Sport and Deviance

Neither deviancy nor criminological theory has ever really attained widespread popularity or usage in the sociology of sport. Yet many research ventures into sports worlds illustrate how there are both formal and informal rules of order in these worlds that are policed, tested, sanctioned, and altered. People breaking such rules face private and public sanctions from time to time, and these sanctions carry concrete consequences for those labeled as offenders. What is especially interesting is how sports institutions and cultures themselves actively promote and then punish rule violations, player misconduct, and general “bad behavior” in a range of ways. Simply put, sport and exercise cultures are rife with the performance of wanted deviance. Wanted deviance is a behavior, perspective, or symbol that violates accepted social or cultural rules, norms or standards within an institutional/cultural setting, but does not raise the alarm as something requiring either outright condemnation or strict control. Stated differently, while the behavior might violate ostensible rules of a culture, and audiences regard it as socially “problematic” in one manner or another, it may be permitted as it serves as social function in one capacity or another. For example, these forms of deviance may even be exciting for both participants and spectators at times. When wanted rule violations are relatively controlled, they are not seen as being symptomatic of pathological circumstances.

Considerable evidence suggests that rule violations in sports are indeed wanted by players, coaches, leagues, audiences, and other stakeholders. Watching physical manifestations of deviance, such as a fistfight in ice hockey, for example, can be physiologically pleasurable and, thus, emotionally meaningful for audiences. Learning that an athlete used performance-enhancing drugs (“doping”) to win may be interesting because it leads to record-breaking times, and discovering that the athlete cheated brings an added element of excitement as it adds further drama to the sport spectacle itself. The violation may thrill, intrigue, or reinforce meaningful social allegiances between participants and audiences. However, rule violators are not always excused of their wrongdoing or granted an unchecked license to thrill with their particular behavior—as evidenced by the increasing intervention of sports authorities into high hits or headshots in ice hockey and in American football regarding concussions and other head injuries.

What sport insiders and their audiences define as acceptable and unacceptable behavior is, at best, inconsistent. As such, studying and theorizing (wanted and unwanted) sport deviance, misconduct, or inappropriate behavior is challenging. In contact sports such as rugby, ice hockey, soccer, and American football, there is considerable tension regarding the tactical use of wanted deviance by coaches and athletes in the throes of competition and its mass mediation by sport promoters. Marketers of North American ice hockey might find permissible on-ice violence hard to sell if both wanted (e.g., body checks or fistfighting) and unwanted (e.g., stick swinging leading to injury) forms of physical violence in the game did not create excitement and tension for audiences. To make sense of such accommodations and contradictions, the emotionaltension balances of safety and risk underpinning competitive sports are a defining feature of their [Page 684]appeal. Quite simply, establishing something that clearly “crosses the line” in the world of sport can be tricky. This entry explores the social control and criminality of deviance in sport.

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