A Look at Sporting Attitudes: What Can We Do to Prevent Indiscipline in Sport?

On December 14, 2011

I was recently watching a Derren Brown vehicle on Channel 4 concerning deindividuation and how individuals can lose sense of their surroundings and do things that they normally wouldn’t because of a sense of anonymity within a crowd.

Coupled with Ash Read’s excellent recent article about discipline in grass roots football, Derren Brown got me thinking about the reasons behind bad behaviour and lack of respect in sport.

I have played a number of sports competitively over the years (both team based and individual) and I currently manage a local football team. However this season there have been a number of incidents that have left even a hardened sports fan as myself in shock at the level of disrespect shown within the game to opponents and officials.

Let me explain some recent incidents and then offer some potential explanations:

Incident 1

We recently had a cup game and were drawn against a team with a 100% record, 4 divisions above us and offered money to play. In what is typical fashion, we arrived at the game with just 11 players including a goalkeeper playing at left back and a centre half in goal due to a knee ligament injury who couldn’t dive to his left and no substitutes or even able to provide a linesman.

In all my years of sport I have never been beaten as badly as were that day and we lost 19-1. However, what really shocked me was not the result or the defeat, but the attitude of our opponents. Given that they were 3-0 up within 10 minutes of the game starting and with the game effectively won, their discipline and attitude was appalling.

Throughout the game they questioned every single decision made by the official and when we were awarded a penalty midway through the 2nd half, no less than 5 players surrounded the referee berating his decision. It was incredible. Here is a team that is clearly better than their opposition, winning at a canter and they are acting and behaving like children when a throw in doesn’t go their way.

Incident 2

The following week my team had a league fixture against a team who were a new addition this season to the league and are running away with the division. Again I managed to scratch together a team off the back of a 19-1 defeat and we put in a reasonably good performance and only lost 5-0.

The game was played in good spirit and the opposition seemed liked a decent bunch. Yet in the 90th minute of the game trailing 5-0 the ball broke to me just inside the opposition half and I played the ball with my left foot to our winger. A split second later an opposition player dived in after I had played the ball with two feet, studs up, straight into my right ankle.

My ligaments immediately ballooned and I was carried off. Indeed there is still swelling as I write this (3 weeks later) and I am experiencing significant shooting pains up my shin. Again I ask the question why would someone act in such an uncharacteristic way at the end of a game that has been already been won?

For me in the team that I manage it is about showing respect and walking away. My team have a play to win attitude but they know that I do not tolerate questioning decisions. My personal opinion is once the decision has been made – move on. I regularly tell my players to walk away even from contentious decisions. In this way we play the game in the way it is meant to be played. It is far easier for to leave the opposition to obsess and argue about decisions that they cannot change.

‘War, Aggression & Sport’

During my time at university I conducted a social research project investigating the causes of aggression in football in social and competitive situations. It was clear from my findings that even reasonably mild mannered individuals, when engaged in a competitive environment experience become increasingly aggressive.

The sociologist Richard Sipes, whose work ‘War, Aggression & Sport’ I referenced as an influence throughout my study, concluded that modern day sport has replaced warfare as a natural outlet of aggression for men. Indeed the fight mentality is ingrained within our very DNA that makes us human and modern day sport gives the individual an outlet for their natural aggression.

Therefore to summarise I feel that there is very little that can be done to prevent indiscipline, lack of respect and even violence in team sports as there are simply too many potential causes.

It is clear that there are a number of possible explanations to explain this and I am yet to even mention that the lack of respect in the grassroots game could be influenced by those in the professional game or indeed by the fact that players look to influence the officials not for the decision but for future decisions during the remainder of the game.

For me it’s an ugly part of the game that unfortunately will never be improved let alone be removed. Instead concentrate on your own conduct and maybe you can influence others.

How would you explain the lack of respect in the game and what do you think can be done about it?