Sport and Crime: Towards a critical criminology of sport
It might be unusual to start with mentioning the acknowledgements in a book review but here we go.
Laura Kelly and Emma Poulton are mentioned as originators of the idea for this book and I can attest that ten years ago I advised Routledge to publish it. The book in hand is the successor text to that sadly unpublished one.
And to look even earlier in the book we might ask why the book is in sport and leisure series not a criminology one?
But as the Oxford Handbook of Sports History (Edelman and Wilson, 2017) contains only 4 mentions of ‘crime’ and one of the grand texts aimed at criminology students (Newburn, 2013) barely mentions sport we should not be surprised.
I am extremely grateful to Andy Millie for pushing me and Bristol University/Policy Press for bearing with me in getting my book accepted as a criminology one.
And whilst we are still looking at such ephemera I must take issue with the claim ‘that this is the first book to fully explore the connections between sports studies and criminology’ (website and back-of-book blurb!).
Introduction
I am cited on page 1 in the Introduction as noticing the ‘sheer potential for a distinctive criminology of sport’. I am mentioned amongst a number of others who I also acknowledge - such as Meek (2013) and Nichols (2010). I give a chapter to considering whether sport can prevent crime or rehabilitate the convicted as those two argue. I’m more equivocal. Millward et al engage in this debate in Chapter 4.
They note Avi Brisman’s review of my book in which he suggests my work was an ‘opening bell or starting pistol’ and likening me to a ‘father wanting acknowledgement of paternity without the responsibilities of child-rearing’. They are kinder but I’m going to admit Avi - who I know and respect - has me sussed, nearly. I am staking a claim - hence my eye-brow raising at the claim that this book is the first. But unlike a stern father I don’t seek to lay down the law and terrorise my children but keep a kindly, perhaps avuncular or god-parental, eye on what is going on in the playground. I’ve always had a ludic intent to my work.
So whether as parent, uncle or god-father I am engaging strongly in this review and have also provided the afterword for Power Played edited by Derek Silva and Liam Kennedy.
Millward et al are hopeful of the future of connections to be made between studies of sport and criminology. They kindly note my emphasis on mundane acts as well as spectacular or scandalous ones involving elites; for instance, they give an example of the banning of skateboards in Norway between 1978 and 1989. I agree their conclusion that ‘the relationship between ‘crime’ and ‘sport’ is so diffuse, contested and broad’ (p5). I would add that our relationship as people and criminologists is similarly diffuse, contested and broad.
My book took a critical criminological stance, even critiquing sports and theories I favoured but also attempted to set out how a variety of criminologies might be applied to sport. Millward et al dive right in so spend some of the introduction setting out some critical points.
Those critical points are:
1) there is a starting point in my work and that of others and
2) citing Francis (2012) they note ‘sport is and always will be harmful’ and
3) those harms include dead workers on Qatar’s World Cup stadia (which they take up in Chapter 7) and increased control and surveillance at sports mega-events (taken up in Chapter 5)
and 4) critical criminology has become diffuse and disputed. Sport makes a ‘novel entry point’ (p6).
Chapter 2 then provides further history of critical criminology and its scant engagement with sport.
Chapter 3 looks at white collar crime and crimes of the powerful in sport. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération internationale de Football Association (FIFA).
Using a Foucauldian lens, sports based interventions (SBIs) are examined in Chapter 4. They are found to mask social inequalities and control whilst providing isolated cases of ‘success’ (p9).
Critical Security Studies inform Chapter 5’s examination of sport mega-events but also of athlete’s bodies.
Drawing on ‘edgework’ Chapter 6 looks at mixed martial arts, bare-knuckle boxing and other extreme sports.
Chapter 7 focusses on the upcoming football Word Cup in Qatar and the social harms caused by it.
Chapter 8 sums up and offers a research agenda. I’ll check it against mine in (Hall and Scalia, 2019).
Chapter 2 - Sport and the Criminological Imagination
For criminology theory nerds chapter 2 offers a friendly history of some of the rifts (schisms?) in critical criminology from the work of Taylor, Walton and Young onward. I did my Masters and PhD at Middlesex University when Jock Young, John Lea and Roger Matthews were setting out a ‘left realist’ criminology opposed to right and administrative ones. I recall that at European events friendly but competitive relations were maintained with ‘left idealists’. Vincenzo Ruggiero provided a consistent sociological critique. (He was also my internal examiner. Tony Jefferson the external.)
I feel my criminology to be balanced (?) between ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ but broadened to include green and sexuality perspectives and possibly tempered by spending 20 years as a Home Office administrative and policy civil servant. I was lucky to know, but never work with, Tim Newburn, Ben Bowling, George Mair and Marian Fitzgerald and did work for Mike Hough when he was moonlighting as a pen-pusher.
The roots of my green and queered perspectives on criminology derive from my PhD on joyriding. I focussed on how similar joyriding was to the advertised pleasures of legal driving and how ungreen that was. Also the mainly young male joyriders seemed to have some anxieties around their masculinity. The fieldwork took place in ‘motor projects’ and some of this eventually found its way into my book years later. This will feed into my discussion of Millward et al’s chapter 4.
Whilst I hope that sports criminology is more than the extant studies of football hooligans I have to recognise with, Millward et al, that Taylor’s work on this topic is important. His first thoughts might be seen to be neo-marxist or left idealist in casting football hooligans as resistant ‘class warriors’ whereas his later accounts - moving in a realist direction - misread the Hillsborough disaster.
Taylor applied a critical criminology to a sport he loved. Few others did. We don’t get to find out how Millward et al relate to sport as participants or spectators. I have sometimes wondered if the lack of criminological engagement with topics close to our hearts like driving and car use has been an ambivalence which I think also applies to sport. They mention feminist critiques of left realism and other criminologies and suspect some feminists may not wish to engage with sport unless to note the masculinity of its adherents or the violence towards women of some sportsmen.
I would have been happy if this chapter had just told us that few attempts had been made to look critically at sport, cited my work and a few others on this before discussing Taylor’s trajectory from an idealist critical criminology to a more realist one. That could have been folded into the first chapter leaving space for another chapter of critical criminological engagement with more sports.
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