Sport and alcohol – who’s missing? New directions for a sociology of sport-related drinking

Introduction

In 2011, an article by this author was published that traced the ‘key themes and research agendas’ in the sport–alcohol nexus. The paper synthesised the main themes and research agendas that have been explored in studies of sports-associated drinking. The paper identified four themes in which sport and alcohol come together: ‘i) the commercial economy, ii) social practices and cultural identities; iii) crime and violence and, iv) health behaviours. The paper highlighted the paradoxical and contradictory nature of the sport-alcohol nexus, especially in relation to health behaviours and crime and violence, where sport is both a context for and a ‘solution’ to health damaging and criminal behaviour’ (Palmer, 2011: 168).

Intended primarily as a research review, this earlier work made it evident that the sport–alcohol nexus had been explored in fairly limited theoretical, conceptual and methodological terms, particularly (but not exclusively) by sociologists of sport. What the paper did not do, however, was usefully present a discussion of new relationships between sport and alcohol, the research problematics and questions these relationships may offer for critical interrogation, and how a more nuanced engagement with a wider range of theoretical frameworks might help to better understand and explain the diversity and complexity of drinkers and drinking in sport. These are the concerns of this article.

In what follows, then, I make a case for new directions for the sociology of sport-related drinking. To do this, I sketch out a series of research avenues and emerging agendas for under-represented aspects of sport-related drinking. I review the dominant themes in sociological treatments of drinking and sport, highlight the gaps and oversights and argue for the importance of widening the empirical and theoretical bases so as to better understand and explain the diversity and complexity of drinkers and drinking in sport. While this brings with it a new set of research questions and problematics, this kind of agenda-setting commentary is overdue – for, as sociologists of sport, we are at risk of simply reproducing stereotypes and assumptions of sport-related drinking more common to popular accounts of sport and alcohol, rather than developing the critical, theoretically informed analyses of drinking in sport that should be our key point of difference.

Moreover, this kind of agenda-setting commentary comes at a critical time. While these are points I elaborate further in the following pages, studies of sport-related drinking have tended to be done in ways that feed into notions of gendered infamy and/or ‘part-time deviance’ (Aldridge et al., 2011) that are part of leisure activities more broadly, particularly those that take place in the night-time economy. Such notions are central to broader policy debates about ‘binge drinking’, drug-taking and the normalisation of both, particularly by young people, as well as broader discourses of risk, regulation, governmentality, individual choice and agency, health and welfare, structure and social contexts. Developing a more theoretically informed understanding of sport-related drinking both within and beyond these popular orthodoxies is an important part of recognising the diverse range of actors, contexts and practices that are implicated in the sport–alcohol nexus so as to reframe the current tenor of the debate.

Rationale and context

The paper serves as something of a riposte to the kind of responses I typically receive (from paid-up sociologists as well as others) when I mention my research interests. Before I can declare that my abiding interest is the social contexts of sport-related drinking – the ‘who, how and why of drinking’ – replies tend to be versions of the following: ‘Oh, like hooligans?’; ‘Yes, it’s terrible. All those guys getting legless and thinking they own the world’; ‘Football’s the worst, isn’t it? Poor old George Best’ or ‘What do you want to know? Everyone knows they screw around on a night out’. Such responses certainly speak to popular stereotypes and assumptions of sport-related drinking and, to be clear, I am not denying that violence, exploitation of women or alcohol-related injuries and fatalities exist in particular sporting contexts: there is a rich scholarly tradition that has addressed these and related issues, and much of this literature will be discussed in the ensuing pages.

For me, however, it is the kinds of issues we haven’t written about that strike me as critical oversights in the attempt to develop a fuller understanding of the who, how and why of sport-related drinking. Where do non-drinking athletes or spectators (male and female) fit into all of this? How do they construct and negotiate their identity in an environment where strong normative codes of drinking exist? What about men who embody different forms of masculine identities, such as gay athletes, and fans or men who reside outside of the major metropoles of North America, Australia and the United Kingdom – in BRIC countries and the Global South, for example? ¹ How do intersections of race and class (as well as gender) contribute to and shape experiences of sport-related drinking?

Equally, over-reliance on a discourse of hegemonic masculinity, drawn from the influential work of Raewyn Connell (1987, 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005), to explain sport-related drinking has couched it largely as a male pursuit, but is this really the case? What about female drinking in sport? Do women involved in sport ‘do drinking’ in the ways we now associate with (White, heterosexual) men? Does ‘hegemonic masculinity’ still have analytical utility when women are the subjects of study? What alternative theoretical frameworks could be applied? Why has female drinking in sport largely eluded sociological inquiry, and what new (or recurrent) themes and issues for studies of alcohol, identity, gender and social relationships may be raised by studies of female drinking, as well as non-drinking and non-normative masculinities in relation to drinking and sport? These were the kind of questions I began to ask of my own research, prompted in part by the largely stereotypical framings of drinking in sport to which I alluded earlier and my concern to avoid simply reproducing what we already know about sport-related drinking.

While my concern here is the research avenues and new agendas that the sociology of sport may attend to, it is important to recognise that sociologists (and other social scientists) have more broadly been alert to these kinds of concerns, debates and theoretical potentialities in other empirical contexts, including office functions (Rosen, 1998), Hen and Stag nights (Montemurro, 2006; Thurnell-Read, 2011a, 2011b), shore leave, university and college ‘Fresher’ weeks, sorority and fraternity houses (Maggs et al., 2011) and school breaks (Berwick et al., 2008; Carpenter et al., 2008), among others – contexts in which female drinking and non-drinking, in particular, have been examined alongside the more customary presentations of drinking by men, and drinking that is both pleasurable and problematic. The argument mounted here, however, is that in terms of understanding and explaining sport-related drinking through a sociological lens, we have been fairly short-sighted in our theoretical, methodological and empirical reach.

To briefly sketch an emerging research agenda for rethinking drinking and sport, there are four key areas that can provide an initial point of departure to frame the concerns of this paper. These areas are not mutually exclusive; theories and research outlined in one category may also be relevant to others. What is common to each, however, is that they raise a set of questions that emerge from areas in which there are entrenched stereotypes at work which, to date, have oriented the research agenda in particular ways.

While the sociology of sport has made a considerable contribution to studies of the ways in which alcohol plays an important role in creating particular cultural identities, this has been carried out almost exclusively in relation to masculine identities. Curry’s (1998, 2000) descriptive work on team dynamics within American college athletic teams, for example, identifies a strong, normative culture of heavy drinking among male athletes. The role of alcohol in football-related disorder has also been noted (King, 1997; Williams et al., 1989), and parallels can be drawn with other boisterous spectator groups such as the ‘Barmy Army’ (Parry and Malcolm, 2004). Equally, Palmer’s work on ‘the Grog Squad’ (Palmer, 2009; Palmer and Thompson, 2007) provides further empirical evidence of the masculine nature of drinking and sport.

While there is no question that sport, and sport-related drinking, reproduce particular forms of masculinity, our overdependence on this as an explanatory framework fails to consider different kinds of relationships between sport and alcohol. It is these that I am interested in, in this case, in relation to women’s experiences of sport-related drinking – as athletes, spectators or consumers of mediated messaging and other forms of advertising and promotional culture.

A recent edited collection by Wenner and Jackson (2009) featured 14 chapters on sport, beer, gender and promotional culture, not one of which examined drinking by female athletes or spectators, included textual analyses of promotional practices geared towards female consumers, or offered a counter-reading of male-centred sport-related beer advertising. This observation is not to deny that drinking or sport can be highly masculine pursuits, nor is it to dismiss the contributions that this work has made to advancing our understandings of the social meanings and cultural practices embedded in sport-related drinking; rather, it is to highlight the gap in the sociology of sport, leisure and consumption on women and sport-related drinking.

This gap, I would suggest, foregrounds the far more central question of why female drinking in sport has largely eluded sociological inquiry. While it is not my intention to answer that question here, it does highlight the absence of work on women and sport-related drinking, relative to research done in other social contexts, that could inform a more developed analysis of women’s drinking and sport. Killingsworth (2006), for example, writes about the drinking practices of members of a mothers’ playgroup in Melbourne, Australia, while Rosen (1998) offers an early ethnographic study of female drinking at a corporate office Christmas party.

Killingsworth’s work, in particular, offers a useful counter to the literature that considers female drinking to be anomalous, deviant or transgressive of normative forms of femininity (Hupkens et al., 1993; Robbins and Martin, 1993; Skeggs, 2005). As he notes:

In a wide range of cultures, alcohol is seemingly regarded as the stuff of men, not women, and drinking a mark of masculinity, not femininity … in the process unproblematically presenting drinking as a legitimate, masculine (anti-feminine) pursuit. But, on any night of the week, in fashionable urban venues around the world, you will find plenty of women drinking, Alcohol is an important part of these women’s social worlds, but it does not place them at the margins of society in either a medical or sociological sense. Rather, they are fashionable students, young professionals, comfortably at the centre of their culture/society (Killingsworth, 2006: 358).

Killingsworth’s observations are particularly applicable to sport, and lead to several questions that suggest a need to extend our conceptual and theoretical frameworks for thinking about sports-associated drinking and, more particularly, how women involved in sport ‘do drinking’. What alternative theoretical frameworks may be developed or applied to sit alongside those that already have considerable currency? Notions of calculated hedonism and determined drunkenness which couch drinking as a ‘controlled loss of control’ (Szmigin et al., 2008) or a ‘pre-meditated pursuit of pleasure’ (Measham, 2004: 344), where ‘getting out of it’ is the explicit and intended end game, may (and, indeed, are quite likely to) hold as well.

The assumptions of ‘cutting loose’, ‘letting go’ or being ‘off the leash’ that underpin these notions of calculated hedonism and/or determined drunkenness for men and women also echo Palmer’s (2012) tentative formulation of ‘hegemonic drinking’ rather than hegemonic masculinity. Here, Palmer argues that the presence of dominant, powerful practices and tropes which cut across gender may provide a useful new way of framing female drinking in sport. In hegemonic drinking, drinking as a state or condition of ideology frames understandings of how particular ways of performing drinking seem natural and normal. Other research from non-sporting contexts, for example, suggests that many of the behaviours associated with male drinking, such as violence, assault or sexual activity, are increasingly being found among women (Day et al., 2004; Hugh-Jones et al., 2005); meanwhile, Rosen’s (1998) account of an office Christmas party depicts behaviour that is ‘unrestrained, hedonistic and boisterous’ – behaviour reminiscent of that described in Thurnell-Read’s account of a Stag night as ‘condoned and encouraged within the strictures of hegemonic masculinity’ (2011b: 978).

In other words, unrestrained drinking is not necessarily about enacting a particular form of masculinity – women cut loose as well – yet we know so very little about female drinking in sport, other than our own anecdotal or personal experiences. As sociologists, we need to do more than extrapolate theory from anecdote. Rigorous research is needed. As is argued elsewhere, ‘without substantive empirical research into the presence and meaning of drinking behaviours among women in a sporting context, we run the risk of perpetuating various exclusions of women from key sociological debates and agendas about sport, identity and the place of alcohol in women’s perceptions and understandings of the two’ (Palmer, 2011: 172).

The second area to which social science analyses of sport-related drinking can be usefully extended is in terms of non-drinking in sport. Relative to the extensive body of literature that has addressed the negative (and arguably positive) consequences or reasons for drinking, and heavy drinking in particular, in sport – everything from injuries and fatalities, encounters with the legal system and sexual and physical violence to camaraderie, fun, pleasure and friendship – researchers have focused minimal attention on non-drinkers and how they coexist with drinkers in the particular social setting of sport.

In a broader research context, non-drinking has been examined in terms of abstinence or non-drinking among recovering alcoholics (Lucas et al., 2010; Powers and Young, 2008; Schuckit and Smith, 2010) and studies are largely quantitative in nature. While useful for identifying patterns and prevalence in a broader adult population, what is missing from such studies is the non-drinkers’ – in this case, abstinent – sportsmen and women’s accounts of the social context or ‘definitions of the situation’ (Thomas, 1937, in Herman-Kinney and Kinney, 2012: 4) in which non-drinking occurs.

In terms of addressing this gap, there are three aspects to non-drinking in sport that I want to briefly explore. First, the demographic profile of many sports has changed through migration, ethnic diversity and shifting relationships to religion and faith, which has led to increasing numbers of sportsmen (and women) avoiding the consumption of alcohol as a marker of their religion. For example, there has been a growing scholarly interest in Muslim women and sport, which has brought issues of sports participation and religion into sharp relief (Abdul Razak et al., 2010; Ahmad, 2011; Hargreaves, 2007; Jawad et al., 2011). While, to date, engaging Muslim women in a dialogue about sport and alcohol has not formed part of this broader inquiry into issues of the body, emancipation, concealment, patriarchy, social inclusion and migration, it does lay open the potential for research into the (perhaps contradictory) place of alcohol in the sporting lives of Muslim women as players or spectators.

Where issues of non-drinking and sport have emerged, this has typically been in terms of elite or professional sports men and women. Players such as Bachar Houli or Hazem El Mazri, who are ‘high profile Muslims’ in Australian Rules football and Rugby League respectively; Torah Bright, winner of the women’s snowboarding half-pipe at the 2010 Vancouver Games and also a devout follower of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons); and Tim Teebow, the NFL player noted for displaying Biblical verse on his eye black (the black grease painted under players’ eyes to reduce sun glare), for kneeling and praying during games and for featuring in a pro-life television commercial that aired prior to the 2010 Super Bowl, are among the elite athletes for whom not drinking alcohol is part of a visibly religious presentation of self.

The intersections between sport and religion raise a whole set of concerns that are beyond the scope of this paper (see for example, Parker and Weir, 2012). Moving beyond the popular metaphor of ‘sport as religion’, or the notion of sport supplanting the traditional values and expressions of religion, my interest here is with the sorts of questions that religion may pose for negotiating and maintaining particular kinds of relationships – with teammates, friends and families, supporters, and so on – in an environment where ‘determined drunkenness’ (Measham, 2004) or ‘hegemonic drinking’ (Palmer, 2012) occupy a place of social and symbolic pre-eminence. The presence of athletes who choose not to drink for religious reasons, when overlaid against a broader discourse of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, makes a discussion of non-drinking in sport a useful point of entry into debates of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and identity more broadly.

Second, those sportsmen and women who elect not to drink through personal (rather than religious) choice may also present fruitful topics for sociological inquiry. Inasmuch as their choice goes against the grain of normative expectations, it raises several questions for how non-drinkers in sport negotiate and maintain their identity and relationships with others, given the centrality of drinking to a range of sports initiations and forms of socialisation (Clayton and Harris, 2008; Lake, 2012; Palmer and Thompson, 2007). What, if any, difficulties does it present in different kinds of sporting (and drinking) contexts? Does this depend on the reason for not drinking – for example, pregnancy or medication, being concerned about maximising sporting performance, perhaps having struggled with alcohol or other kinds of addictions, or simply exercising a personal choice not to drink?

There are clearly a range of reasons for not drinking which may be put forward by both athletes and sports consumers alike, which leave open potential analyses of questions of legitimacy, authenticity, agency, identity, belonging, health and body care for further exploration through empirical research.

Of interest here is the potential to extend two typologies that may provide useful analytical frameworks for understanding non-drinkers in sport. First is the work done by Herman-Kinney and Kinney (2012) on the ways in which non-drinking college students in the United States formulate, maintain and transform their personal and social identities. Applying the framework of ‘dry’ students on a ‘wet’ campus, Herman-Kinney and Kinney explore the social experiences of non-drinkers from their own perspectives, examining, in particular, what it is like to live in an ‘environment where drinking is the norm, their moral experience of stigma and the strategies they employed to develop and maintain positive experiences identities’ (2012: 4).

Alongside this, Thompson et al. (2011), in their work on the culture of alcohol in Australian Rules football, developed the formulation of ‘drinkers, non-drinkers and deferrers’ among fans of the code. Unsurprisingly, ‘drinkers’ were those fans who drank, often heavily, while at the football. ‘Non-drinkers’ abstained from drinking while at the football and in other spheres of their life. ‘Deferrers’, however, were those who drank little or nothing while at the football, or only drank after the final siren. For deferrers, attending the football ‘delayed, discouraged or reduced alcohol consumption, even encouraging abstinence in some cases’ (Thompson et al., 2011: 399). These findings both contrast and challenge previous research that has unequivocally associated (Australian) football with drinking and, in their presentation of counter-stereotypic ways in which fans engage with alcohol (or do not), the authors ‘challenge the assumptive worlds in which popular commentary on football and drinking typically operate’ (Thompson et al., 2011: 388).

While both typologies have much analytical utility, and can be usefully extended into other areas where entrenched stereotypes are at work, there is a risk that such methods of categorisation may prove too blunt, glossing the complexities of the behaviours that sit within the categories of ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ or ‘drinker’, ‘non-drinker’ and ‘deferrer’. Of concern here is the fact that sportsmen and women may not always and exclusively be dry (or wet), and may slip in and out of such categories. It is here that more can be done on interrogating the intersections of religion and ethnicity, as well as personal choice and agency, so as to develop more fine-grained and nuanced understandings of the personal and social identities of non-drinkers in sport.

A dominant theme in the literature on sport-related drinking (and drinking more broadly) is the role it plays in facilitating communication and cohesion among athletes and fans alike. Palmer and Thompson (2007) have explored the drinking-based behaviours, practices and interactions of ‘the Grog Squad’, where ‘belonging, identity and social status [are] communicated and conferred through banter, “piss takes”, windups and practical jokes that revolved around spectacularly high levels of alcohol consumption’ (Palmer and Thompson, 2007: 188), while elsewhere Clayton and Harris (2008) have analysed the drinking-based ritual practices of initiation among a male university rugby team in the south of England.

Notwithstanding the absence of scholarship on the sociality of sport-related drinking among women, the analytical point to emphasise here is the flipside of sociality; that is, the practices (and politics) of exclusion that sports-related drinking entails. As I develop in this section, these are crucially linked to issues of class, race and religion (as well as gender).

I noted earlier that the presence of athletes who choose not to drink for religious reasons, when overlaid against a broader discourse of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, makes a discussion of non-drinking in sport a useful point of entry into debates of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and identity more broadly. Here the work of Burdsey (2010) and Yu and Bairner (2012) makes useful – albeit very different – contributions to the scholarship. Burdsey, for example, notes the ‘pejorative discourses and marginalizing practices’ (2010: 316) that have surrounded English cricket tours of Pakistan. As Burdsey writes: ‘the story often went … being in a Muslim country, the players faced the “unbearable” absence of alcohol’ (2010: 316). Reflecting on practice as well as discourse, Burdsey’s work recounts ‘certain situations and procedures intrinsic to the game of cricket that do not take account of the identities and practices of Muslim players …[such as]… team-mates and club members’ frequent consumption of alcohol which, along with other intoxicants, is prohibited (haram) in the Qur’an’ (2010: 328).

Yu and Bairner (2012), in their examination of Confucianism and ethnic stereotyping of Indigenous baseball players in Taiwan, note the ways in which the behaviours of the players ‘do little to offset public perceptions about the aborigines as ‘associated with excessive drinking, singing, joyousness, outgoing personalities and low academic achievement’ (2012: 695). As is the case with other accounts of sport-related drinking, such perceptions are fuelled by the kind of gendered (and in this case racialised) infamy to which I referred earlier – brawling, assaults and encounters with the criminal justice system, among others – in which players become involved.

It is of central importance to note that both Burdsey and Yu’s and Bairner’s work underscores the ways in which drinking – either not doing it or doing too much of it – provides a key lens through which to view race-based exclusionary practices more broadly. Burdsey (2010: 330), for example, notes the ways in which the absence of the behaviour (i.e. not drinking) can spark an interest in and questioning of practices by ‘the Other’ (‘why don’t you drink?’), while displays of drinking by Indigenous baseball players perpetuate particular assumptions that serve to further exclude from sporting interactions and practices those who are already the most marginalised in Taiwanese society (Yu and Bairner, 2012).

Sports-related drinking, however, is not solely linked to exclusion through race or religion. Lake (2012), for example, notes the ways in which the ability to ‘hold your drink’ is a critical element in socialisation in a competitive tennis club in which the politics of exclusion are already powerfully linked to taste and class.

Social class and drinking is also implicated in a broader health and social policy agenda in which sport-related drinking is yet to be fully examined. In most OECD countries there is concern among authorities, agencies and health professionals that the purchase and consumption of alcohol is concentrated in areas characterised by high levels of social and material disadvantage (Ellaway et al., 2010). While research has mapped the locations of bottle shops, pubs, licensed venues and supermarkets with liquor outlets across major metropolitan areas, and detailed the ways in which ‘binge drinking’ increases around events of sporting significance and public holidays in particular demographic areas (Lloyd et al., 2011), the connections between locational disadvantage, sports spectatorship and the pleasure of leisure have not been subject to social inquiry, despite their considerable implications for issues of health and social policy, urban planning, governance and regulation.

Circumstances of social and material disadvantage also provide part of the backstory to the biographies of athletes who have struggled with alcohol and other forms of addiction, and for whom their sporting ‘legend’ is closely tied to heavy intoxication and determined drunkenness. For many, part of their story is that of the poor boy (rarely girl) made good. That is, their sporting prowess provided a ‘way out of the working class’. These sporting biographies, in which determined drunkenness features heavily, are however problematic in a wider policy discourse on ‘binge drinking’, particularly among young people in socio-economically deprived communities. How do we present the sporting achievements of the likes of George Best, Paul Gascoigne or Alex Higgins, among others, without valorising their drinking in the communities still mired in the social disadvantage that these sportsmen managed to escape? Certainly, sporting prowess has enabled young people to escape a particular kind of habitus; however, excessive drinking remains inextricably linked to both their old and new biographies. In other words, a more nuanced consideration of how drinking may play into aspirational sporting biographies could provide further, fruitful scholarship on the sport–alcohol nexus.

This paper was prompted, in part, by my concern that the over-riding focus on drinking in sport as a “bastion of masculinity” obscured a range of other relationships to sport and alcohol. The orienting research question here may be whether all men drink in the same way, as the construction of sport and drinking as a ‘bastion of masculinity’ tends to flatten men, and masculinity, into something of a homogeneous category. The plurality of men and their relationships to sport and alcohol may, in fact, be far more nuanced, and lend themselves to more fine-grained (ethnographic) analysis through empirical research in relation to non-normative forms of (Western) masculinity, sport and alcohol.

Again, some questions for prospective research may be helpful here. To what extent has the extensive promotional culture in sports-related drinking capitalised on the so-called ‘pink dollar’ of (affluent) gay men? When we will see an openly gay man promote any of the leading beer brands? What are the implications of attempting to capture a market share in cultures such as the United Arab Emirates where alcohol consumption and prohibition sit side-by-side, particularly as major sporting events, sponsored by alcohol companies, enter and grow exponentially in BRIC countries? The forthcoming 2022 World Cup in Qatar (of which Anheuser-Busch InBev is a named sponsor) may prove to be something of a test case or ‘natural experiment’ here.

Some of these issues have begun to be addressed (Amis et al., 2009) in relation to promotional practice; however, the substantive empirical and theoretical focus in research on the sport–alcohol–masculinity nexus remains that of Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, which orients the research agenda in very particular ways. This is not to dismiss the work acknowledging masculinities (plural) in sport more broadly (Adams et al., 2010; Anderson, 2009; Flood, 2002, 2008; Pringle, 2005), but simply to recognise that when it comes to theorising men’s attitudes, behaviours and practices in relation to sport-associated drinking, hegemonic masculinity continues to serve as the dominant paradigm for understanding and explaining such behaviours.

Social theory and sport-related drinking

One of the arguments developed in this paper is that sociological accounts of sport-related drinking have been done within a fairly limited theoretical framework and, through this, have perpetuated a series of established orthodoxies and taken-for-granted positions. I have suggested that social scientists with an interest in drinking more broadly have seen the possibilities of other theoretical frameworks for explaining the cultural practices, social interactions and, indeed, consequences of consuming alcohol, and that drawing on these may lead to a more developed understanding of sport-related drinking. It is my concern now to sketch out some alternative theoretical frameworks for explaining (and critiquing) sport-related drinking, and some of the research avenues these may open up.

There are, of course, multiple versions of sociological theory that could contribute to studies of sport-related drinking, and I examine just three key perspectives from sociological theory that have currency in studies of drug and alcohol use more broadly, in order to suggest their application to studies of sport-related drinking. These are: Pierre Bourdieu’s application of symbolic capital within the framework of distinction; the ‘normalisation’ theory popular in socio-criminological studies of drug use, particularly among young people; and Michel Foucault’s work on disciplinary power. I have chosen these perspectives not because they are representative in any way, but rather because they represent the ‘ongoing need to reassess and reinvigorate the theoretical frameworks that drive drug research, policy and practice’ (Moore, 2008: 324). ²

To take each in turn: Bourdieu’s (1989) work on symbolic capital and distinction has been usefully deployed elsewhere in drug and alcohol studies (Lunnay et al., 2011), yet has not been systematically applied to an analysis of sport-related drinking. As discussed earlier, Lake’s (2012) work on inclusion and exclusion in a competitive tennis club hints at the role of drinking in the exercise of symbolic and cultural capital, yet drinking is not the prime focus of his research. The absence of a Bourdieusian perspective in studies of sport-related drinking specifically is surprising, given that much drinking is done either for social recognition or to achieve distinction or inclusion among sports peers. Indeed, scholarship notes that sport-related drinking is frequently done to achieve validation or recognition by fellow drinkers, yet the analytical point that is invariably made is that men drinking is a marker of distinction among male peers – a display of hegemonic masculinity. Prestige is defined and distinction reasserted through drinking, yet full use has not been made of Bourdieu’s concepts when explaining the social meaning of sport-related drinking. There is clearly more potential to applying Bourdieu’s key concepts to analyses of drinking and sport, particularly when considering the symbolic capacity of drinking to establish and reinforce boundaries of distinction.

While not attributable to a single social theorist, the normalisation theory is ‘one of the most influential recent developments in the sociology of drug use and has become something of an orthodoxy in the field’ (Measham and Shiner, 2009: 502). In essence, the thesis contends that whereas illicit drug use in particular used to be attributed to individual or social pathology, it has increasingly become a fairly unremarkable feature of young people’s lives; ‘part of the broader search for pleasure, excitement and enjoyment framed within consumption oriented leisure lifestyles’ (Measham and Shiner, 2009: 502). While most commonly applied to studies of illegal drug use, aspects of the normalisation theory could usefully frame an analysis of sport-related drinking. Certainly, the starting point for many studies of sport-related drinking is the premise that there is nothing remarkable about it. Yet to be useful theoretically, the obvious needs to be pushed a little further. What makes sport-related drinking unremarkable? Why is drinking considered to be ‘just part of the culture?’ What social, historical, political or other trends might account for the normalisation of sport-related drinking? Critically, perhaps, is sport-related drinking ‘normal’ for all? That is, is normalisation is a contingent process that is negotiated, accommodated or resisted by particular social groups operating in particular social situations? In other words, where do the boundaries of ‘normal’ start and end in sport-related drinking? These are all potential avenues for further empirical research into the normalisation of sport-related drinking.

In analyses of drug and alcohol policy in particular, Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power, biopower and governmentality are frequently used to explain the social construction of drugs and alcohol as a ‘problem’, how to treat drug users and how drug users and addicts are constructed and positioned as medico-legal subjects (Bourgois, 2000; Duff, 2004; Keane, 2009). From Foucault’s work on sexuality, imprisonment and mental health, we recognise that power circulates among people and is continually produced and reproduced in their discourse and practices, allowing drugs and alcohol to be studied in the contexts in which they are produced, governed, traded and used (Bourgois, 2000).

What then might a Foucauldian analysis of sport-related drinking look like? Certainly, Foucault’s focus on disciplinary power and governmentality can help us to move beyond understanding subjectivities and people’s experiences of sport-related drinking (which Bourdieu and the normalisation theory allow us to do) to looking at networks of governance in which drinkers become regulated subjects, or at the decisions, interactions and consequences of sport-related drinking that form part of a broader ‘risk discourse’ situated in debates about individual choice, agency, structure and context. These are preliminary possibilities that lay the foundation for a more developed, explicitly Foucauldian research agenda around sport and alcohol.

Although I have outlined the ways in which three additional theoretical frameworks may be applied to studies of sport-related drinking, these of, course, need data and analysis to turn them from the abstract to the concrete. The point has been made elsewhere that there is a need for a ‘more inclusive suite of methods to tease out some of the more nuanced understandings of the relationships between sport consumers and alcohol … through ethnography, visual methods, focus groups, interviews or surveys’ (Palmer, 2011: 179). To return to questions of theory, I would suggest that where sociological methods have been deployed to explain aspects of spot-related drinking, the ‘theory problem’ remains. Quantitative work, such as surveys, tends to describe the prevalence of alcohol consumption among particular cohorts (sports science students make popular subjects), and theory of any kind is almost entirely absent. Where qualitative methods have been employed (including in my own work), this has been done in the kinds of theoretically limited ways that this paper is keen to move beyond. Thus, a key challenge – which this paper has only begun to address – is the need to do more and different empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated research in ways that can truly reflect the complexity and diversity of sport-related drinking and drinkers.

Concluding comments

The paper has outlined a series of emerging research avenues for advancing scholarship on sport-related drinking that is far from exhaustive in terms of the literature reviewed or the empirical material referenced. Pursuing the questions raised is, however, an important step towards challenging popular assumptions about sport-related drinking that cast and limit understandings of alcohol in sport in very particular ways. Certainly, sport-related drinking is implicated in a whole host of health and social problems and is enjoyed by particular kinds of men in particular kinds of settings that do little to counter the dominant stereotype with which I began this paper. However, the fundamental point here is that men and women have other relationships to sport, and to alcohol, as athletes and as consumers of sport (and alcohol); while these have been attended to in other social-science accounts of drinking beyond sport, they are yet to be fully realised in sociological analyses of sports-related drinking. Looking to alternative explanatory frameworks beyond those we routinely employ can help to widen the empirical and theoretical bases through which we can understand and explain drinking and drinkers in sport.

Highlighting new areas of sociological inquiry does raise potential concern over competing and contemporaneous paradigms, and whether we are talking about aspects of social behaviour that cannot be reconciled by theorising them differently. This, for me, is a ‘yes, but…’ problem. That is: yes, the behaviours and practices associated with sport-related drinking can continue to be explained through theories oriented by concerns with gender, for example, but there are other ways in which this can be done as well. Recognising that fun and pleasure are legitimate sources of meaning does not detract from broader issues regarding health, social policy, governance and regulation. Indeed, the hedonism of particular kinds of drinking, be that in relation to sport or anything else, presents club officials, governing bodies and policy makers with a dilemma, as it clashes with other expectations of citizens, including notions of responsibility, reasonableness and self-control; additionally, negotiating the tensions and contradictions inherent in the pleasure of drinking raises a whole set of questions for research, policy and practice.

My drawing attention to new relationships to alcohol and sport, and suggesting alternative ways of analysing and interpreting them, is not to dismiss established conceptual paradigms. New theories and explanatory frameworks do not detract from the value of past approaches, but their relative absence does suggest a need to widen our frame of vision so as to develop a more fully realised sociological understanding of sport-related drinking. Moreover, developing a fuller understanding of the diversity and complexity of drinking in the context of sport, through the kind of research avenues and agendas outlined here, can usefully inform policy debates and developments around alcohol use and misuse.