Review of Chapter 5 Sport and Crime

 Chapter 5 Modes of Surveillance, Governance and Surveillance in Sport

This chapter looks at the ‘security legacy’ that follows from hosting mega sorts events that involves a general surveillance of populations and the more individual surveillance, governance and policing of athletes bodies. I am glad to see attention to the mundane as well as the exceptional.

The work of Roche (2000) on the Berlin (1936) and Barcelona (1996) is highlighted and borrowing from Critical Security Studies safety and security at mega events is considered before examining three aspects of sports surveillance: 1) for ‘safety’ and ‘security’; 2) ‘lateral surveillance’ and 3) of athletic bodies and performance.

So we need to be very careful in asking for whom security and safety are promised and on what terms. So we see how ‘hooliganism and ‘terrorism’ are utilised. Intriguingly by Baudrillard to call out Mrs Thatcher’s terrorism against the miners but most often by states to impose security apparatus that lingers on in legacy form. And, it might be said, to blame hooliganism for all problems in sport and specifically Liverpool fans. They note also the confluence of discourses around hooliganism and terrorism.

The promised legacy of mega events rarely occurs but the that of surveillance lingers on. Even one-off events like a Champions League final or Super Bowl often leads to greater surveillance. Though I would suggest some cities are now so densely surveilled that the presence or effect of additional surveillance might be difficult to assess. And, anecdote again, my attendance at the Rugby World Cup suggested to me that Tokyo city was so large that the the event was barely noticed beyond the stadium and fan zone. But note Millward et al quote South Wales Police on the use of a Champions League Cup in Cardiff to ‘test and prove concepts’. However, this did not go well (BBC, 2018) and was critically contested by fans and commentators.

Much is made of the use of CCTV and it would have been nice if some of material on this were quoted. For instance Crime control or crime culture TV? and As Easy as AB and CCTV one of the first pieces of work on such matters (1994!).

The encouragement for players or fans to inform on each other is pictured as ‘peer monitoring’ or 'lateral surveillance'.

As my talk to UEFA shows (see above) I am particularly concerned for the rights of athletes in their own right but also down the line of all of us. It is interesting to see that the ‘whereabouts’ procedures are described as ‘draconian’ by Andy Murray. We keep less tight tabs on convicted dangerous and sexual offenders.

I think Millward et al are right to note the greater impact of many of these things in the global south. But within the global north they note disparities with the National Basketball Association’s dress code squarely aimed at the many young black athletes on their rosters (see Kennedy and Silva, 2020 on similar in the National Hockey League).

Review of chapters 1-4 of Sport and Crime Millward, Ludvigsen and Sly

 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).

I’ll review a chapter at a time over the next few weeks.

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.

Chapter 3 Sport, Corruption and White-Collar Criminality’

The chapter is sub-titled Crimes of the Powerful (1) and we get part 2 of that in Chapter 7.

The focus of this chapter is the proven and suggested corruption within the IOC and FIFA related to a far too close connection with various commercial interests. Most of this work has been done by investigative journalists.

They use Sutherland to add a critical criminological edge to the work of the late Andrew Jennings and co-writers. They open their chapter with a very lengthy, and thoroughly justified, quote from Jennings (2011) in which he opens by admitting he is a criminal. That is that those he seeks to investigate and have prosecuted are so powerful that they can define his activities as criminal but not theirs.

I only briefly referred to Jennings in my work but I can now offer some personal thoughts on corruption.  A quote from Andy Brown of the Sports Integrity Initiative sets the scene.

Nic Groombridge, […] argued that current anti-doping rules are ineffective as a deterrent to doping, in parallel to the argument that laws on drugs are ineffective in deterring users from taking them.

He argued that as in society, the focus should be on harm reduction rather than outright prohibition as the war on drugs has been lost. He explained that a needle exchange programme had found that 30% of needles tested showed use of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), illustrating that the public – and not just elite athletes – are widely using such substances.

 

Groombridge pointed out that athletes are an easier target to prosecute for PIEDS than the general public, as they too easily surrender their rights. Delegates argued that as athletes are involved in competition and the public are not, permitting them to take PIEDs risked forcing other athletes to do the same in order to stay competitive. 

This was at the 2018 UEFA Anti-doping Symposium.  It was held at the Royal Institution and some of my reflections on this event are here. So where was the corruption?

We were all put up in a five star hotel and catered well. Since I had warned the organisers I was not proposing to say comforting things I was not expecting to be offered any work or contracts but the cosy international milieu suggested to me that had I cut my cloth to fit I might have secured preferment. They all largely agreed with each other and resented my suggestion that corruption was the worse problem. And that doping/anti-doping served - even if not deliberately - as a distraction from that. And the recent news about ongoing corruption in UEFA backs this up.

My association with penal charities and as an occasional lecturer with Kings College London has given me access to some high end law firms for wine and canapé type events and I always sense the power that flows through such places and the interconnections of powerful interests.

Being well fed and entertained is very nice as is being thought to have some significance if only for an hour or two is nicer. But it does not match up to ‘free shotguns, skis, clothing, video games, hunting trips, shopping sprees’ etc noted by Boycoff (2016) that some IOC members received in Utah prior to Salt Lake City getting the Winter Games.

 Chapter 4 Governing Young People and Communities Through Sport

Millward et al point us towards the work of Lauss and Szigetvari (2010) who deploy a foucauldian concept of ‘Governing by Fun’ and other critical  approaches are used to look at sport as a hook and general good thing (my coining). This is also picked up by Kelly (2013) who evaluates projects aimed at preventing crime or rehabilitating offenders in terms of: ‘sports for all’; ‘social cohesion’; ‘pathway to work’ and ‘giving a voice’ to young people.

This illustrates the difficulty of determining what counts as ‘working’. And Chamberlain (2013) is rightly cited as noting that many evaluations are not robust and rely too often on anecdote.

As a Home Office civil servant in the Probation Service Division I funded a number of projects under the Supervision Grant Scheme (SuGS, named by me for Madness frontman). Amongst the schemes funded were some sports ones and several motor projects which took convicted offenders and young people seen to be ‘at risk’.

I left to take my PhD on car crime and my two fieldwork sites were at motor projects that I had visited often before. As a side project I undertook an ‘evaluation’ of one. Clearly it was impossible to indisputably impute any reduction in offending to attendance at the Motor Project. Especially since this might just be one evening a week with no added educational or rehabilitative modules or packages. Though anecdotally know some of those attending seriously reduced their taking of cars but continued to offend (ordering 'weed' by phone whilst be interviewed by me in their home).

My cultural criminological take didn’t seek to say whether the projects worked in strict crime reduction/prevention or even foucauldian fun terms but interrogate why the ‘homeopathic/naturopathic’ solution to car crime was seen to be limited access to cars. I concluded that the problem of car crime could only be seen in addressing the wider ‘car culture’. This lead in the direction of ‘green criminology’ and through an interest in masculinities (tip of the hat to Tim Newburn and Betsy Stanko) onto ‘queering criminology’.

If working with cars and occasionally racing them (only some motor projects allowed this) did work it seemed to me it did so by (re)integrating the young men into a ‘car culture’ which was still problematic. I met only ever one young woman at a project, and she may have been ‘at risk’ but car-obsessed rather than a joyrider. I accept that a foucauldian fun/governance framework could be applied to such projects but that the ‘norm’ they are to internalise need challenging. To be clear that norm is the use of cars as transport and (as advertised) the means to fulfil our dreams. See my  Ambivalent Criminology – ‘Have you stopped driving your car?’ Paper given to BSC Conference LSE 2007'

The sports-based interventions that Millward et al review should stand a better chance of ‘working’ as more ‘work’ is done for those attending beyond the ‘hook’ of sport and yet beyond anecdote few can.

The fun/governance nexus is further explored in respect of fan zones and here I can offer another anecdote.

In 2019 I went to Japan for the Rugby World Cup. I saw Wales beat Georgia and Australia in early rounds. I attended fan zones prior to and post match for those events. I also saw more matches from later rounds at a fan zone in Tokyo, particularly enjoying watching Japan progress. I more my Japan rugby shirt and enjoyed drinks and chats with English, Welsh, Scottish and American fans.

Since I was not likely to start any fighting I’m not sure I needed governing through fun (Japanese boy bands anyone?) but certainly prefer that to be governed in ‘unfun’ ways. We do need to remember that the ‘fun’ of projects or zones is often condemned by those with more straight forwardly punitive views. On fan zones think we need work on researching differences between the different audiences for live and zoned sports and between different sports.

Obviously discussion of fan zones and the Rugby World Cup lead us into their fifth chapter.

Review of 'Sport and Crime: Towards a critical criminology of sport'

 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).

I’ll review a chapter at a time over the next few weeks.

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.

Chapter 3 Sport, Corruption and White-Collar Criminality’

The chapter is sub-titled Crimes of the Powerful (1) and we get part 2 of that in Chapter 7.

The focus of this chapter is the proven and suggested corruption within the IOC and FIFA related to a far too close connection with various commercial interests. Most of this work has been done by investigative journalists.

They use Sutherland to add a critical criminological edge to the work of the late Andrew Jennings and co-writers. They open their chapter with a very lengthy, and thoroughly justified, quote from Jennings (2011) in which he opens by admitting he is a criminal. That is that those he seeks to investigate and have prosecuted are so powerful that they can define his activities as criminal but not theirs.

I only briefly referred to Jennings in my work but I can now offer some personal thoughts on corruption.  A quote from Andy Brown of the Sports Integrity Initiative sets the scene.

Nic Groombridge, […] argued that current anti-doping rules are ineffective as a deterrent to doping, in parallel to the argument that laws on drugs are ineffective in deterring users from taking them.

He argued that as in society, the focus should be on harm reduction rather than outright prohibition as the war on drugs has been lost. He explained that a needle exchange programme had found that 30% of needles tested showed use of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), illustrating that the public – and not just elite athletes – are widely using such substances.

 

Groombridge pointed out that athletes are an easier target to prosecute for PIEDS than the general public, as they too easily surrender their rights. Delegates argued that as athletes are involved in competition and the public are not, permitting them to take PIEDs risked forcing other athletes to do the same in order to stay competitive. 

This was at the 2018 UEFA Anti-doping Symposium.  It was held at the Royal Institution and some of my reflections on this event are here. So where was the corruption?

We were all put up in a five star hotel and catered well. Since I had warned the organisers I was not proposing to say comforting things I was not expecting to be offered any work or contracts but the cosy international milieu suggested to me that had I cut my cloth to fit I might have secured preferment. They all largely agreed with each other and resented my suggestion that corruption was the worse problem. And that doping/anti-doping served - even if not deliberately - as a distraction from that. And the recent news about ongoing corruption in UEFA backs this up.

My association with penal charities and as an occasional lecturer with Kings College London has given me access to some high end law firms for wine and canapé type events and I always sense the power that flows through such places and the interconnections of powerful interests.

Being well fed and entertained is very nice as is being thought to have some significance if only for an hour or two is nicer. But it does not match up to ‘free shotguns, skis, clothing, video games, hunting trips, shopping sprees’ etc noted by Boycoff (2016) that some IOC members received in Utah prior to Salt Lake City getting the Winter Games.

 

Sport and Crime: Towards a critical criminology of sport review of intro and chapter 2

 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.

Farting in Church: Doping in Sport

I don't attend church or chapel but a couple of weeks ago it felt like I'd joined a sect or at least witnessed one: the Church of Anti-Doping. I farted there and, indeed, to see the way that some congregants reacted you’d think I’d crapped in the nave. UEFA called it, “FA anti-doping summit issues call to 'catch the cheats’”. I’d been told it was a Symposium.

When first approached I thought it was a scam or a wind up and also could not imagine they’d want my critical input. But no they definitely wanted my input as a criminologist and eventually was asked that my 25 minute presentation touch on these issues:

• Introduction to deterrence: Overview of key notions and concepts in studying deterrent effects of laws/rules
• Are anti-doping regulations/practices as currently implemented likely to be effective at deterring doping-related conduct?
• Comments on the deterrent effect of the increase in the basic sanction for certain substances from two to four years
• Comments on the deterrent effect of re-testing athletes’ samples from many years earlier
• Conclusions/recommendations to enhance the deterrent effect of anti-doping regulations/practices

I was concerned that my opinions were being potentially constrained but come the day I had my say. Some of this comes through in this report from Sports Integrity Initiative of the Symposium. But, as my opening paragraph suggests it it did not go down well. I got into quite an argument with Jean-Pierre Morand. He is very well connected as were many of those who attended. So well connected as to be deeply stitched into the sports law establishment. His patent disregard for any of my points - interrupting my presentation and hogging questions at the end - meant I was not at my coolest and eloquent in answering him and others.

I posted on Facebook that day that I’d had quite a mauling but a few congregants did come up and talk to me during the drinks reception and show some support for some of my ideas or, at least, my temerity. Since then I’ve also tried to explain my position on doping/anti-doping (AD) to non-lawyer or criminology friends who saw the post and subsequent pictures of me being fierce. Trying to do this and taking into account the few friendly engagements plus some parts of presentations made by Paul Dimeo and Andreas Zagklis has lead me to blog this in the form of questions I’ve faced or have since asked myself.  Perhaps I’d have been more persuasive if I’d done this earlier.

Deterrence?

I pointed out that there were many and varied opinions on deterrence but I argued that criminology might be seen as the study of the undeterred. Classicist and administrative criminology favours forms of rational sentencing and situational deterrence. These would seem to sit well with the rules-based nature of much sport - many of my questioners - clung to more authoritarian (irrational?) views of putting the fear of god into criminals/dopers.

From my green criminology I pointed out that doubling fines for litter didn’t seem that effective in deterring let alone doubling the deterrent threat. From football specifically I mentioned the extent of ‘diving’ (simulation of being fouled) having not been deterred by masses of witnesses (the crowd), the capable guardians of Routine Activity Theory (the officials) or CCTV (the many broadcast cameras).

Level Playing Field?

One justification for AD is that if one athlete dopes then the playing field for others is uneven. I turn that around and argue for an even playing field between athletes and non-athletes. AD causes a massive inequality between different classes of citizen. Even the low level at which I played my sport or even the most casual of observation would be that sport (like much of life) is not fair and often cements rather than ameliorates that unfairness.

Cheating? 

I don’t believe anybody has ever managed to arrange for a 100 metre race to be only 90 metres for them alone but that would be cheating. But 200/400 track runners and sometimes others are judged to have stepped off line and therefore run shorter than other competitors. I’ve no reason to believe any of these have been with an intent to cheat. At school we were occasionally forced to do cross country and word was that some people cheated and cut corners. I didn’t, but understood this cheating was not to win or to prevent losing but simply and painlessly fulfilling the requirement to do it. However, as runners in the recent Shenzhen Half Marathon showed some people do find ways to shorten their own course. Not to win but simply to be able to say that they completed it. It was cameras that detected (note not deterred) the cheating. I know I’d feel cheated if I discovered any of my marathon courses turned out to be measured as short.

Health?

Criminologists know the extent to which ‘crime’ is highly relative. Crimes in one era or country may differ and sometimes your status may allow you to carry out actions that are crimes for others (age of drink, sex, voting etc). Studying the list of banned substances shows that doping/cheating can change over night - as Maria Sharapova knows to her cost. Many athletes take vitamins/supplements but these can be seen as gateways in the way that cannabis is sometimes alleged to be for hard drugs. What if vitamins were banned? If they truly work perhaps they should be.

The tablets that WADA brings down from the mountain need to be swallowed with caution.

Team sports?

Much of the second day was about the differences for team sports which encourage me to believe that my suggestion that football should go for Socexit from WADA-imposed individual sports templates. I suggested that England football team up against the ‘hand of god’ could have taken a truck load of drugs and still not won. Whereas individual drug use can be effective as the next section examines.

The athlete’s view?

A particular test for me of my views was hearing Christine Girard speak. I know athletes are unlikely to appreciate my defence of their rights as many have bought into the obviousness of clean sport and the necessity of AD. Perhaps too they see no future for them or for sport if they become apostates. Christine spoke movingly about the justice she found in finally receiving medals and recognition when promoted to the podium many years because of the drug failures of others.

Clearly I don’t want to hurt her or suggest she is wrong but now I would suggest that despite being in a sport in which doping was known to be rife she did well and did not, in her terms, ‘cheat’. But participating in an unregarded sport in Canada she’d not have faced the same pressures as athletes under extreme State or Corporate pressure. It was not the AD system that deterred her.

  Full time

In conclusion in addition to Dimeo’s fault finding with the anti-doping system I would add two additional reasons not to be cheerful which we’ll come to. He and Verner Møller set out these ‘inadvertent consequences of anti-doping’ whilst noting apropos deterrence that numbers of failed tests suggests little deterrence:

A super efficient testing system might be used to take out rivals by spiking their food/drink/ supplements etc. They give proved and alleged cases. But note that the strict liability approach is so central to anti-doping that such miscarriages of justice will continue. A team wishing to get out of an expensive contract might allow an athlete in their care to fail a test or the whereabouts requirements. A State-sponsored athlete who had displeased their sporting or political masters might be thrown under the bus to placate the demands of the anti-doping gods.

The growth of testing is matched by a growth in creating the undetectable by ‘doping doctors’ and again they give examples. Read the book!

All of this leads to miscarriages of justice when innocent dopers are sacrificed on the altar of anti-doping. For instance, the widespread use of hormones in cattle-raising in many parts of the world have lead to failed tests. Such news lead to one participant in the seminar to opine that athletes would perforce have to become vegetarian. As a vegetarian that’s low on my list of human rights abuses but as argued above must concede that it is an abuse.

Close to this are issues of athletes privacy. The whereabouts rules are highly restrictive and convicted paedophiles in the community are subject to less scrutiny. There have been errors and unreasonable demands that would lead to an outcry if ‘the rest of us’ were subject to them. Christine Gerard did express here concern as a young woman being obliged to urinate in front of a stranger.

Which brings us to my additional thoughts. Dimeo and Møller couch their arguments in terms of inadvertence but I’d go further and suggest the occasional conspiracy but mostly the ideological issues.

One of my concerns is the grim determination/desperation of athletes in clinging to the current system and embracing their own slavery to the dictates of AD. The levels of surveillance they endure and the abandonment of their own human rights makes me fear for my own. I do not believe that sports people are a deliberately sharpened thin end of an overweening totalitarian wedge but part of a societal trend which should be challenged. To coin an aphorism, an elite athlete is someone you’ll do anything to win from taking drugs to giving up their own and others human rights.

Again, there is no suggestion that this is a deliberate policy but the heat generated by AD policies and ritual denouncing of ‘drug cheats’ provides plenty of inadvertent cover for other activities and failures.  Thus corruption, match-fixing and on-field cheating are downplayed. AD appears to offer an objective, scientific solution to a problem.

In criminology there are arguments about whether prison works and if so how but a critical take is that prison is not meant to work as rehabilitation of, or deterrent to, the criminal but ideologically to justify punishment and oppression. AD is not so much meant to catch a few ‘evil’ or ‘dopey’ cheats but to discipline all athletes and, perhaps, all of us.

After match analysis

You ask what does this all mean? One one hand the end of all professional sport or the recognition that we are talking about a branch of the entertainment industry and it the narrative that is important not the cleanliness of the actors. My appreciation of the Tour de France has not diminished in the least because of past drug scandals. Lance Armstrong won through a combination of things and his boorishness and consistency both spoiled the story.

And let’s be clear, I’m not advocating doping. It is bad for you. Elite sport is bad for you.

But perhaps as grown ups we might say we don’t need fairy tales and that we don’t believe the gods of WADA can save us.