Football, Ethics & Integrity

The Moral Lessons Of The FIFA Scandal

By Professor Mike McNamee (Swansea University)

June 10, 2015 Picture: Anton Gurevich/Flickr.

 This article is part of The Critique Exclusive The Philosophy of Sport In Practice
Part I: The FIFA World Cup.

T
he Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, wrote in his postwar classic Homo
Ludens (man the player) that play had its own kind of logic, existing to a
certain degree in its own world [1]. Though no philosopher, his criteria of
the concept of play have been the object of considerable discussion in the
philosophy of sport. Loosely put, he argued that play should be understood as free,
disconnected from ordinary life in a variety of ways, having its own compelling
order, and with no goals beyond itself. The philosopher of education Richard
Peters [2], while attempting to distinguish games and sports from “real” education,
offered a shorthand for this thesis. Games have their own ends: they are autotelic
(Kolnai, 1966) [3]. Game-playing was to be understood as essentially non-serious;
self-contained and disconnected from the serious business of living. These features
of play have strong historical and conceptual resonances to our ideas of playing
sports.

Their connection, however, to modern commercialized sports is less strong and

increasingly under threat. I want to remark upon two incidents, that show how
professional sport is nowadays big business and as such is intrinsically connected to
the spheres of economy, politics and, increasingly, to law. I draw on two examples
from the so-called ‘beautiful game’ in the last month.
th
The BBC reported on 19 May that 50 arrests had been made in Italy in response
to a match fixing investigation in the Italian professional football leagues (Division
3 and 4) [4]. The investigation, like others before it, focuses on bribery, corruption,
fraud, and illegal and irregular gambling – criminal acts that are said to threaten the
integrity of sports in general and football in particular. And, of course, global media
attention has focused this week – both on the back and the front pages – about the
election and subsequent resignation of FIFA President Sepp Blatter, and associated
issues. It is said that FIFA’s governance has lacked rigour and that certain of its
members have acted without integrity. What this all means, however, is another
matter. We need to move beneath the journalistic headlines.

The tension between play and professional sport is easy enough to see. Part of the
problem is a conceptual one. Simply referring to the playing of sports as a voluntary
engagement in self-contained, intrinsically valuable activates captures much of what
is at stake: sports’ autotelicity. But one’s lens must be bifocal, as it were. Serious
amateur and professional sports have always been as much about external ends as
internal ones. Elite sports have always been about display as much as play. And
display does not happen without institutions to guide sporting practices. The
trouble, of course, is their simultaneous efforts to support but also undermine the
very sports they exist for (MacIntyre, 1984; McNamee, 1995). Stephen Mumford’s
recent contribution to this site makes that clear, and his remarks about the political
dimension of sport are apposite here, too [5]. Sport has internal and external goals
or ends. The question is not so much how we preserve the autotelicity of elite sports,
but rather how we negotiate the fact that it serves other ends and purposes than
just its own. The word “integrity” features in many of these discussions, though
appeals to it have taken on different meanings.

Among those external ends, prestige, status, and reward have always figured
prominently. The then IOC President Avery Brundage went to extraordinary
lengths to preserve the amateur status of Olympians, drawing on ideals of the
amateur days of Olympic participation. Yet these were based on a faulty historical
assumption about the ancient Olympics being amateur (Young, 1984) [6], naïve
ideas of the purity of sport, and were little more than an elitist preference for the
leisurely gentleman athlete. Football has not been hostage to such pretensions, but
the role that money now plays in sport is both ubiquitous and increasingly
pernicious.

What is clear from recent match fixing scandals is that football is a vehicle for
criminal syndicates to make serious profits and to do so at the price of one of the
most important conceptual aspects of sports: uncertainty of outcome. It takes no
philosophical genius to work out that without uncertainty of outcome as a logical
precondition, sport (or at least sport as we know it) cannot exist. The competition
is predicated on pitting talent and effort on a formally level playing field in order to
determine which is the better team or competitor. The rules formally preserve the
equality of opportunity to contest victory.

“It takes no philosophical genius to work out that without

uncertainty of outcome as a logical precondition, sport (or
at least sport as we know it) cannot exist”

What is not legislated for, but which is as wildly shared norm of sport as one can
find, is that one should try one’s best to win. That is to say: if one is not playing to
win, in football, one is not playing at all: that is the form of play in football.
Intentionally missing penalties, or deliberately getting red-carded, or the legion of
other practices that seem to be presently discussed by match fixers and their
opponents, are threats to the integrity of the competition as a form of play. Here
integrity is understood as something like the nature of the activity taken as a whole.
But there are other senses of integrity at play in match fixing efforts. Players, whose
identity is in no small way defined by their role as sportsmen and women, usurped
by their willingness to wrongly manipulate match outcomes, act in opposition to
their personal integrity. There is also a social or ethical dimension too: obligations
to play and play to one’s best are in part an obligation to teammates, opponents,
coaches, fans, and the sports federations themselves. Consenting to throw a match
or manipulate its outcome in the many ways that are possible, shows a lack of
integrity in the willful failure to accept the obligations that flow from the very role
of person as footballer.

Secondly, one could not fail in a philosophical commentary on integrity to say

something about the recent FIFA media explosion. If ever there was a corrective to
the self-contained view of play, recent days have shown the interconnectedness of
sports with the daily lives of football lovers, administrators, journalists, politicians,
lawyers and law enforcement agents (to name only the obvious affected parties). I
suspect that there are few reasons to think that football is wildly different in culture
and practice from many of the world’s most popular and economically valuable
sports activities. Institutions like FIFA, and other global sports bodies, have
emerged from a history of amateur games and amateur, volunteer, organizational
structures. It is abundantly clear that they have not been formed, in the manner of
blue chip companies, to have robust governance frameworks.

While sports were operating on a relatively modest economic scale, matters of

integrity were less high-profile. Yet the past two decades have seen some progress,
though far from generalized, on a range of governance issues from child protection,
athlete welfare, and anti-racism, to anti-discrimination with respect to homophobia
or sexual identity. These important ethical issues are part of what has been called
“broad sport integrity” (Cleret, McNamee and Page, 2015) [7]. They form the
broader ethical and cultural landscape of sports integrity, but have been lost in
recent days to the issues of “narrow sport integrity”. I say “narrow” but the label is
merely descriptive not qualitative: I refer to the practices of bribery, corruption,
fraud, irregular and illegal gambling, and outcome manipulation (match fixing).

The beautiful game is clearly in need not of simple cosmetic surgery but a whole
new diet and lifestyle make-over. At the heart of this is an approach to governance
that takes more seriously not just financial integrity and political integrity, but a
broader conception of the entire ethical landscape. The integrity of FIFA,
understood as its commitment to a historically significant set of values and norms
in pursuit of the maintenance and enhancement of football as a social practice, is
what is at stake now. What sports more generally need is the creation of a new role
in sports administration: sports ethics and integrity officers, who can bring together
the whole panoply of issues of broad sports integrity into focus for their
organisations and to develop clarity of purpose around the values that sports stand
for and which live and breathe in their organisations.

Football makes a difference to people’s lives. It is the global game par excellence. It
matters how football is played and regulated. Let us hope that recent events, that
have done so much to sully the name of the game, will provide a springboard to
dialogue and action that will renew football in ethical terms. Clearly, philosophical
expertise in the making and evaluating of arguments and policies for the good of
the game, for football integrity, is an important aspect of its new diet and lifestyle.

Footnotes & References

[1] Huizinga, J (1949). Homo ludens. A study of the play-element in culture.[Translated by

RFC Hull.]. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

[2] Peters, R. S. (1966) Ethics and education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

[3] Kolnai, A. (1965, January). Games and aims. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
pp. 103-128.

[4] BBC (2015) Italy police arrest 50 in football match-fixing

probe,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32793892, accessed 21.5.15

[5] Mumford, S. (2014) Bread and circuses: is it morally irresponsible to be

consumed with the FIFA world cup?,http://www.thecritique.com/articles/bread-
and-circuses-is-it-morally-irresponsible-to-be-consumed-with-the-fifa-world-cup/
accessed 4.6.15

[6] Young, D. C., & Young, D. C. (1984). The Olympic myth of Greek amateur
athletics (pp. 29-40). Chicago: Ares.

[7] Cleret, L., McNamee, M.J. and Page, S. (2015) “Sports Integrity” needs sports
ethics (and sports philosophers and sports ethicists too), Sport, Ethics and Philosophy
9(1).

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