What Is Sport?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I am going to present a condensed version of my theory of what sport is from my book The Philosophy of Football. In that work, I took my starting point in Bernard Suits’ celebrated, though controversial view that a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ and a sport is a game that involves physical skills with a wide following and a wide level of stability. In the monograph, I carefully work through Suits’ theory showing which clauses of the analysis can be kept, which have to be amended and which should be rejected, while adding other elements to provide an adequate understanding of sport. Here I will not follow suit. Instead, on the scholarly issue of situating my view in the literature, I confer my reader to the book, and instead focus on presenting my own positive view of what sport is and my reasons for holding it. Sport is an extra-ordinary, unnecessary, rule-based, competitive, skill-based physical activity or practice where there is cooperation to fulfil the prelusory goal of having a competition, where mere sport participants endure or tolerate the implementation of a sport’s constitutive rules, whereas sport practitioners also aim at fulfilling sport’s lusory goal of winning, minimally not losing, whichever sport competition they partake in.

I present the idea that sport is a social historical kind and how we should understand that before addressing my suggested analysis of sport and how it fits our concept of sport and sports as we find them practiced by us.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport
• demarcation
• analysis
• social analysis

Acknowledgments

This paper was presented at the British Philosophy of Sport Association 16^th Annual Conference, Trinity College, University of Oxford. I am grateful to all the participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Early Suits argued that all sports are games (Suits 1973, 1978/2005). Later Suits modified the view and admitted that some sports are not games (Suits 1988, 1989).

2. On the scholarly issue of situating my view in the literature, I will, where this might be needed, deal with that in the footnotes. Obviously, I also confer my reader to the book.

3. I am not going to worry about the presence of various types of league systems in some sports. I leave to my reader to amend for such sport setups.

4. Philosophers of sport might be puzzled to find that I do not emphasise my rejection of Suits’ requirements of sport having a wide following with a wide level of stability. I find these parts of Suits’ original analysis weak and badly motivated, thus I will not spend any time on it in this paper. For a critique of this part of Suits, see (McNamee 2008, 15; Borge 2019a, 160). Notice also that I find McNamee’s bog snorkelling case a compelling counterexample to Suits requirement of sports having a wide following (McNamee 2008, 9–10).

5. This is the Searle-Khalidi view. Intuitively, it seems correct to say that if someone found this note, they found money and queer to say that they didn’t really find money, but instead by finding the note they turned it into money.

6. Engaging in a bit of counterfactual history thinking brings this point home. Imagine that in the transitional stage or stages between non-sport and sport in ancient Greece, history took another turn and the ancient Greeks did not develop sports as we know them from, for example, the athletic contests at Olympia, Nemea, Isthmia and Delphi, which ‘became known as the “circuit” (periodos) of sacred crown games’ (Kyle 2014, 23). In that counterfactual scenario that stage or stages would not count as sport, because without the full-formed or mature social historical kind of sport in the picture to frame that stage or stages as sport, collective intentionality in no longer part of the equation and without collective intentionality there are no sports.

7. Notice that social historical kinds like sport can undergo both fission and fusion. Chess boxing is a candidate for being considered the result of a fusion of social kinds—the sport of boxing and the game of chess.

8. Nowhere in this essay do I assume that there is some ontological entity called sport activity or practice independently of there being individuals doing that activity or partaking in that practice. Furthermore, I do not assume that collectives over and above the individual members of such collectives can have intentional states like aiming at something. Apart from these, I believe, fairly uncontroversial clarifications, I take it that there is no need for me to enter the fray of debates on methodological individualism in the social sciences. When I write that the aim of a social historical kind like an initiation rite is different than that of a social historical kind of sport, I am assuming that this is constituted by or connected to individuals that are doing such activities or partaking in such practices. It is these individuals that aim at something or another. Clearly, an individual sport performer might have other aims by doing the sport than winning the competition—he or she might be entering into the sport event with the sole intent of impressing the opposite or same sex (for further obvious reasons), carrying out aesthetically pleasing bodily movements, performing health-promoting movements, and so on and so forth—, but unless, at least and minimally, someone or another aims at winning, we do not have a sport. Winning is the internal or intrinsic aim or purpose of sport. The lusory goal of sport is to win and as will be clear, this is also reflected in the lusory attitude required for sport. In the book, I put this point in terms of it being a requirement for there to be a sport that the sport form of whatever sport we are considering is used. I defined usage of a sport form as the deployment of the sport form in accordance with the sport’s internal aim or purpose, i.e. aiming to achieve the internal aim or purpose of the sport. In order to do or play a particular sport, you have to use the sport form and using the sport form is to try to win whichever sport competition you are engaged in. This is the paradigmatic or prototypical manner in which the sport form partakes in a relation to a function—function here pertaining to the inside of a sport, i.e. the internal or intrinsic aim of the sport—, and without it there would not be sports. Usage of a sport form should be regarded as a sincerity condition of sport. Had there not been the use of the sport form, then there would not have been the sport in question. In the book, I spend some time distinguishing various relations a sport form can partake in—use, abuse, application, appropriation and parroting—, and I argue that the default or standard aim of the activity must be to win the competition—the latter being the lusory goal of sport (Borge 2019a, 100–107). The sport form in question must be used. A reader does well to notice that with regard to the question of when a sport form is used and when it, as it might be, is abused, applied, appropriated or parroted, there is more to such considerations than merely counting heads with regard to the question of usage of the sport form and fulfilling the sincerity condition of sport. Questions of social position, power, hierarchy, hegemony, institutions, etc. with regard to players, coaches, owners, audiences, and others connected to a specific sport event or a period of a sport’s existence might come to bear on such considerations. Philosophers of sport might do well in considering consulting historians and sociologists on such issues. At this point in the essay, I will not defend the claim that aiming at winning is an internal or intrinsic part of sport. I return to the question of how to think about the alleged requirement of sports being competitive when I later in this paper consider nature sports like non-competitive surfing and non-competitive activities and practices like parkour. Still, I might note at this point that some might argue that Robert Simon’s theory of sport represents a competitor view to my line of sport being about winning. This competitor view, it might be suggested, is that sport is primarily about sport-specific athletic excellences. The line would have it that Simon has argued that the sport competition is a mutual quest for excellence and that does not entail winning all the time. I would find such a suggestion curious, because reading Simon I find no such idea. What I do find is something different. Simon is not presenting an argument about how sports actually are done and perceived by their spectators, rather he presents an argument for how he thinks sports ought to be in order for sport competitions to be ethically defensible. Simon tells us that his line on sport ‘as a mutually accepted quest for excellence through challenge’ is motivated by how ‘sport should be regarded and engaged in’, i.e. ‘the ethical significance of competition conceived of as a mutual quest for excellence’, which is not how sports are actually done and conceived of, since, in fact, ‘[c]ompitition as the mutual quest for excellence, it must be emphasized, is an ideal’ (Simon 2004, 27, 27, 32, 39). Sigmund Loland commenting on the fourth edition of Simon’s work, points out that the work is ‘written on the normative premise of sport as “a mutual quest for excellence in the intelligent and directed use of athletic skills in the face of challenge”’ (Loland 2015, 334; Simon, Torres, and Hager 2015). My view of sport is not premised on any normative principles of how one wished things could be or turn out, thus the Simon picture does not make contact with the view presented here. Simon’s project is different than mine—I want to understand sport as it is, Simon wants something else. The view presented in this paper is not threaten by the normative premise that sport competitions ought to be mutual quests for excellence in the intelligent and directed use of athletic skills in the face of challenge.

9. At least some types of art products can be said to be aimed at and sometimes succeeding in doing the latter (see footnote 10).

10. The extra-ordinary is understood as that which comes on top of or alongside the ordinary everyday world of common concerns, and which is generally conceived of as something different than everyday life. This way of delineating the extra-ordinary might seem almost trivial or vacuous. However, I am not sure if the activities and practices that come on top of or alongside the ordinary—ranging from penance to minigolf—have much more in common than being something other than the ordinary. The notion of ‘the extra-ordinary’ proves its worth not by its definition or the delineation it provides, but by helping us to show or point to exemplars of the extra-ordinary that fit the bill of not being ordinary world activities or practices. Both the sacred and the art world are paradigmatic examples of domains that are understood by us as being something other than our everyday life. A particular bodily movement within a sacred context, such as a religious ritual, is something different and is understood differently than the same type of bodily movement carried out as part of, say, manual labour. We relate to and perceive a particular bodily movement very differently if we believe or know it is part of a religious ritual—the sacred and extra-ordinary domain—than if we believe or know it is part of a person’s everyday labour—the profane and ordinary domain. The same applies to art. Take, for example, the ready-made art of Marcel Duchamp, for example, Fountain (1915). We behave quite differently towards a urinal from the Bedfordshire model porcelain urinal production line when it is presented as art in a gallery—the profane and extra-ordinary domain—than we do when encountering it in the men’s room at the local pub—the profane and ordinary domain. Indeed, when presenting Fountain Duchamp exploited the fact that we conceive of things presented as art in a gallery differently than we do when encountering them in ordinary life, i.e. the ordinary world. I doubt, however, that there are many other interesting commonalities between a religious ritual like, say, communion, Duchamp’s Fountain and a sport event like a football match between, say, Plymouth Argyle and Wycombe Wanderers, than that these activities can all be marked off as things that are different from everyday, ordinary activities. These sorts of activities are non-ordinary, and I call that the extra-ordinary. Notice that with regard to the claim that sports are unnecessary—both in the sense of not being directly valuable for ordinary world concerns and not seen as addressing or being about ordinary world concerns—that some activities or practices belonging to the extra-ordinary side of human existence are seen as addressing or being about ordinary world concerns. Belonging to the extra-ordinary side of human life are artistic performances (theatre, dance, music, etc.) and art of various kinds (literature, fiction film, paintings, etc.), and these works of art differ from sport. Only the former has an artistic function and is conceived of by its audience as having one. Furthermore, some works of art are intended to influence and succeed in influencing the ordinary world. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an example of the latter. Such works of art are extra-ordinary, but unlike sports, they are not unnecessary in the sense of not addressing or being about ordinary world concerns. Clearly, Stowe intended for her book to say something specific about the slave trade of her day as well as to influence her own age, i.e., the ordinary world. This is how we understand the work as a whole and its various parts. How different things look with regard to sports. It hardly makes sense to think of the various parts of a sport competition like, for example, ski jumping, as being anything like the parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Works of art have an artistic function and can also aim to influence and succeed in influencing the ordinary world in a way that sports do not. Notice that fine art and sport are both unnecessary in the sense that they are not directly required to meet everyday ordinary world needs. If you need food to survive, writing a novel is not going to help you right away. However, fine art might help indirectly with meeting everyday ordinary world needs, because it can—as the example shows—address ordinary world topics, and this can be valuable in remedying ordinary world concerns. Another extra-ordinary world activity or practice, which also does not seem unnecessary in the same way as sport is, is religion and religious practice, including religious rituals. I take it to be uncontroversial that (many) religious practices are believed to influence and are relevant (for their practitioners) to ordinary world concerns. Thus, religious practices do not qualify as being unnecessary in the same way sport is.

11. Notice that I regard more process-oriented sports like, for example, the aesthetic sport of gymnastics as also having defined end-states, like, for example, completing each individual event correctly.

12. Obviously, this needs to be supplemented with our theory of what type of social historical kind sport is. I will not go through those steps here.

13. On the notion of human sports, see Borge (2019b).

14. Here we note a difference between my conception of sport and Suits’ understanding of sport. Suits argued that sport is ruled-based, ‘where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means’ (Suits 1978/2005, 49, 1973, 51). Suits made the latter a necessary condition for something being a sport. This view has become orthodoxy in the philosophy of sport, but it is false. Suits would object to the line of reasoning pursued in this essay by pointing to his story of the game playing generals Ivan and Abdul, who agreed to a game without limiting means in ‘[a] fight to the finish’ (Suits 1978/2005, 70). Suits argues that the two old warhorses in order to play this game still need a limitation on the means by which they play. They need ‘a rule which forbids you to make a move in the game before a certain agreed upon time’ concluding that ‘a starting time is such an artificial limitation [on the means at your disposal for achieving victory]’ (Suits 1978/2005, 73–74). Suits’ argument proves no such thing (Borge 2019a, 131–133). An agreed-upon starting time does not limit the means by which you can play the game or sport, but enables there to be a game or sport. The two are importantly different. To decide to play a game or a sport at a certain point in time does pose limitations on what you can do in the ordinary world or everyday life—for example, if you are to play the ultimate game or sport in a fight to death at 2 pm, you cannot at the same time pick up the kids from school—, but not on what you do in that game or sport once it has started. This line of thinking sits well with my understanding of prelusory goals of sport (which differs from Suits’ understanding of it; see footnote 18) and the line that sport is extra-ordinary and unnecessary. Given that you have a prelusory goal of having a certain game or sport to play like playing the Ivan and Abdul fight to the finish, then you cannot destroy your intended game or sport opponent before the game or sport starts. Your intention to play the ultimate game or sport depends on there being an opponent to play against. However, deciding to play a game or sport at a certain point in time x does not necessarily pose limitations on the manner in which you play that game or sport, because prior to x there is no such game or sport. This has consequences with regard to the ultimate game or sport as envisaged by Ivan and Abdul in Suits’ Grasshopper. Should you choose to start a fight to the death prior to the time set for the game or sport action by ambushing your opponent, you have de facto forfeited the game or sport event in favour of plain old murder. Having the goal of having a game or sport to play—this being what I call a prelusory goal—does place limitations on what you can do prior to the fulfilment of that goal. However, the prelusory goal is independent of the game or sport itself and does not constitute a limitation on the means the players have at their disposal when playing games or sports.

15. Lewis argues that ‘[w]hen common sense delivers a firm and uncontroversial answer about a not-too-far-fetched case, theory had better agree’, while our amended line is that when categorization judgements of prototypicality of sports deliver the prototypical sports, theory had better agree. (Lewis 1986a, 194).

16. Notice, again, there is no social historical kind of sport, unless there are individuals doing sports, and there is no internal or intrinsic aim or purpose of sport, i.e. aiming at winning, unless there are individuals aiming at winning particular sports. Given this, I take it, obvious fact, it follows that the inside of a social historical kind like sport, consists of individuals that collectively make up the various sports. When we talk about the internal aim or purpose of sport being to win, minimally not lose, then, of course, this means particular individuals aiming at winning, minimally not losing. As previously mentioned, with regard to social historical kinds like sport, deciding or finding whichever lusory attitude is connected to or constitutive of particular social historical kinds is not merely a question of counting heads and how each of those individuals relate to the activity or practice in question. I will not labour this point any further in this footnote (see footnote 8). With regard to the question of social historical kinds like sport and lusory attitude, it might be worth recalling that we have already argued that sport is a transparent social historical kind, but that the transparency-relation need not pertain directly to the sport performers. Take the case of greyhound races. Obviously, the hounds in greyhound races do not fulfil the required lusory attitude of sport—to aim at winning, minimally not losing—since the hounds are not aware nor even conceptually equipped to be aware of doing sport or being part of a sport or a sport event. As with the question of sport and collective intentionality, in a case such as the greyhound races case, the question of sport and lusory attitude pertains not to the sport performers (the hounds in the races), but to the organizers, owners of the dogs, the audience, etc. The greyhound races are organized in a manner so that the hounds running after a mechanical, or artificial, hare count as aiming at winning and whichever hound crosses the line first count as having won the race, thus fulfilling the lusory attitude required for sport. This is how the races are organized and this is how the organizers, owners of the dogs, the audience, etc., take them to be organized. The inside of the greyhound races that makes it a sport (if you want to consider it a sport) pertains to organizers, owners of the dogs, the audience, etc. Consider the following science fiction inspired scenario. In a distant future, the human race has managed to wipe itself out and no other creature of similar cognitive capacities has stepped in and taken our place, while leaving behind an automatized world in which many of the things that the humans created are still up and running even thought there are no humans around anymore. The greyhound races, or, more precisely and importantly, the greyhound races form, has survived human extinction. Obviously, this would need a lot of stage setting. How are the tracks maintained, how are the hounds taken care of, how are new hounds bred, and so on and so forth. These details are inconsequential to the thought experiment. Take it as writ. What do we have in this scenario? The greyhound races form has survived. Technically, the greyhound races of this future are the same as our present greyhound races. A time traveller from the present could at first glaze come to believe that there were greyhound races and in one sense he or she would be correct. The greyhound races form of the present and the future is the same. In this sense, there are greyhound races in this humanless future. In another sense, our time traveller would be wrong, if he or she concluded that there were greyhound races at this future point. The activity or practice of greyhound races qua sport does not exist in this bleak future. Why? The inside of the activity or practice has changed, since the greyhound races are no longer organized in a manner so that something count as aiming at winning or winning a race (after all, there are no organizers, owners of the dogs, audience, etc.), and that makes all the difference. Now you only have chasing hounds and that does not count as a sport. The social historical kind of greyhound races as indexed to the present, which by stipulation is where our time traveller comes from, has gone out of existence. In our imagined scenario, the form of the activity or practice has survived, but the social historical kind of greyhound races has not. Anyone unhappy with made up cases with regard to social kinds and change due to a chancing inside can consult the case of danza de los voladores (Borge 2015, 116, 2019a, 93, 106, 229).

17. Another contested and controversial case is eSport. The method under consideration settles this case and rules that the various electronic sports belong to the sport domain. Furthermore, our usage of prototype theory explains why eSports remain on the outskirts of the sport domain. They would normally not be thought of as athletic endeavours, whereas your prototypical sports are, but the eSports are essentially physical activities or involve centrally physical skills (see Borge 2019a, 177). Similar remarks hold for an activity or practice like darts.

18. Here we note a difference between my conception of sport and Suits’ understanding of sport. A prelusory goal—a goal prior (pre-) to playing a sport (lusory) is presumably something that is specified prior to a sport contest. Suits describes a prelusory goal as ‘ [t]his kind of goal may be described generally as a specific achievable state of affairs. (…) [T]he pre-lusory goal of a game (…) can be described before, or independently of, any game of which it may be, or come to be, a part’ (Suits 1973, 50). What you will get is a description of the physical facts involved in reaching the sport-specific aims of whichever sport you are playing—in the 100-metre dash it is reaching the goal line located a hundred meters from the starting line, in ice hockey it is bringing a hockey puck over the opposing team’s goal line, between the goalposts and under the crossbar and in preventing the opposing team from bringing a hockey puck over one’s own goal line, between the goalposts and under the crossbar, and so on for the various sports we play—but the problem with this line of thinking is that with regard to some sports like ice hockey the prelusory goals as understood by Suits does not exist prior to the sport itself. This shows that Suits’ understanding of prelusory goals does not help us understand sport. This connects to another part of Suits’ analysis of sport, which is omitted in the view presented here. Suits summed up his analysis of games by writing that ‘playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ (Suits 1978/2005, 55). However, Graham McFee has pointed out that for certain games like chess ‘the idea of “unnecessary obstacles” makes no sense’, because ‘[n]o “obstacles” here seem explicable independently of the game’ (McFee 2004, 25). Similarly, for some sports like ice hockey, the obstacles to be overcome are not explicable independent of the sport. Suits does address McFee’s worry, but he does so by appealing to institutions—‘it is not possible to achieve the prelusory goal of chess (…) aside from the institution of chess’—and this admission shows the irrelevance of Suits’ notion of prelusory goals, when one wants to understand games and sport (Suits 1978/2005, 58). What you are left with after Suits’ admission is the trivial observation that sports, like any other activity or practice can be described independent of the social kind itself. McFee’s rejection of Suits’ requirement of unnecessary obstacles in sport is sound and that rejection carries over to my rejection of Suits’ notion of prelusory goals.

19. Due to what is known in the philosophy of sport as the incompatibility thesis—the idea that you cannot break a constitutive rule of a sport and at the same time play that sport (see the next footnote for a further discussion and elaboration)—one finds philosophers of sport who insist that when we find rule-breaking in sport, the rules that are broken are so-called regulative rules. Whereas constitutive rules are part of what a particular sport is and to break them would somehow destroy the sport as that sport or the rule-breaker as being someone who does that sport, regulative rules of a sport is not part of what that particular sport is, so violations of the latter is unproblematic. Regulative rules regulate behaviour, activities and practices that exist independent of and prior to such rules. A philosopher that defends the incompatibility thesis can insist that the handball rule in association football is a regulative rule, and that you can break such a rule and still do the sport in question. For example, William Morgan writes that “ Suits could not have been clearer on this point: ‘violating the [regulative] rule is neither to fail to play the game nor (necessarily) to fail to play the game well, since it is sometimes tactically correct to incur such a penalty for the sake of the advantage gained’ (Suits 1978/2005, 52) (Morgan 1987, 3). The first thing to note is that Suits is not as clear on this as Morgan takes him to be. Suits tells us that ‘two kinds of rule figure in games, one kind associated with prelusory goals, the other with lusory goals’ (Suits 1978/2005, 51). The kind associated with Suits’ so-called prelusory goals are the constitutive rules, which ‘set out all the conditions which must be met in playing the game’, whereas the other kind of rule ‘operates (…) within the area circumscribed by constitutive rules, and this kind of rule may be called a rule of skill’ (Suits 1978/2005, 51). Examples of such rules of skill, according to Suits, are ‘the familiar injunctions to keep your eye on the ball, to refrain from trumping your partner’s ace, and the like’ (Suits 1978/2005, 51). Rules of skill, if it is correct to call them rules, are more like a heuristics that tells you how to play a sport well. When Suits then goes on to claim that there is ‘a third kind of rule (…) the kind of rule whose violation results in a fixed penalty, so that violating the rule is [not] to fail to play the game’, he fails to account for how the latter part follows given his incompatibility thesis (Suits 1978/2005, 52). In a later work, Suits again addresses both constitutive rules and rules of skill, while telling us that ‘in football (…) the rules rule out, among other things, the use of machine guns by guards and tackles’, though, again, there is no mention of regulative rules (Suits 1988, 5). The year after, Suits mentions regulative rules when referring to Klaus Meier’s work, but does not use the term himself (Suits 1989, 12). The background for this reference is that Suits had argued that the offside rules in American football and ice hockey were constitutive rules, whereupon Meier claimed that ‘rules such as these, which specify the penalties to be applied when particular constitutive rules have been violated, may be more appropriately called “regulative”’ (Meier 1988, 20, Suits 1988, 5–6, see also Meier 1985). Suits does not accept this invitation. Instead, he merely modifies his view and admits to being mistaken when presenting the offside rule in American football and ice hockey ‘as illustrative of a constitutive rule per se, since such rules are extensions of, or derivations from, a game’s basic constitutive rules’ (Suits 1989, 11–12). In American football, the offside rule yields yardage penalties, and according to Suits in the quote above, that offside rule is not illustrative of a constitutive rule per se, but is clearly still a constitutive rule. Suits is not at all clear on how his incompatibility thesis is supposed to sit with the seemingly obvious observation that constitutive rules are broken when people play sports. Be that as it may. Morgan is clear in his defence of the incompatibility thesis. Morgan writes that ‘the unqualified claim formalism makes with respect to the observance of rules applies to only one kind of rule, namely the constitutive rules. It is only the latter kind of rule that defines what a game is in the sense of setting out all the conditions that must be met in the playing of the game’ (Morgan 1987, 3). Morgan goes on to state that ‘regulative rules presuppose the existence of constitutive rules (without which there would be nothing to regulate), and so count as extensions of the latter rules, it doesn’t follow that the breaking of one of these rules invalidates the game as such’ (Morgan 1987, 3). The handball rule in association football, Morgan would have to argue, is a regulative rule, not a constitutive rule. However, history teaches us otherwise. If we consider Law 12—Fouls and Misconduct, from FIFA’s rule book 2015–2016 edition, concerning when fouls and misconduct are penalized by a direct free kick or penalty kick, we find that ‘[a] direct free kick is awarded to the opposing team if a player commits any of the following seven offences in a manner considered by the referee to be careless, reckless or using excessive force: • kicks or attempts to kick an opponent • trips or attempts to trip an opponent (…) [a] direct free kick is also awarded to the opposing team if a player commits any of the following three offences: (…) • handles the ball deliberately (expect for the goalkeeper within his own penalty area) (…) [a] penalty kick is awarded if any of the above ten offences is committed by a player inside his own penalty area, irrespective of the position of the ball’ (FIFA 2015, 37). Among the ten offenses mentioned in Law 12, we can extract these key rules (with the addition for some of them of not being careless, reckless or using excessive force): • Do not kick or attempt to kick an opponent • Do not trip or attempt to trip an opponent • Do not handle the ball deliberately (expect for the goalkeeper within his own penalty area). With these in mind, consider the suggestion made in the book that the year 1863 might mark the beginning of the social historical kind of association football (Borge 2019a, 94–100, 184–185). On 1 December 1863, at the fifth meeting of the Football Association (FA), carrying the ball and hacking were banned and this, I suggested in the book, indicates that the fission of proto-football towards two distinct sports—association football and rugby football—had begun. The rules of not handling the ball and not kicking or tripping the opponent are at the centre of one of the most important stages in the life of the social historical kind of association football, and those rules are clearly constitutive rules of the sport. Things could have looked very different. Collins reports that ‘at the end of the fourth meeting on 24 November 1863, it seemed that a consensus had been arrived at (…) [r]unning with the ball in your hands would be allowed and hacking would be legal. In short, the meeting had agreed to play football along the lines played at Rugby School’ (Collins 2017, 33). The rules of 24 November 1863 included the following: ‘9. “A player shall be entitled to run with the ball towards his adversaries” goal if he makes a fair catch, or catches the ball on the first bound; but in the case of a fair catch, he makes his mark, he shall not run.’ 10. “If any player shall run with the ball towards his adversaries” goal, any player in the opposite side shall be at liberty to charge, hold, trip or hack him, or to wrest the ball from him; but no player shall be held and hacked at the same time’’ (quoted in Harvey 2005, 140–141, my italics). Compare rule 9 and 10 of the fourth FA meeting on 24 November 1863 with FIFA’s rule book 2015–2016 edition Law 12—Fouls and Misconduct on when fouls are penalized with a direct free kick or penalty kick to the opposing team. You find that the latter almost looks like it was designed to refute and replace rule 9 and 10 of the 24 November 1863 rules. That is no accident. Harvey tells us that, at the fifth meeting of the FA, ‘laws 9 and 10 of the FA code were expunged and replaced by’ the following (Harvey 2005, 143): “9: No player shall carry the ball.10: Neither tripping or hacking shall be allowed and no player to use his hand to push adversary” (quoted in Harvey 2005, 143). At this point in history, it is reasonable to talk, at least, about the dawn of the social historical kind of association football. The rules of not handling the ball, not kicking opponents, not tripping opponents, not holding opponents, not charging opponents, and the like, are woven into the football blueprint and are constitutive rules that are part of the foundation of football. This is part of the crossroad from which proto-football developed into association football and rugby football. These constitutive rules of the sport are broken or violated on a regular basis by association football footballers, thus the need for reaction or penalty-evoking rules that instruct referees on how to deal with such rule violations. The idea that we can save the incompatibility thesis by arguing that the often-seen violations of these rules of not handling the ball, not kicking opponents, not tripping opponents, etc., are mere violations of so-called regulative rules is clearly misguided. In light of the data from sport history as relayed in this essay, the incompatibility thesis with regard to association football is clearly false, and thus also false with regard to the sport phenomenon as such.

20. Here we note a difference between my conception of sport and Suits’ understanding of sport. Suits tells us that the necessary lusory attitude for playing a game or a sport is ‘the knowing acceptance of constitutive rules just so the activity made possible by such acceptance can occur’ or that ‘games require obedience to rules (…) where such rules are obeyed’ (Suits 1973, 55, 1978/2005, 47). Suits own reading of the required lusory attitude led him to argue that ‘to break a game rule is to render impossible the attainment of an end (…) one cannot (really) win the game unless one plays it, and one cannot (really) play the game unless one obeys the rules of the game’ (Suits 1978/2005, 39). If you break the rules of a sport, then logically speaking you are no longer playing that sport, and subsequently you cannot win the competition you seemingly are part of. You cannot cheat, i.e. wilfully violate the rules of a sport, and at the same time play that sport. ‘It is impossible for me to win the game and at the same time to break one of its rules’ (Suits 1967, 150, 1978/2005, 40). Morgan calls this the ‘logical incompatibility thesis’ (Morgan 1987, 1). Unfortunately, Suits’ thesis just does not fit the sport landscape where we find that intentional and non-intentional rule-breaking happens all of the time. This gives us reason to reject Suits’ view. One way, however, for a Suitsian to defend the incompatibility thesis would be to adopt an error theory of sport, i.e. the view that we are often mistaken about when people play sport and when they do not play sport. In the monograph I argue that this theoretical price is too high and that one should give this option a pass (Borge 2019a, 140–144). I also show why Morgan’s defence of the incompatibility thesis should be rejected (Borge 2019a, 180–186; Morgan 1987). Regarding Morgan’s defence of the incompatibility thesis, see the previous footnote. Suitsian formalism, i.e. reductive formalism, should be given up. The rejection of Suits on this point usually leads philosophers of sport to endorse the ethos view of sport. The lusory attitude is not to be found in strict adherence to the formal rules of the game, but rather in the endorsement of a sport’s ethos, i.e. interpretation of the rules of a game. The first to introduce this line of reasoning was Fred D’Agostino (1981). The ethos view seems these days to be the default view on lusory attitude among philosophers of sport and I leave it to my reader to count and account for all the authors that seemingly take their refuge in the ethos view when considering the question of sport and lusory attitude. Unfortunately, the ethos view suffers from a flaw akin to that of reductive formalism. D’Agostino writes that ‘unacceptable behavior violates the rules of the game in a way which, according to the ethos of that game, disqualifies its perpetrator as a player of that game. According to this non-formalist account of games, only such unacceptable behavior is not game-behavior; only a player engaging in such behavior ipso facto ceases to be a player’ (D’Agostino 1981, 15). This is the ethos view’s very own logical incompatibility thesis. It is impossible for me to win the sport and at the same time to break one of its rules in a manner, which is not accepted, endorsed or included in the ethos of the sport. This compatibility thesis fares no better when looking at how sports are actually played. Consider the case of association football. Rule breaking in football happens all the time and it is the consensus of the football world that the players who break rules do not stop being footballers. Unacceptable behaviour that passes under the radar of referees, on the other hand, is rarer, but when it happens (and it does happen), the player in question still counts as a footballer, and what he or she did is an action in a game of football made by a footballer. Unacceptable footballing conduct does not automatically make you a non-footballer. Furthermore, when actually looking at the empirical evidence, we find that a shared ethos is not necessary for playing the same sport (Borge 2019a, 147–149). You remain a participant or practitioner of football in a football match until a referee rules that you are no longer to be part of that game. This is a minimal conception of the lusory attitude. A sport performer can break the rules intentionally or unintentionally, or violate the shared ethos of a sport (if there even is such a shared ethos), and still be a sport performer and part of a sport, as long as he or she endure, obey or accept the arbitration of the rules of whichever sport he or she plays or is part of. This minimal conception of lusory attitude cuts right through the reductive formalism vs. non-formalist/anti-formalism debate, and avoids the various pitfalls into which these positions fall. The view argued for here explains that which needs explaining without taking on any superfluous views and debates.

21. As I use these notions, the notion of a sport performer covers both sport participants and sport practitioners. In, for example, an association football match, sport performers are the people who are on the pitch playing the match. Being a sport performer is neutral as with regard to the attitude of the individual or individuals that are part of a sport or sport event, i.e. with regard to lusory attitude. Consider the case of someone who enters an association football match believing that it is a highly sophisticated rainmaking ritual. Call this individual Ringo and the point in time at which he enters into the sport for T1. If the match has referees, instead of being self-refereed, then perhaps Ringo is of the opinion that the referee or referees are some sort of clergy presiding over and leading the ritual in question. Be that as it may. By stipulation Ringo is not doing a ritual or is part of a ritual, because it is not a ritual, but an association football match, i.e. a sport. Ringo believes that he is doing a ritual, but he is actually playing association football as he endures or tolerates the implementation of the sport’s constitutive rules. Ringo is a mere sport participant. Ringo is not using the association football form because Ringo is not aiming at winning, minimally not losing, the match he is playing. However, for it to be a football match and football we need someone in the game using the football form, i.e. aiming at winning, minimally not losing. Remember, again, in certain fringe cases like young children being habituated into the game, we can accept that the lusory attitude are fulfilled by others than the ones actually playing football. Here I will not worry anymore about that possibility. To recap; to endure or tolerate the implementation of association football’s constitutive rules, while aiming at winning, minimally not losing, is to use the association football form and to be a practitioner of the sport. Consider the highly unlikely scenario that Ringo keeps playing association football, while not stopping to believe that it is a rainmaking ritual and that others like Ringo enter the sport practice while believing it to be a rainmaking ritual, until no-one connected to the sport think they are part of a sport and no-one aims at winning, minimally not losing, but instead they all believe that they are part of a rainmaking ritual, and aims at making it rain. Call this latter point in time for T2. Do they at T2 play association football? If you ask about whether they play the social historical kind of association football that we got acquainted with at T1, the answer is no. Association football qua sport has at T2 gone out of existence, since no-one acts as if they are part of a sport, i.e. no-one aims at winning, minimally not losing; there are no practitioners of the sport of association football that use the association football form as indexed to T1. The association football form has survived and is present at T2, but what we find at T2 is a rainmaking ritual and not a sport, and that is, obviously, a different social historical kind.