Page 34 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 15

instincts or the irrational gambling instinct, it was of course to be strictly
condemned.
(Weber 1930: 167)

There is little doubting what would have been the Puritans’ disapproval
of almost everything that characterizes the culture of sport today – the ecstasy
of the moment of victory, the chauvinistic pride when a fan’s team wins, and
the rawest of human feeling from high states of euphoria to violent impulses
(Kerr 1994). They would have condemned righteously the ever-expanding
possibilities to gamble not only on the outcome of a sports contest (or, in the
case of the ‘pools’, many simultaneous sports contests), but also on the seem-
ingly infinite range of mini-outcomes (such as predictions of scores, scorers,
timing of significant game developments, and so on) now made available on a
24-hour basis by a global Internet betting industry. Sport can be seen to be an
important symptom and a partial cause of a move away from a social order
founded on the repression of physical play and its pleasurable accoutrements to
one that not only accepts such pursuits, but also promotes and ‘makes capital’
from them. The constituents of the contemporary ‘carnivalesque’ (Bakhtin
1968) may have changed, but – as Hughson (1998) notes in his analysis of soccer
hooliganism – sport is still a significant site of struggle between the controllers
of social space and the controlled.
From the late eighteenth century onwards, the sea change in social organiza-
tion caused by the spread of factory labour, the growing concentration of the
new industrial proletariat in the cities, the circulation of popular democratic
and revolutionary ideas, and the mobilization of radical political movements –
in short, the capitalist, industrial, urban and political revolutions that unfolded
across the nineteenth century (Nisbet 1967) – made control and surveillance
of popular amusements more difficult. This increased degree of social licence
provoked an intensified ‘moral panic’ (Cohen 1980) about popular leisure
among the established landed class and the emerging capitalist class alike.
Pressure built up, therefore, for greater control over working-class activities
outside paid labour hours as part of a more general subjection to industrial
capitalism’s time and work-discipline (Thompson 1967). Workers were
expected to turn up for work on time and in a fit state for arduous and often
dangerous shifts in mines, mills and factories – any residual tolerance of
seasonal, intermittent and ill-disciplined agricultural labour was being swept
away by the industrial capitalist demand for efficiency and reliability. Such calls
for commitment to work and restrained leisure led, for example, to the banning
in 1860 of the ancient football game in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, leading to a
Court Circular carrying an ‘Obituary: Death of the Right Honourable Game
Football’ (Anon. 1992: 5). At the same time, there was a movement to promote