Figurations, tension‐balance and the flexibility of football rules

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the applicability of the concept of figurations developed by Norbert Elias (and Eric Dunning), which states that the norms/rules of both sport and society are at the same time rigid and flexible. This will be accomplished through a discussion of Elias's conception of society and the relation of this notion to the sociological analysis of sport developed by the present author of its rules. The article also involves an empirical illustration of Elias's thought about the relevance of the sociological study of sports rules, with an emphasis, for present purposes, on the association football (‘soccer’) offside rule.

Acknowledgements

This work was granted with financial aid by the Brazilian National Research Council‐CNPQ (Process 400471/2006‐0). We would like to thank Dominic Malcolm for his careful reading of an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks go to Eric Dunning for his reading this article and helping us to specifying the meaning of some of the central concepts discussed in this article. Of course, the remaining mistakes are ours. Translation: Eduardo Henrique Araújo de Gusmão.

Notes

1. Elias, O Processo Civilizador, Vol. 1.

2. Elias and Dunning, ‘Dynamics of Group Sports With Special Reference to Football’. One should not play down the contribution of Eric Dunning to Eliasian sociology regarding sport studies, especially regarding the ideas and concepts discussed in this paper. As Dunning himself reveals in an exclusive interview conducted by the leading Brazilian Eliasian scholar Ademir Gebara (Conversas Sobre Norbert Elias, 40–1), he was the one who was interested in sports, particularly football, having been football player in the university team. Moreover, in an interview Dunning gave to Rojek (‘Interview: An Anatomy of the Leicester School of Sociology’, 357), he says he thinks that his own studies of football helped ‘to establish the term configuration as a good term to represent the dynamic and relational character of structure’.

3. For example, Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentleman and Players; Maguire, ‘The Emergence of Football Spectating as a Social Problem 1880–1985’; Malcolm, Sheard and White, ‘The Changing Structure and Culture of English Rugby Union Football’; Sheard, ‘Aspects of Boxing in the Western “Civilizing Process”’; Varner and Knottnerus, ‘Civility, Rituals, and Exclusion’.

4. Elias and Dunning, ‘Dynamics of Group Sports With Special Reference to Football’.

5. Cf. van Krieken, ‘Beyond the “Parsonian Problem of Order”’.

6. Elias, The Society of Individuals, 3.

7. Ibid., 6.

8. Ibid., 7.

9. Ibid., 10.

10. Ibid., 32.

11. Ibid., 40.

12. The same kind of thinking can be extended to basketball, rugby, handball, etc..

13. Elias and Dunning, Deporte y Ocio en el Proceso de la Civilización, 233.

14. Elias in Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 52 (Italics in original). Concerning the levelness of society, Elias (What is Sociology?, 93) affirms that: ‘Be that as it may, in direct relationships between two people, A's relation to B is also always B's relationship to A. In such relationships A's dependence on B is always connected with B's dependence on A, except in marginal situations.’

15. Cf. Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 192.

16. Wisnik, Veneno Remédio, 319.

17. Elias, Escritos e Ensaios 1, 26.

18. Francis Kew (‘Contested Rules’, 127–8) shows in a convincing manner this relation connected to the introduction of restrictive rules with the intention of fostering a balance of tensions in five sports, namely: rugby union, rugby league, basketball, netball and football.

19. The history of the offside rule in soccer presents three fundamental moments: (1) its creation in 1886; (2) its first modification, in 1925, when it became necessary to have two defenders between the attackers and the goal line so that the offside could be characterized, in the moment that the player in the attack position took the ball; and (3) the most recent change, in 1990, when it was established that the player standing in the same line of the penultimate defender would not be in an offside position any longer. It is assumed that the modifications of the offside rule were motivated by such factors and there are solid indications that this was the case. Its origins seem to lie in the Eton rules: ‘The Eton Field Game, as its name suggests, is played on an area of grass not dissimilar to a present‐day association football pitch but with hockey‐like goals and a slightly smaller ball. It has a strict offside law – it was evocatively known as “sneaking” – and the majority of players roam the field in a mobile group. However, in 1847 there existed a virtual taboo on handling the ball and goals were scored when the ball passed between and beneath the height of the posts rather than above a bar as at Rugby.’ (Curry, ‘Forgotten Man’, 85, footnote 8).

20. Elias in Elias and Dunning, Deporte y Ocio en el Proceso de la Civilización, 67.

21. Cf. Giulianotti, Sociologia do Futebol, 166–87.

22. Cf. Dunning in Elias and Dunning, Deporte y Ocio en el Proceso de la Civilización, 249.

23. During the exhaustive analysis of the entire game – with special reference to the offside moves (potential or effective) – we counted on the help of Rosângela Pimenta, then a doctoral student at the Sociology Post‐Graduation Programme, at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil, to whom we thank.

24. Cf. www.uefa.com/competitions/under21/statistics/teams/typestat=o.html.

25. For the analysis of these images, we used the software Snaglt 8, from the Techsmith Corporation (www.techsmith.com), free version, available for tests.

26. Elias in Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 52.

27. Ibid., 52.

28. It should be kept in mind that the course of action that occurred was one among other options available to the player. He could have tried, for instance, to ‘break through’ the Serbian defence by dribbling through on his own.

29. Sans and Frattarola, Regulamento de Fútbol, 185.

30. http://www2.uol.com.br/cbf/circulares/CIRCULARFifa987-CONSELHODOIFABREGRA11.pdf. Accessed on September 18, 2007.

31. Eric Dunning has called our attention to the fact that defenders have been using the offside trap mainly since the 1925 amendment to the offside law. Here we emphasize the 1974 Dutch offside trap because this is the one which has been used by defenders in modern football since then. It can be described as ‘a voice of command comes from the central defender, and all four defenders step forward, leaving attackers offside … [It is] a collective synchronisation which was created in Belgium in the 1960s, bettered in the 1980s, and nowadays it has been used by many European teams’ (Lobo, ‘A Defesa em “Linha” e a Táctica do “Fora de Jogo”’).

32. Cf. Winner, Brilliant Orange.

33. www.uefa.com/news/newsid=145533,printer.htmx. Accessed on August 16, 2007. Julian Carosi calls the attention to the fact that the Football Association, after this play, decided to recommend that such conduct should be punished with a yellow card, for being characterized, in accordance with the ‘spirit of the game’, as an unsportsmanlike conduct. It is important to mention that Sam Allardyce, later, excused on having used such expedient (Cf. www.carosi.freeserver.co.uk/corshamreferee/offside.htm). However, the same cannot be said about matches disputed outside England.

34. Elias in Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 192.

35. Kew, ‘The Development of Games: an Endogenous Explanation’.