The links between sport and social policy have been extensively analysed in recent years, with governmental agencies, academics and third sector organizations (such as the Substance co-operative ) producing a wealth of material that has sought to promote the benefits (or highlight the problems) involved in using sports participation as a vehicle for integrating individuals and marginal social groups into ‘mainstream’ society.

On the one hand sport can be seen as an important means of encouraging personal development, social solidarity and identity – and its proponents have claimed that sports participation can improve health, reduce crime and lead to greater community cohesion in deprived areas. However, some critics have questioned the use of sport in social policy – either on conservative grounds that such activities are a frivolous waste of public money, or (from the left) because programmes offer only a superficial mask for some of the more ingrained, material causes of poverty and social inequality. Indeed, more dystopian critics see sports development only as an instrumental form of public control – a sinister means of occupying otherwise troublesome bodies and minds.

While the debate continues, I recently came across a grassroots organization taking the lead in developing some of the positive aspects of sport and community cohesion. Inter Mancunia is a football club run predominantly for refugees and asylum seekers based in Greater Manchester. It is run by volunteers and part-funded by the Football Foundation and provides training and coaching facilities for its membership – which is free and open to all-comers.

One of the aims of Inter Mancunia is to make disadvantaged young people, refugees and asylum seekers feel welcome in the city, and to build good relations within and across different ethnic groups and between new migrants and existing local people.

Last month Inter Mancunia organised the inaugural Brighter Futures Cup – a one-day 7-a-side tournament at Manchester Grammar School involving various teams, including ones from Uganda, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the odd team of Brits to make up the numbers. I was coaxed out of semi-retirement to turn out for one of these - and quickly realised that maybe I’d hadn’t retained as much of ‘the old magic’ as I’d hoped.

However the tournament was great fun, very competitive but played in excellent spirit - and was eventually won by Salford Welcome) who triumphed 3-1 in an entertaining final.

Salford Welcome

As I eased my aching limbs afterwards something struck me about the tournament. While its social benefits were evident in terms of enhancing contact between different groups, encouraging participation in collective activity, providing a sense of identification and so on, these were not being imposed. They weren’t instrumentally geared to meet some existing programme of government; nor was there a sense that the organization was meeting some ‘target’ or even self-consciously engaged in ‘good work’ – indeed the organizers seemed to spend most of the tournament cursing the day they ever got involved in it.

What came across from everyone involved was the sense that simply playing football was the main pleasurable (and social) end in itself and a sufficient reason for the tournament to exist. Put otherwise, a good game and a good laugh were of greater priority than the good deed. So roll on the next tournament.

This event serves to remind us that the ‘global game’ remains important for contributing to intrinsic senses of well-being, shared endeavour and fun - notwithstanding its increasingly problematic commercialization at the professional level, or its enhanced instrumental usage in the policy arena. It is also evident that, aside from the policy debate, the real ‘social value’ of football (and sport generally) is actually more contested and open to multiple interpretations. As in so many areas of life, sport is a contradictory and diverse practice and so its motives, meanings and impacts must be evaluated in each empirical context. As social scientists we know that sport offers a variety of progressive and less-progressive social possibilities – and exploring the contexts under which each and both apply remains an ongoing and necessary (if sometimes tiring!) concern.

Find out more

Free study materials from The Open University: Society in the LearningSpace

Study sport with The Open University

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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Thinking Allowed

Sport might appear to be all about fair play, but it is also all about winning and losing; and some of the rewards for success are rich indeed. Consequently, there are powerful temptations to bend, or even break, the rules to secure the rich prizes that are available to the winners. To some extent sport makes its own rules, although decision making is increasingly subject to public appraisal and the sponsors of sport and its regulatory bodies must abide by the rules of the wider society. Sport has its own governing bodies that regulate the bodies that take part.

Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable.

Although sport is big business, and constituted by media, sponsorship and commercial networks as well as its practitioners, at all levels, it is also a particular social world, which seems to operate outside the parameters of convention in an uneasy relationship between promoting competition and elite outcomes, at the same time as widening participation and creating greater equality and cohesion. Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable (for some).

Sport is not outside debates about corruption and unfair, even illegal practices, although what is categorised as corruption in sport often centres on revelations of drug abuse and performance enhancement by individual athletes. Doping and match fixing affect the results of sporting events, which undermine the basic principles of sport, and implicate participants, organising bodies and promoters. Ideals of fair play and amateurism underpinned the Olympic movement; the modern Games were based on a movement with stated ideals, some of which seem less relevant today, like the amateur ideal and requirement that athletes be amateurs and not professionals.

Marc Hodler revealled corruption in the International Olympic Committee
[Image from Wikimedia: available under GNU Free Documentation Licence]

The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes

Ideas about democratic participation and fair play remain a powerful part of Olympic rhetoric and governance, although what counts as social exclusion or social inclusion in sport varies according to time and place. These ideals not only seem incompatible with corruption, they also serve to conceal it; rather like white-collar crime. It’s not what convention leads us to expect, whatever the current furore about bankers and politicians, so it passes unnoticed. The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes that precede success in being the host city. As Andrew Jennings has demonstrated, corrupt practices have been rife within the IOC (International Olympic Committee), and came to a head with the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, when Marc Hodler, an IOC member, broke ranks and revealed that agents had been bribed to vote for cities bidding for the right to host the Games. This blew the lid on systematic malpractice within the IOC, and an internal enquiry found clear evidence that up to 20 of the 110 IOC members had been bribed to vote for Salt Lake. It didn’t stop in 2002, though, and there continue to be claims of corruption in the bidding process in the lead-up to 2012. 

The 2012 website may be counting off the days, but news stories also show some of the tensions and difficulties that beset the staging of any such mega sporting event and, indeed, sport in general. Like all sporting activities, the Games involve both winning and losing, success and failure, equalities and inequalities. The Olympic democratic ideals, global reach and wide range of sports and participation mean that the Games lend themselves more powerfully to such a politics of inclusion than most other sports, especially those which are dominated by commercial concerns.

Corruption in the Games, as across sport, can be seen as the outcome of a failure of governance as Sunder Katwala has argued. This failure can be seen in part as dependent upon the inequalities that permeate the organisation of sport, and not the more corporeal inequalities or differences in skill and competence that are displayed on the field. Corruption in sport may be primarily economic and financial but it is also social and cultural and draws on social inequalities that are not entirely dependent on athletic competence.

If some of the lessons learned from critiques of white-collar crime mean drawing attention to the privileges of class, gender and ethnicity that can be obscured by ever growing bureaucratic regulatory bodies, then this concept has some purchase in understanding the slow pace of change in the governance of sport.

Find out more

• OpenLearn: Influences on corporate governance – free learning material from The Open University
• The great Olympic illusion

Further reading

• 'Embodied Sporting Practices: Regulating and Regulatory Bodies', by Kath Woodward, Palgrave Macmillan
• 'Dishonored Games: Corruption, Money and Greed at the Olympics', by Viv Simpson and Andrew Jennings, SPI Books (US)

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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Sex and gender are in the news again. While in the academy boundaries are blurred and sex as well as gender can be seen as socially constructed and subject to social and cultural inscriptions that shape classification, in sport there remain very clear definitions of female and male with competitions being for women or for men. Things may not be quite so clear, however as is evident in the enormous coverage given to the 800m gold medallist Caster Semenya. She is fast, so fast that other athletes questioned whether she was a woman, leading the IAAF to instigate gender verification tests, albeit in a procedure that, quite wrongly was leaked before the final at the World Athletics Championships in August.

Caster Semenya
[image © copyright José Goulão, some rights reserved]

As a sociologist who writes about bodies in sport, I feel fortunate to have been asked to comment, if depressed that many of the media interviews have been prefaced by some reference to Semenya’s ‘masculine’ appearance. It is hardly surprising that the athlete has a lean body with muscles; most athletes do. Bodies are shaped by sporting practices and these practices shape sport, but bodies are gendered and women in sport have to negotiate racialised, heterosexist stereotypes. Semenya’s raised levels of testosterone may tell us more about what happens to the body of an elite athlete than establishing any certainty about gender categories.

The debate, especially as manifest in media coverage, has invoked expert scientific and medical commentary in its path from claims of unfair practice and a body variously described as ‘manly’ and with a ‘strikingly musculature physique’ to sympathy for defiant resistance to the humiliation of gender verification testing and the claims that this very fast woman, must be a man.

Gender testing has a long history in sport, even though compulsory tests were abandoned at the Olympics in 1992. Tests have changed from those based on the embodied features which ‘experts’ can see to DNA and chromosomal tests to the current more complex panoply of procedures that include psychological testing. Perhaps there is some acknowledgement of the complexity of gender identities and the weakness of a distinction based on the categorisation of human beings into two sexes; intersex and a range of different forms of development mean that many people than we imagine do not conform neatly to the clear genetic and physical criteria that the regulatory bodies of sport deploy.

The very term 'gender verification' suggests that we could get at the truth. A team of experts will find out, but gender is more complex. The current coverage of Semenya's case illustrates how troubling gender is in sport. Images draw upon stereotypes of what constitutes masculinity and femininity in the current case, as in so many in the past. Women athletes have to reassure us of their femininity, through comportment and appearance, even when they, through the body practices of their sport, necessarily have very different bodies from their female non-sporting counterparts.

Public debate is always framed by a moral discourse of 'fair play' that invokes the unfair advantage that men who pass a women might gain in sport, but what is most alarming and distressing about these cases is the humiliation that women undergo in being subjected to 'verification' and the public and expert scrutiny that is reserved for women. The drug testing which has largely replaced the genetic testing in the Olympics could be carried out without a specifically gendered emphasis. Then maybe we could celebrate the achievements of a woman who can run very fast.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts