Patrick Murphy

The social roots of football hooligan violence

The authors review evidence suggesting that football hooliganism is the product of specific structural conditions. They essay a preliminary conceptualization of the ways in which these conditions generate a violent or aggressive masculine style, and attempt to establish what it is about professional football that has given it a lasting hold on the imaginations of sections of the working class. A tentative explanation of football crowd behaviour is offered which relates long-term changes in rates of disorderliness to specific changes in the class structure and in the social composition of football crowds.

Anthropological versus sociological approaches to the study of soccer hooliganism: some critical notes

It is argued that the anthropological approach, as used by Armstrong and Harris, has not generated any breakthrough in the study of soccer hooliganism. In particular, it is suggested that their use of a commonsense rather than a sociological concept of violence vitiates their analysis in several ways, contributing above all to substantial inconsistencies between some of their own empirical data and their general conclusions concerning levels of soccer-related violence. It is also contended that their critique of the ‘figurational’ or ‘process-sociological’ approach followed by the Leicester researchers is based on a confused misrepresentation of that approach. Specifically it is argued (i) that Armstrong and Harris fail to recognize the wide range of methods, including extensive participant observation, used by the Leicester group, (ii) that their attempt to cast doubt on the Leicester groups contention that the core football hooligans come predominantly from the ‘rougher’ sections of the working class is based on nothing more than a priori speculation. In this connection, Armstrong and Harris themselves provide no reliable data on the social class of soccer hooligans in Sheffield, and they seem unaware of the fact that several different sources of data appear to confirm the finding of the Leicester group, (iii) they have misunderstood both the terminology and the reasoning of the Leicester group concerning the ‘rougher’ sections of the working class and their relationship to football hooliganism.

Sport for all: Some public health policy issues and problems

Abstract This paper has two central objectives: (1) to examine critically the assumption underlying a central objective of many ‘Sport for all’ programmes, namely to improve peoples health; (2) to illustrate, via the use of two recent British case studies, some of the complexities involved in the administration of sports policy and in coordinating sports policy with health policy. It is argued that almost all the studies which are cited to support the idea that sport is good for health refer not to sport but to physical activity or exercise. But physical activity and sport are not the same. The paper explores some of the key social differences between sport and physical activity–for example the fact that sport is inherently competitive and that many sports are mock battles in which aggression and the use of physical violence are central characteristics–and examines some of the health consequences of these social differences, for example in the terms of the injury risks. It is argued that if ‘Sport for al...

Boxing Blind: Unplanned Processes in the Development of Modern Boxing

This essay traces the development of boxing from its prizefighting days to its status as a modern sport. The essay is written using a figurational perspective. The broader aim underlying this analysis is to use it as a means of highlighting the central contribution made to the emergence, development and decline of sports forms, and indeed to human history as a whole, by unplanned, unforeseen processes. These phenomena are treated in a non-reified way. They are interpreted as emanating from the complexity of previous human interactions and the limited abilities of the participants to comprehend the nature of the dynamic, power relational networks in which they were embroiled. Unplanned processes take a variety of forms and they are explored further in a more concentrated case study of recent developments in amateur boxing.

Football Hooliganism in Britain before the First World War

This paper summarizes some preliminary findings of a three-year research project carried out at the University of Leicester. It discusses and partially refutes the theoretical explanations of football hooliganism as advanced by Taylor and Clarke. Based on historical research and a content analysis of selected reports of football hooliganism before the First World War, the paper shows that, contrary to common opinion, football hooliganism is by no means an entirely new phenomenon. It also examines the sociological implications of this finding and suggests that the major sociological explanations of football hooliganism offered so far will have to be substantially revised.

Drugs, Sport and Ideologies

In November 1989 Steve Pinsent, a British former Commonwealth Games weightlifting champion, was jailed for three months at Aylesbury Crown Court, near London, for supplying anabolic steroids. In passing sentence, Judge Morton Jack told Pinsent (The Times, 18 November 1989) that the use of drugs in sport to improve performances ‘is an evil which is prevalent and growing’. Judge Jack’s comment nicely points up two of the three interrelated issues which form the subject matter of this paper. The first of these concerns the question of whether the use of drugs in sport is indeed ‘prevalent and growing’. The second problem to be examined arises from the fact that what is often described as ‘drug abuse’ in sport frequently arouses strong and immediate condemnation — as expressed, for example, in Judge Jack’s use of the word ‘evil’ — and that this condemnation is frequently accompanied by demands for swingeing punishments, such as life bans, for athletes found guilty of using prohibited substances. But what is the basis of this opposition to the use of drugs in sport? In seeking to answer this apparently simple question, not from a moralistic but from a sociological perspective, we may be able to shed light on some aspects of the development and contemporary structure of modern sport. The third and final issue of this chapter is to examine some of the major processes, both within sport and within the structure of the wider society, which have been associated with the use of drugs in recent years.

Involvement and Detachment, from Principles to Practice: A Critical Reassessment of The Established and the Outsiders

In this paper we revisit The Established and the Outsiders (Elias and Scotson 1965; second edition 1994). We argue that Elias was so intent upon demonstrating the heuristic value of his theory of established–outsider relations that he allowed these concerns to cloud his assessment of Scotsons data. We argue that the paradox is Elias had already developed more sophisticated and flexible tools for analysing the dynamic complexities of human figurations. Finally, we suggest that the problems Elias encountered in maintaining an effective degree of detachment in this study may lead to a wider appreciation of the difficulties facing anyone wishing to move from an understanding of the principles of the involvement-detachment thesis to their practical application.

Sports administration on the hoof: the three points for a win ‘experiment’ in English soccer

In this essay we set out to rectify the failure of the English Football League to monitor the consequences of the three points for a win reform it introduced in 1981. We begin by identifying the conditions leading to its introduction before going on to present the before and after goal‐scoring patterns at the highest level of English football. We also compare the English situation with the impact the reform has had upon the elite level of Italian and Spanish football. We assess these processes from a figurational perspective and make specific use of Elias’s games model approach. We conclude that football administrators have yet to absorb the lessons that an understanding of these processes has to offer. ‘All the management know something is wrong – we are not idiots. But don’t ask me the solution’ (Jack Dunnett, President of the Football League, 1981). 1