It’s more than a job: discourse and the treatment of elite footballers accused of sexual violence

Football and the Australian National Imaginary

For most of its 150-year history, Australian Rules football was not a profession, but a leisure activity and source of public entertainment – beginning as ‘a rough-and-tumble game played in the parklands of Melbourne’ in the 19th century (Hess and Nicholson, 2008) and becoming codified and nationalised through the 1980s and 1990s. ³ Only since the 1980s have footballers been paid a full salary, such that playing at the elite level could be considered an occupation. Despite this shift, the ways in which playing football is imagined remain largely unchanged from its pre-professionalisation days. Although internally it is a highly and self-consciously professional working environment, such that players are encouraged to develop a ‘professional identity’ (Kelly and Hickey, 2008), written and spoken discourse about Australian rules persistently characterises it as transcendent. It is cast as a religion, and footballers are portrayed as national heroes, role models and (in a seeming contradiction) children. These ideas are so normalised within football discourse as to seem unremarkable. It is not that football fans are unaware that their heroes are paid large amounts of money – footballers’ salaries are discussed in detail, particularly during the October trade period – but there is still an apparent disconnect between the way in which playing the game is popularly imagined, and the fact that it is a highly paid job in a multi-billion dollar business.

Religious discourse is often applied to football, with fans called ‘the faithful’ coming to ‘worship’ at the ‘hallowed turf’ (Alomes, 1994: 49) of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Scholars from the United Kingdom and Australia have examined the way their national football codes are imagined as, resemble or differ from, religion (Hervieu-Léger, 2000), exploring what this means for fan identification and experience (Alomes, 1994; McKibbin, 2011), or for players’ health and willingness to ‘sacrifice’ it and themselves for the game (Alexajbaf, 2014). These accounts are largely positive, with Stephen Alomes (1994: 52) considering football a possible answer to a ‘search for transcendence’; any potentially negative consequences for non-footballers are not considered. Popular histories as well as media texts evoke religious discourse, demonstrating its ready acceptance. For example, The Australian Game of Football: Since 1858 (Weston, 2008) published to celebrate the game’s 150th anniversary, includes an entire section on the framing of sport as religion, even asserting, that ‘the church comparison is more fitting’ than the ‘corporate lingua franca’ of brand identities (Weston, 2008: 233–234) to explain how clubs operate. Up Where Cazaly? (Sandercock and Turner, 1981: 225), a pioneering social history of the sport, comments, ‘Football in Melbourne has acquired the status of a religion, primitive perhaps, but definitely a sacred rite to its worshippers’. Footballers’ position in the ‘religion’ is not usually articulated directly, although Alomes (1994: 49) alludes to their ‘divine powers’, and their status is undoubtedly elevated above the average person.

Footballers are also commonly imagined as ‘national heroes’ and ‘role models’. Australian rules has an arguably closer tie to national identity than most other sports, as it is an ‘Australian invention’ (Blainey, 2010) and bound up in stories of Australia’s growing independence from England and emergence as a nation (Sandercock and Turner, 1981: 14–30). Ian Syson (2014) remarks on various football historians’ concerted emphasis on its ‘indigeneity’ and ‘contribution … to Australian life’. Rob Cover (2015: 81) identifies the footballer emerging as a national hero partly because the sport represents values that are closely associated with Australian nationalism. Cover argues that the ‘larrikin’, associated with Australian soldiers of the world wars and the colonial settler as well as the familiar ‘Crocodile Dundee’, is a national hero figure easily applicable to the footballer. He is ‘badly behaved but not criminal, tough yet capable of folk-like practical ingenuity, irreverent and anti-but not an outright revolutionary, mischievous but performing acts which usually can be forgiven’ (Cover, 2015: 83). Even a larrikin’s criminal behaviour is forgivable, including footballers’, especially concerning aggression, violence and alcohol (Rickard, 1998: 78, 82–84). Although Kelly and Hickey (2008: 2) note many footballers’ reluctance to accept the position of role model, Alomes (1994: 56) mentions it as an assumed fact, and Cover (2015: 142) identifies it in the confession and repentance aspects of scandal narratives on drug and alcohol use; this reflects its persistence in the popular imagination.

Although discourses of religion and larrikinism appear unrelated, they share a logic that grants footballers a higher status than mere mortals – objects of worship, whose failings can be excused, perhaps more like the Olympian gods than figures in major religions today. Likewise, the way footballers are infantilised as ‘little boys’ or ‘kids’ who are not responsible for their actions, particularly in the context of sexual assault cases (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013: 150–154), seems to contradict this transcendence; however, it resonates with the larrikin ideal and reinforces the way off-field behaviour can be excused. ‘Professional’ relationships between players, teammates and staff are also often portrayed as familial in the context of alleged sexual assault (Alexajbaf, 2014; Philadelphoff-Puren, 2004).

There is arguably little harm in equating sport with religion as a means of engaging with fans’ enjoyment of the game; however, as Cover (2015) argues, positioning footballers as national heroes excuses ‘scandals’ including drug abuse and sexual violence (p. 83). The power of these sets of discourses can be illustrated with Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of ‘semantic thickness’, whereby concept pairs that are ‘similar in difference’ can, through repetition, resonate with and reinforce each other (pp. 7–8). Bourdieu argues that the repetition of binaries associated with gender – outside (public)/inside (private), dry/wet, above/below and so on – create semantic thickness to reinforce masculine domination. Likewise, repetition of different discourses that share distinct similarities is mutually reinforcing, derived from the fact that they are not the same. Taken together, these discourses provide excuses from three angles: footballers are elevated religious figures and role models (who would not do anything terribly wrong), but simultaneously national heroes whose ‘misbehaviour’ is ultimately forgivable and children who cannot be expected to know any better.

Where they have been critically analysed, these discourses have largely been considered separately and not in the context of action taken against footballers charged with crimes. This article demonstrates how these discourses form part of a scheme of representation that positions football as ‘not-work’, even in circumstances that ordinarily demand the language of workplaces and the treatment of employees expected of a professional workplace.

Work and play: discourses in tension in the case of Andrew Lovett

Mainstream media discussion of the Lovett case reveals a resistance – overt or covert – to equating playing football with something as mundane as a ‘job’. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I demonstrate both the relative prevalence of the competing discourses and how the construction of an article can further portray football as other – or more – than work. The 13 opinion articles in the sample were published between 27 December 2009 and 10 March 2010. Several referred to multiple footballers facing sanctions for off-field behaviour (including Lovett), commonly Geelong’s Matthew Stokes, who faced drug trafficking charges. Here, writers offer more direct comment on the causes of incidents and appropriate handling. Alternative constructions to work discourses are prominent, even in articles printed after Lovett launched his legal action and discourses of children, family, religion, role models and national heroes are visible. Sports journalists authored all but two opinion articles, and their approach might be expected to differ significantly from other journalists, especially given the criticism they receive for failing in their ‘watchdog’ role, especially regarding scandal (Rowe, 2016: 2). However, non-sports journalists also employed non-work discourses in news and opinion articles, which demonstrate the pervasiveness of these discourses.

Using NVivo, a word search query of all 91 articles relating to Lovett’s sacking revealed that terms evoking ‘play’ are much more common than those evoking ‘work’ – appearing more than three times as often. Play-related and associated terms appeared a total of 904 times: ‘players’, ‘play’ and ‘game’ (455), ‘club/s’ (370), ‘teammates’ (39) and ‘team’ (40). Work-related terms appeared less than one-third as often, a total of 267 times: ‘contract/ual’ (100), employment/career (61), ‘work/ing’ in an employment sense (20), million/money/paid/dollar/salary/sum (92) and ‘business’ (2). Quantitative data were checked to ensure that only terms relevant to playing football were included (e.g. 27 references to Lovett’s ‘legal team’ were excluded from the ‘team’ data). Although frequent use of ‘club’ was expected – and, to an extent, ‘play’– as this is standard sports language, it remains significant as its distance from workplace discourse contributes to the overall separation of football from ‘work’.

Early in the case – before Lovett took legal action against St Kilda over his sacking – work discourses were much less prevalent in all of the newspapers studied, with preference given to the language of play, clubs and teams, as well as discourses of religion, national heroes, children, family and role models. This highlights how associating work discourses with football is unusual, as they are prominent only after Lovett went to Fair Work. Thus, in a sense, this action ‘imposed’ work discourses onto news reporting as the case was framed as an employment issue, largely reflecting the language of Lovett’s legal team. Lovett’s case rested on contractual agreements and allegations that St Kilda failed to provide employees with a ‘safe working environment’ – treatment amounting to ‘workplace bullying’ (Lane, 2010a). Table 1 shows how terms associated with work appeared more than 1.5 times as frequently after the legal action, averaging 3.57 mentions per article compared with 1.97 mentions before legal action. Conversely, terms associated with play appeared half again as frequently before the legal action as after, averaging 12.83 mentions per article before and 8.37 after (see Table 2). When ‘club/s’ is omitted from the non-work data (its frequency remained virtually unchanged at 4.09/4.05), the relative rate of occurrence of non-work terms before the legal action is almost double (average 8.60/4.64). This highlights the persistence of non-work discourses, as work discourses were largely introduced from outside football and opinion pieces consistently favour portraying football as not-work.

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Table 1.

‘Work’ term frequencies.

Term	Pre-legal action	Post-legal action	Total
Contract/ual	27	73	100
Employment/career	14	47	61
Money/paid/million/dollar/salary/sum	21	67	89
Work/ing	7	13	20
Total	69	200	269
Average per article	1.97	3.57	2.96

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Table 2.

‘Game’ and ‘team’ term frequencies.

Term	Pre-legal action	Post-legal action	Total
Play/players/game	240	215	455
Club/s	143	227	370
Team	25	15	40
Teammates	27	12	39
Total	435	469	904
Average per article	12.43	8.37	9.93

Even references to money do not necessarily position football as work or Lovett as an employee. One article begins with implicit criticism: ‘ACCUSED rapist Andrew Lovett will pocket an undisclosed six-figure sum without ever pulling on the boots for St Kilda’ (Warner and Epstein, 2010). Mentioning the fact that he never played for St Kilda implies it was undeserved, and ‘pocket’ also connotes theft. Another article (Smith, 2010b) declares they are ‘paid great sums of money to play football’ and, effectively, have everything done for them, which implies this pay is not justified, unlike a salary.

Although variations on ‘suspended’ (24 in relation to Lovett’s case) or ‘sacked’ (120) were more common overall, language applicable to an informal club setting rather than a workplace was prominent in describing his exit. ‘Banned/banished/shunned/ostracised/snub’ were used 39 times, as well as ‘dumped’ (4); for example, Lovett was ‘[s]hunned by his new teammates since December’ (Wilson, 2010b). Crime reporters Anthony Dowsley and Mark Buttler (2009) employed similar language to sports journalists, writing that Lovett was ‘questioned over rape accusations that have stunned the game and seen him banished from the field’. ‘Banished’ (7) is particularly emotive, implying exile from his homeland, far more devastating than being suspended from a job. Lane (2010b) refers to his suspension as ‘football exile’, ‘Dumped Lovett wants St Kilda to pay up’ (Denham, 2010) positions Lovett as a jilted lover seeking a divorce settlement. This language was again much more common before Lovett’s legal action. Another example, ‘Bullants [second-tier league club] a possible Lovett lifeline’ (Diamond, 2010), equates not playing football with death (‘lifeline’ appeared four times in this context), as does calling a player facing sacking ‘a kid facing the football gallows’ (Niall, 2010). It is difficult to imagine such language being used to describe an employee suspended from another type of workplace.

Whether work discourses are incorporated or not, opinion writing portrays football as ‘really’ not-work. Samantha Lane’s (2010b) ‘Lovett could take Saints to the Supreme Court’ avoids work discourses almost entirely, referring to his recruitment as ‘a club he joined’. Early on, Lane labels him a ‘Bomber-turned-Saint’ in reference to his switch from Essendon to St Kilda, positioning it as a change of identity rather than of workplace. The only allusions to work are a reference to the Collective Bargaining Agreement and mention that Lovett continued to receive his ‘base pay’ and his ‘three-year deal worth more than $1 million’, half-way through the article. This is common in the pre-legal action articles.

Caroline Wilson’s (2010b) ‘Bruised Saints make right call’ published after Lovett’s legal action, holds discourses of work and ‘not-work’ in tension, but club, family and hero discourses dominate. While the lead paragraph introduces work discourses, mentioning St Kilda’s ‘damaged brand’ and Lovett’s ‘ruined career’, the remainder emphasises non-work aspects. Shortly after, Wilson writes, ‘St Kilda not only wanted to cut all ties with the troubled 27-year-old but also take him off the payroll’ (my italics), which suggests that ‘cutting ties’ with Lovett – ‘family’ discourse – was the club’s priority, positioning money as a secondary consideration. Later, all traces of work disappear in favour of club and ‘hero’ discourses. His (alleged) contract breaches are framed as ‘[breaking] several club rules’ and ‘[conducting] himself in a manner not befitting an elite athlete’; the ‘national hero’ is evoked as Wilson paraphrases coach Ross Lyon: ‘only as the season unfolds will he truly see how much the saga has hurt the club in its quest for a premiership’ (my italics) – clearly the domain of heroes.

Collingwood president and prominent commentator, Eddie McGuire (2010), highlights the tension between work and not-work by making a distinction between what football is ‘really’ about and portraying its professional structures and systems as over-the-top and damaging to players. He also continually invokes the larrikin. McGuire evokes nostalgia for a time when footballers could behave, however, they liked, ‘as long as [they] were happy with what [they] saw in the mirror’. Euphemising alleged rape, assault and drug trafficking as ‘indiscretions’, ‘personal habits’, ‘misdemeanours’ or ‘something [that] goes wrong in a player’s life’, ⁴ McGuire suggests that they should not attract attention from media or even the police. He begins,

ONCE upon a time a footballer needed only to stay out of the way of the police and the Truth newspaper [a weekly ‘scandal sheet’ published in the first half of the 20^th century] to enjoy a relatively stress-free life regardless of personal habits.

But, the first item in the ‘chain reaction’ that McGuire claims begins when ‘something goes wrong’ is ‘the police make an arrest’. This suggests that in the (ideal) past, ‘larrikin’ footballers would not have been arrested for the same offences, and the nostalgia evident in ‘once upon a time’ and ‘those days are long gone’ positions this as just. The ‘chain reaction’ includes managers, CEOs, the marketing department and so on positioning the league as a business, but McGuire portrays the process that involves them as excessive, farcical and as victimising footballers. In McGuire’s narrative, media reporting is a ‘circus’, ‘websites are character-assassinating, talkback callers are screaming’ and in ‘serious’ cases such as Lovett’s, ‘punishment, retribution and moral outrage’ take precedence over justice. Thus, McGuire maintains the idea that the ‘larrikin’ should be forgiven for his indiscretions, rather than be subject to sanctions and public scrutiny.

Complementing these constructions are references to other common ‘non-work’ discourses: family, children and religion. Journalists portrayed relationships within football clubs as relational/familial much more frequently than professional. For example, McGuire (2010, my italics) wrote that ‘[i]f a player has let down the group, there usually isn’t much sympathy among his teammates and tough love is usually the first reaction’. He thus implies that a player’s peers are responsible for punishing him, as in a family or informal club rather than a workplace. McGuire never explicitly references the club (Lovett’s employers) imposing sanctions – mentioning only ‘their positioning of their accused players’. Samantha Lane (2010b) draws a comparison between St Kilda’s treatment of Lovett and their treatment of other players investigated over sexual assault in 2004 in relational rather than professional terms. Lane describes the ‘heart-to-heart’ then-coach Grant Thomas had with the accused players, contrasted with Lovett’s lack of a ‘friend’ or ‘supporter’.

Three opinion articles directly label footballers as children; for example, reference to a ‘spoiled-kid complex’ (Editorial, 2010) and ‘[treating] their players as irresponsible children until they proved otherwise’ (Riley, 2009). Two of these articles – both by non-sports journalists – elaborate on footballers’ immaturity and need for discipline. Others infantilise players more subtly; for example, Caroline Wilson’s (2010a) article, ‘AFL is still wrestling with violence’, published after Lovett’s sacking, uses ‘punishment’ four times when referring to sanctions imposed on players for alleged off-field crimes – a term more commonly used for (childish) bad behaviour than adult crimes. Wilson also stated that a player’s club felt he ‘needed to miss serious games of football in a bid to reflect the seriousness of what he had done’, phrasing also reminiscent of punishment meted out to children. Patrick Smith (2010b) wrote,

Young men are dragged from around the country, paid great sums of money to play football and be worshipped. To have people think for them, write columns for them, pay bills for them.

This positions footballers as children who do not (or cannot) take responsibility for day-to-day living. Significantly, although Smith mentions footballers being paid, the infantilising discourse surrounding it makes it seem incongruous. In another article, Smith (2010a) claims the AFL plays the role of ‘nurse’ with its programmes on dealing with ‘grog, women and drugs’. Footballers are also here portrayed as religious figures through ‘worshipped’.

Although recently two players have been stood down or sacked over alleged sexual assault, and several others for other alleged crimes, sanctions are inconsistent. Newspaper commentators who expressed an opinion about Lovett’s sacking all supported St Kilda’s stance, with sports writer Mike Sheahan (2010) declaring that ‘Allowing a man facing a rape charge to ply his trade at AFL level simply seems out of the question, for the club and the league’. ⁵ Yet, North Melbourne rookie Majak Daw continued to play after being charged with rape in 2014 and was even redrafted while he was standing trial for sexual assault. A Factiva search shows that this decision was never questioned in the mainstream news media. Conversely, virtually every time a player is suspended when accused or charged with a crime, the AFL Players’ association complains, insisting that suspension contradicts a player’s right to the presumption of innocence (e.g. Lane, 2010c). In Milne’s case, the Association stated, ‘We don’t consider the decision genuinely reflects a commitment to a player and his family as much as it does other interests of a club’ (Robinson and Warner, 2013), which positions the player and the club – not the complainant – as the only parties who should be considered in such a decision.

Regarding off-field behaviour, Patrick Smith (2010c) remarked that integrity in sport relates to ‘how much impact it has on a club’s chances of victory’, which may be correct, from a football point of view. Other footballers and football representatives have made public statements presuming that the consequences of off-field actions only affect the game and its players (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013). Maintaining the illusion that football transcends mere work provides a logical framework that enables a lack of sanctions to pass unnoticed or a footballer returning to play after a short suspension to seem justified. It makes a player missing on a few games, even on full pay, seem far more serious than another professional temporarily stood down. It further enables sexual assault allegations to seem unlikely – a demi-god role model seems less likely to be guilty than an ordinary person. It enables clubs – or the League – to make decisions based on what will best protect their ‘brand’ and chances of victory.

Conclusion

Current reporting on footballer sexual assault is quite different from 2004, when complaints were frequently explained away as false and footballers’ sexual morality was the focus of outrage (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013). No opinion articles blaming ‘predatory women’ or ‘gold diggers’ (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013) accompanied the Lovett case. However, reifying playing football in such a way that it supersedes the interests of women allegedly harmed by footballers suggests that there is still more to be done. There is a contradiction – even symmetry – between the way male footballers’ paid work is hypervalued and considered ‘not work’, and women’s unpaid domestic labour is devalued and dismissed as ‘not work’. Given the way that men’s performance in elite sport is often used to justify male superiority more broadly (Nelson, 1994: 53–55), it is unsurprising that the valuing of male footballers’ interests over female rape complainants’ mirrors this inequality. Although thinking of football as a profession and footballers as employees might detract from the pleasure fans experience, in the context of off-field criminal allegations, such a shift might facilitate fans acknowledging that a female complainant’s interests are also important.