broader environment. Creativity, then, can be understood as the relational enactment of perceptual openness to affordances. This view of creativity and indeed agency, as dynamic, context-dependent, relational and, deeply connected to the body and the world around has implications for understanding individual and collective learning and performance.