Shame and the sports fan

ABSTRACT

Sports fans sometimes feel shame for their team’s moral transgressions. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon. We offer an account of sports fan shame in terms of collective shame. We argue that this account is superior to accounts of sports fan shame in terms of shame for others and shame for oneself. We then argue that accepting the role that sports stars play in bringing about the collective shame amongst their fans provides a new way of justifying the claim that sport stars are subject to special moral obligations.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective emotion
• sports fandom
• philosophy of sport
• shame
• philosophy of emotion
• role model obligations

Introduction

Sport produces many emotions – for example, exhilaration, disappointment, anger, fear, pride, and shame. If a player plays badly, they might feel ashamed of their poor performance. But it is not only players who feel shame.¹ Sports fans also feel shame about their club’s poor performance. For example, after his club’s 10–2 aggregate defeat to Bayern Munich in 2017, one Arsenal fan said: ‘I’m ashamed we’ve been playing like a Sunday League knockabout’ (BBC Online 2017).

Fans also feel shame about the moral failures of their club. For example, in response to the sex abuse scandal involving the Penn State Nittany Lions Football club that broke in 2010, a number of the club’s supporters expressed their sense of shame. Writing in The Washington Post, Robert Pierre (2011) described this scandal as one involving ‘collective shame’ and saying of all connected to Penn State ‘shame on us’. Similarly, in relation to the sexual abuse scandal at Crewe Alexandria Football Club, lifelong fan Adam Breeze (2018) wrote an article in The Guardian with the title, ‘I was a Crewe Obsessive. Now I’m so ashamed of my club that I’ve divorced them’. Responding to false allegations made by Aamer Anwer of racist behaviour by fans of Partick Thistle Football Club against the Rangers player John Waters, lifelong fan Tom Hosie wrote: ‘Had such an incident taken place then I would have been ashamed to have been a Thistle fan. There is every chance I wouldn’t be a Jags [Partick Thistle] fan right now’ (Agency 2012). And in response to Luis Suarez’s biting Branislav Ivanovic in a match against Chelsea, Liverpool fan Ian Salmon (2013) wrote, ‘As a footballer I adore Luis Suarez. Tonight, as a fan, I’m ashamed of him’. In this paper, we investigate the shame that sports fans feel for such moral transgressions.

We start our investigation by asking: what is the object of the shame in these cases? In other words, what is the negative evaluation of shame directed towards? We begin by taking these claims at face value – that is, we accept that fans feel shame for their clubs just as we might feel shame for a loved one. However, this position clashes with the commonly made claim that shame involves an evaluation of the self. In section 1, we will explain why this gives us reason to reject the other-focused account of sport fans’ shame. In section 2, we will explore whether fans’ shame for their club is really shame for themselves. While this self-focused account fares better than the other-focused account discussed in section 1, it does not accommodate the descriptions of fans’ shame for their club. In section 3, we consider an alternative: fans feel shame for a collective they are part of. In this way, their shame is self-focused, but the ‘self’ in question is their collective. We will argue that this account offers the most plausible analysis of the object of fans’ shame. In section 4, we end by exploring the implications of our discussion for the claim that being a sports star confers special moral obligations. We will argue that accepting that the role that sports stars play in bringing about the collective shame amongst supporters provides a new way of justifying the claim that sport stars are subject to such obligations.

Note three things before we begin. First, as mentioned at the outset, there are many other emotions that sports fans feel. Our focus on shame should be understood as providing a case study that can shed light on the nature of the emotions experienced by sports fans rather than making any claim about the priority of shame in understanding the nature of fandom. Second, we will be discussing the shame that a fan feels qua fan. In other words, we are interested in the shame that fans feel in virtue of their fandom, not shame they may feel in relation to other things, such as being a lousy father, a terrible cook or a tax evader. Finally, in examining the object of fan shame we do not mean to imply that there can only be one object of fan shame. It is possible that there could be more than one object of the shame that sports fans feel in relation to the moral failings of their club. Our interest, though, is in the central object of this shame. In other words, we are interested in the typical object of this shame, the one that can best make sense of the experiences of shame fans feel towards moral transgressions by those associated with their club.

Shame for another

The first account we will examine holds that the object of fan shame is someone or something other than the fan experiencing the shame. In some cases, it will be the club they support. In other cases, it will be someone associated with the club, such as the manager, a player or a director. Either way, the sports fans’ shame is directed at something or someone other than themselves. There are at least two things to be said in favour of this view.

First, it is perhaps the most natural way to read several of the quotes we examined in the introduction. Breeze, for example, talked about being ‘ashamed of my club’, while Salmond described being ‘ashamed of him [Suarez]’. These quotes seem most naturally understood to be picking out someone else as the object of shame: the club in Breeze’s case and one of the club’s players in Salmond’s. Another advantage of this view is that it makes sense of the negative evaluation involved in shame. In both of the cases discussed above, it is someone other than the fan who has acted wrongly. On the face of it, it seems to make sense that it is the person who has acted wrongly who should be the object of the negative evaluation. It makes sense then that it should be Suarez and Crewe Alexander that are the objects of shame in these cases.

This way of understanding the object of shame, however, is in tension with a central claim held by many working on the nature of shame: that shame is a self-focused emotion. For example, Deonna et al. provide the following description of shame: ‘In shame, we apprehend a trait or action of ours that we take to exemplify the polar opposite of a self-relevant value as indicating our incapacity to exemplify this self-relevant value even to a minimal degree’ (Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni 2012, 102 emphasis added). Similarly, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev claims that, ‘Shame involves viewing oneself in light of certain norms, especially those which are also adopted by others’ (2000, 512 emphasis added). While John Rawls describes shame as, ‘The feeling that someone has when he experiences an injury to his self-respect or suffers a blow to his self-esteem’ (1999, 388 emphasis added).

One reason for accepting this commonly made claim about shame is that it provides a plausible phenomenological account of the way in which the evaluation involved in shame differs from that of guilt (Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni 2012, 83; Lewis 1971, 30). While both shame and guilt involve negative evaluations of the self, their central focus is different. As Helen Lewis (1971, 30) puts the point:

The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done or undone is the focus. In guilt, the self is negatively evaluated in connection with something but is not itself the focus of evaluation.

Lewis’ point is that the experience of guilt involves a focus on an act that the self has performed while in shame the focus is on the self that performed that act. Martha Nussbaum makes a similar point, claiming that, ‘Whereas shame focuses on defect or imperfection, and thus on some aspect of the very being of the person who feels it, guilt focuses on an action (or a wish to act), but need not extend to the entirety of the agent, seeing the agent as utterly inadequate’ (2004, 207 emphasis added). To put it simply: a guilty person feels bad for having acted badly, while an ashamed person feels bad for being a bad person.

Another reason to think that shame is a self-focused emotion is that this helps to explain the differing action tendencies associated with shame and guilt. According to Bernard Williams, shame involves, ‘not just the desire to hide, or to hide my face, but the desire to disappear, not to be there’ (1993, 89). In other words, shame involves avoidance. This claim is supported by a range of psychological studies into the nature of shame (e.g. Lindsay-Hartz 1984). Williams also claims that shame may also lead to, ‘attempts to reconstruct or improve oneself’ (1993, 90). In other words, shame involves reform. Guilt, on the other hand, according to Williams (1993, 89–90), involves a desire to apologize and attempt to make reparations for the wrong that has been done. This suggests that while shame is focused on, ‘what I am’, guilt is focused on, ‘what I have done’ (1993, 92–93). This gives us further reason to think that shame is a self-focused emotion.

Given that there is good reason to accept that shame is a self-focused emotion, there is thereby good (though perhaps not definitive) reason to reject an account that holds that the object of fan shame is not the self.

Shame at the self

The problem with the other-focused account was that it conflicted with the widely accepted view that shame is a self-focused emotion. We might therefore try to provide a self-focused account of fan shame. According to this account, when fans claim to be ashamed of their club or ashamed of one of their club’s players, they do not mean that the object of their shame is the club or the player. Instead, the object of their shame is themselves. This account has a clear advantage over the other-focused account – namely, that it agrees with the orthodox view that shame is a self-focused emotion.

However, the self-focused account has an equally clear disadvantage in comparison to the other-focused account. While the other-focused account fitted neatly with the claims in the introduction made by those feeling ashamed, the self-focused account does not. When Breeze writes that he is ‘ashamed of my club’, the self-focused account must say that what he really means is that he is ashamed of himself. Similarly, when Salmond says that he is ‘ashamed of him [Suarez]’ what he really means, according to the self-focused account, is that he (Salmon) is ashamed of himself. In both cases, the self-focused account appears to be in tension with how the fans themselves describe their shame.

The problem becomes worse when we consider the negative evaluation in these cases. The other-focused account makes clear sense of the negative evaluation. In both cases, it is someone (or something) else who has acted wrongly and someone (or something) else who has a negative aspect to their self (e.g. a flaw, vice, or negative trait). It makes sense, then, that they would be the subject of a negative evaluation. The self-focused account on the other hand cannot easily make sense of this negative evaluation. It wasn’t the Liverpool fans who bit an opponent, so there is no obvious reason why a Liverpool fan should be ashamed of this behaviour. Similarly, it wasn’t the Penn State or Crewe Alexandria supporters who committed the sexual abuse, so again there is no obvious reason why they should feel ashamed for this abuse on this account.

One way to respond to this problem would be to simply accept that there is no reason for these supporters to feel ashamed. Given that the supporters were not involved in the morally objectionable behaviour, they have no reason to feel ashamed about it. This, it could be claimed, does not present a problem for the self-focused account but rather it simply highlights the irrationality of these supporters. However, in order for this response to work it is not enough to claim that some or even many cases where fans report feeling shame for their club are irrational. In order to serve as a full response to the question of the object of fan shame, this response must hold that all such feelings are irrational, as they all involve a negative self-evaluation in response to negative actions performed by others. While this claim may be accepted by those already disposed to view sports fans as irrational, this strikes us as a position that should only be accepted as a last resort.

In summary, a strength of the self-focused account is that it accommodates the widely held claim that shame is a self-focused emotion. However, a weakness of this account is that it struggles to fit with the fans’ own descriptions of their shame. Moreover, it appears to make such shame irrational, given that the fans did not perform the immoral acts. In the next section, we will sketch an alternative account that explains fan shame in terms of collective emotion. We will argue that this view provides the most plausible account of the object of fan shame and thereby best explains the shame of sports fans.

Collective shame

So far we have examined two accounts of the object of fan shame and the advantages of each. On the one hand, the other-focused account seems to correctly identify that the fan qua individual is not the focus of shame. On the other hand, the self-focused account fits with the widely held view that shame is a self-focused emotion. In this section, we propose an explanation of the sports fans’ shame that captures both of these aspects.

Let’s start by recalling that Pierre (2011) describes the Penn State sexual abuse scandal as one involving ‘collective shame’. We agree and propose that fans feel collective shame for the moral transgressions of their club and the members of that club.² After outlining an account of collective shame, we demonstrate its explanatory power: the varying action-tendencies of shame – namely avoidance and reform – explain varying fan responses to the moral transgressions of their club.

There are various ways to conceive of collective shame. The first is to see the club and its supporters as members of a collective agent. According to some, collectives – such as nations, corporations, and in this case football clubs – have sufficient complexity and organization to count as agents (see, e.g. Lawford-Smith and Collins 2017 for an overview). While those who endorse collective agency need not endorse collective emotions, some (e.g. Huebner 2011) argue that collectives themselves can experience emotions. In other words, on this view, collective shame is when collectives themselves feel shame. On this view, the football club itself feels shame as a consequence of its moral failures.

Our explanation of collective shame, however, will not rest on clubs themselves being collective agents or themselves experiencing emotions. Even if clubs are not agents, they are groups and the account of collective shame that we will draw on makes sense of collective shame without committing us to the view that football clubs are agents or themselves experience emotions – though nothing we say rules out that possibility either.

If clubs are groups, then we might just say that collective shame is the aggregation of all the fans feeling shame (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012). But this account does not explain why fans feel shame for the moral failures of their club or its players. All that the aggregation model is able to explain is why fans might feel shame for an aspect of their respective selves. But it is not that the fans feel shame for an aspect of themselves. Rather, as discussed, they describe themselves as feeling shame for an aspect of their club. By reducing collective shame to individual shame, the aggregation model thereby seems lacking. What we need is an account that explains why fans feel shame for something they feel part of.

In what follows, we will draw on aspects of the account of collective shame developed by Pettigrove and Parsons (2012) in order to explain why fans feel shame for their club without thinking that the club is an agent. This is by virtue of fans identifying as members of the relevant group – namely the club, where ‘club’ covers at least the squad, the management and the fans. So, fans may feel shame for their club in much the same way that members of a country may feel shame for the actions of their government. Importantly, on this view, emotions have inherent social dimensions – that is, they arise and are partly constituted by one’s social environment – and it is these social dimensions that explain the form and character that seems distinctive about the shame that fans feel for the moral failures of their club. Understanding these social dimensions is central to understanding the mechanism through which fans identify as part of their club and how engagement with the club and other fans reinforces this identification. After we have seen how fans may come to identify with their club, we will then see how collective shame operates.

The first social dimension is that emotions are contagious (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012, 508). The idea is likely familiar: we find ourselves laughing and happy when everyone else around is laughing and happy, or we find ourselves scared and sad when everyone else around us is scared and sad. Importantly, we often do not realise we are sharing the emotions of those around us. In short, we take up the emotions of others without conscious effort. The contagious nature of emotions has also been supported by a number of empirical studies (e.g. Goodwin, Jasper, and Poletta 2000). Even when we are disposed to respond with joy and exhilaration, for example, at a goal being scored by our club, being around others when this happens seems to intensify our experience.

The second social dimension is that we often learn how to respond to actions and events through others. This is what some call ‘emotional socialization’ (Pollak and Thoits 1989 cited in Pettigrove and Parsons 2012, 508). The idea is that we learn ‘emotional scripts’ through observing the emotions of others and implicitly receiving feedback on our own emotional responses. These scripts identify the appropriate object and action tendencies of those emotions. As we discussed earlier, guilt tends to induce us to apologise and make amends. Importantly, as Pettigrove and Parsons (2012, 509) point out, these scripts are normative: they tell us how we ought to feel and express our emotions. These scripts can be induced via others, cultural practices, monuments, and so on. None of this denies a biological basis for the emotions. But it does help to explain the cultural and group variability between feelings and expressions of the emotions (Thoits 1989, 319).

We contend that this practice does not just occur with large social groups, but also among small groups such as football clubs. Fans experience intense emotion as a consequence of their passion for a club that is then intensified (via emotional contagion) when they watch their club play. Passions mount and this passion and particular expressions of passion are either encouraged or discouraged through the emotional responses of other fans. For example, some fans might punish fellow fans for racist chants (Liew 2018) whereas others might sing along with those chants (Small 2007). So, depending on the nature of their fellow fans, fans might either be taught that racism is acceptable or that it is not. In effect, the emotional interaction between fans in stadiums, drinking establishments and other venues cultivates a particular emotional outlook amongst that group. Moreover, as Pettigrove and Parsons (2012, 512) note, there is research that suggests that group dynamics encourage homogeneity of attitudes and behaviour when group identity is salient (Smith 1993, 302). Being in a situation, such as at a game or in a bar, where everyone is wearing the colours of the club one identifies with seems like a clear case where one’s group identity is salient.

The third (and final for our purposes) social dimension concerns group identity. Among the aspects that Pettigrove and Parsons (2012, 512) identify, two are relevant for our purposes. First, people in groups often respond to threats to their group as if they were threats to themselves (Smith 1993: 302–303). For example, if you insult their football club a fan of that club will often respond as if you have insulted them directly. For this reason, fans may also feel their club’s failure is their failure. Second, group identity is often defined in terms of hostility to another group and hostility towards that other group is important, if not essential, to group membership. This is particularly clear with respect to Glasgow’s Old Firm clubs, Celtic and Rangers. For many fans of these clubs, hating the other club is an integral part of being a fan of that club. Indeed, some believe that Rangers fans hate Celtic more than they love their club (Smithers 2011). Such hatred is therefore part of such fans’ group identity.³

While this is undoubtedly a simplification of a more complicated picture, we can think about the connection between these three social aspects of emotions in the following way. Emotional contagion leads to emotional socialization. When there are enough people in a group, the group will start to enforce particular norms about how to feel and express emotions. Emotional socialization helps to explain why it is that when groups of people come together with mutual interests that they will come to see themselves as a social group. For example, the particular atmosphere of a group of people watching a football game allows the spreading of positive and negative emotions in response to stimuli (e.g. wins generate positive emotions and losses generate negative emotions). Interaction – ranging from nonverbal and subconscious to verbal and intentional – between fans calibrates which events merit positive responses and which events merit negative responses, as well as what form and force these emotional responses should take. Notably, fans may have these emotions both occurrently and dispositionally – that is to say, fans may be said to have collective emotions even when they are not actively feeling those emotions (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012, 513; von Scheve and Ismer 2013, 411). To have an emotion dispositionally is to be disposed to feel that emotion given the appropriate stimuli. For example, we might say that a Rangers fan hates Celtic even when they are not feeling hatred because when they think about Celtic the feeling of hatred arises within them. Thus, emotional contagion leads to emotional socialization and emotional socialization leads to group identification.

We are now in a position to explain why fans feel shame about the moral failures of their club. Through the processes of emotional contagion and subsequent emotional socialization, which as we have seen may involve a range of emotions, fans come to see themselves as part of the club. The moral transgressions of a club then reveal morally substandard aspects of the club to fans. Because the fans see themselves as part of the club they take on their club’s failure as a failure of their own. Such collective shame is therefore still self-focused and yet the object is something other than individual fans. The object of shame is the club and fans see themselves as part of the club. In other words, the club is the self and the fans are constituents of that self.

We can see this borne out with respect to shame’s action tendencies. This will help to further support our claim that the account of collective shame we have presented provides the best explanation for sports fans’ feelings of shame after their clubs’ moral failures have been exposed. As we noted earlier, shame has two main action tendencies. The first is avoidance: the desire to hide and to disappear. The second is reform: the desire to reconstruct or improve oneself.

Consider avoidance first. This seems to manifest in at least two ways. Sometimes fans accept their shame but yet engage in a kind of avoidance that we might call divorce, following Breeze (2018). This is when fans want nothing more to do with their club. Their collective shame makes them sever ties. We can see this clearly in the words of Roxanne Jones, a Penn State alumnus and a former vice president at ESPN. After saying that she was ‘ashamed’ because of the sexual abuse scandal and its malicious mishandling by Penn State, she went on to say that:

Since then, I’ve wanted no association with the school or the culture that valued winning football games above protecting children from rape. And when my son was accepted to Penn State that year, we tossed the acceptance letter in the trash. My own Penn State sweatshirt was stuffed deep in the back of the closet (Jones 2015).

This expresses clearly Jones’ desire to have no immediate association with her club – to in effect divorce herself from a group she previously identified with – following the repeated moral transgressions by Penn States and its officials. But note that while Jones tossed out her son’s letter of acceptance, she only stuffed her sweatshirt into the back of a closet where it can be retrieved. This suggests she may be open to re-engaging with her club at some future point. Hence, the divorce is not necessarily permanent.⁴ Regardless of whether the divorce is temporary or permanent, Jones seems to be feeling collective shame: she is not ashamed for something that she did, but rather for things that a group that she identifies with did.

But at other times fans do not engage in avoidance in this way. Sometimes they cannot face their shame and manifest avoidance in other ways. Call this form of shame avoidance suppression. This is exemplified by the actions of some fans of Glasgow Rangers Football Club in response to journalist Angela Haggerty’s interview about the tax fraud scandal that Rangers were embroiled in. In her interview, she mentions a range of facts about the scandal. Rather than accept this failure of the collective self, many Rangers fan reacted with hatred and bile – such as insults about her hair colour, her Irish heritage, her Catholic heritage, and her sex. Indeed, one Rangers fan was sentenced to six months in prison for, ‘a threatening communication aggravated by racial and religious prejudice’ (Greenslade 2014). According to Pettigrove and Parsons (2012), suppression reactions may stem from shame because:

A shamed collective will be disinclined even to acknowledge their shame, never mind being committed to feeling collective shame, acting from it, or believing they occupy a diminished position. They do not want any of these things; nevertheless, they do, at some level, feel, act, and believe in these ways (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012, 520, fn60).

While we think it is clear that not all members of a collective will respond in this way (some may respond to their shame in other ways) and that not all fans will have even suppressed shame (some may just have been angry directly while others may simply be saddened),⁵ Pettigrove and Parsons’ point still holds: members of a group often aim to push past shame and in doing so they often turn a source of shame into a source of pride. They do this by reconceiving of the failure as a success or denying there is any such failure and that the identification of a failure is done by one’s enemies in order to discredit them. This provides one explanation of the reaction of some Rangers fans to Haggerty. They treated her as a villain and focused attention on the villain’s wickedness. This meant that the villain’s identification of a failure made them feel pride rather than making them feel shame because it is reconceived as revealing something about the villain rather than about the club. Moreover, as Pettigrove and Parsons (2012, 520) put it, ‘We can see ourselves – and be seen by others we respect – as the innocent victims who have suffered an undeserved injustice. And our shame can be transformed into righteous anger’. Importantly, this is a way in which one might try to avoid collective shame. While shame might sometimes cause us to stay at home and not be around others, it can sometimes manifest itself as righteous anger.

Shame does not always lead to avoidance. Sometimes it motivates reform. We can see this in some Sheffield United fans’ response to the hiring of Ched Evans after he completed a prison sentence for rape (his sentence was later overturned). While the reaction from fans was mixed, some fans were against his re-signing. More than 140,000 people signed a petition to stop Sheffield United re-signing him after his release from prison (Keegan 2014). While it is clear that not all the signatories of this petition were fans of this club, there were at least some fans among the signatories. Tony Needham, a Sheffield United fan, wrote in The Guardian that, ‘allowing Evans to go back to his old job at Sheffield United, as if nothing had happened, would be saying that football was the most important thing in the world and sod anything else’, and this ‘saddens him’ (Needham 2014). Needham’s sadness also seems to express shame for his club: shame that his club would hire a convicted rapist without even considering what message that sends. What Needham seems to want, along with some other fans, is for the club to reform itself and thereby get past its shame. It is likely that when attempts at collective reform fail or seem fruitless that such fans will move from reform to divorce – that is, rather than trying to change the club, they will instead cut ties. When group identification is so deep that divorce seems impossible, this may then lead to suppression.

In summary, we have argued that collective shame best explains the experiences of fan shame for the moral failures of their club. This view avoids the problems with the self-focused and other-focused accounts. The latter fails because it takes others to be the object of shame and the former fails because it takes the individual as the object of shame. The collective account accommodates the reasons in favour each view: the collective – in this case, the club – is the object of shame but the fans identify as part of the club and so shame is still very much self-focused given that the fans see themselves as part of the object of shame. It is just that it is a (so to speak) bigger self than the individual.

Shame and special obligations

It is often claimed that sports stars have special obligations to act ethically due to their elevated status in society. While it is of course always bad for people to act immorally, many seem to think that it is particularly bad when the person acting immorally is a famous sports star. In support of this claim, it is argued that famous sports stars have the ability to influence other people and thus to influence whether they become virtuous or vicious. As a result, they have a duty to serve as good role models and encourage people to become virtuous rather vicious (Wellman 2003, 334). The footballer Pele seems to endorse this view in the following explanation of why he feels like he has a special responsibility as a role model: ‘Every kid in the world who plays football wants to be Pele which means I have the responsibility of showing them how to be a footballer but also how to be a man’ (FIFA.com 2018). Those who are sceptical about the existence of such duties respond by claiming that sports stars should not be subject to role model obligations because they should not be seen as role models. In raising this objection, Wellman quotes the basketball player Charles Barkley who claimed: ‘I’m not a role model […] [T]he ability to run and dunk a basketball should not make you God Almighty. There are a million guys in jail who can play ball. Should they be role models? Of course not’ (Wellman 2003, 333; cf. also Feezell 2005; Jones 2011; Lynch, Adair, and Jonson 2014; Spurgin 2012).

In this section, we will argue that the existence of collective shame provides an alternative basis for the claim that sports stars to have special obligations to act ethically. In doing so, we show the relevance of collective emotions to the ethics of sport and celebrity. Our discussion will not help to settle the debate around whether sports stars are subject to role model obligations. However, accepting the claim about the collective shame experienced by sports fans provides us with the resources to outline an alternative argument for the claim that sports stars are subject to special obligations.

One of the roles that sports stars play is to be high profile representatives for their club or country. They are not the only ones who represent the club: the manager, coaches, chief executives, other club employees and even the supporters serve as club representatives in different ways and to varying degrees. Nevertheless, it is the players who are usually the focus of attention from supporters and the media, making them the most high-profile representatives of the club (perhaps along with the manager, though this varies between different sports). It is therefore the immoral behaviour of the players that is most likely to bring about collective shame for a club. Because of this, sports stars are in a special position to influence the collective emotions of their club’s fans. This special position of influence over the collective emotions of the club may be thought to bring with it special moral responsibilities. In addition to the reasons everyone has not to act immorally, sports stars also have the additional reason that their immoral actions may result in many of their supporters experiencing collective shame. Given the harm these experiences of shame do to both the collective and the individuals that constitute it, it seems reasonable to think that these moral reasons could generate special moral obligations in some cases. This therefore provides a way of defending the claim that sports stars have special obligations that do not appeal to the presence of role model obligations or them being role models at all.

This way of defending the special obligation of sports stars can be extended to apply to others connected to the club as well. As noted above, sport stars are usually the most high-profile representatives of their clubs but they are far from the only representatives. Given that others also function as representatives of a club there is good reason to think that they too have a special responsibility to the others involved in the collective. For example, when a group of a club’s supporters act shamefully by engaging in racist chanting, they are likely to influence the collective emotion of the club. If we think that sports stars have moral responsibilities here then it seems like supporters will too. These responsibilities may be weaker given that they have less of an influence over clubs’ collective emotions but that does not mean they do not exist. This way of defending special obligations for sports stars then also provides an argument for thinking that all those who may represent a club have special responsibilities to the other members of the collective.

Finally, sport stars may have a special responsibility to model appropriate responses to shame – that is, to respond to shame in constructive ways. Because there is no way to definitively stop other players or fans doing something shameful, collective shame will sometimes be appropriate. Once shame is appropriate, it seems plausible that given the kind of influence sports stars have that they should feel and express shame in non-destructive ways, i.e. avoid shame suppression. This includes both the sport stars who committed the transgression and other sports stars. (Less famous players may also have a special responsibility, but to a much lesser degree given their lesser influence over fans.) As we discussed in section 3, shame has two typical action tendencies: avoidance and reform. As we saw, avoidance can manifest in at least two ways: divorce or suppression. Divorce is unlikely to be an attractive option for most sports fans. Avoidance on the other hand, is often dangerous in collective situations: fans will suppress their shame and in doing so reconceive of the failure of the self as a success of the self and so take pride to be fitting. Perceived attacks on that collective will then be seen as injustices and those making the apparent attacks will be considered villains, who may be responded to with righteous anger and threats of violence. At least for sports fans, this is not the best way to handle shame for the collective. What sports stars can do instead is to explicitly endorse reformation in response to collective shame. They have reason – and perhaps an obligation – to push for the club to change and to encourage reform in those who are willing to reform and perhaps to campaign to fire those who are unrepentant or whose wrongdoings are so significant. When such attempts at reform fail, sports stars will often have a reason to leave the club – that is, divorce themselves from the group. This is a last resort because stars (especially big stars) have more power to influence the direction of the club and arguably the emotions of fans. That is, famous sport stars are better placed than less famous players and fellow fans to change the fans’ emotional scripts and to help to change the attitudes these fans have to wrongdoings performed by their club or its players.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have offered an explanation for the shame that sports fans feel because of the moral transgressions of their respective club and its members. We have argued that these emotions are best understood as a form of collective emotion. We then argued that this provides a novel way of arguing for the claim that sport stars are subject to special moral obligations. These claims are significant for both philosophy of emotion and philosophy of sport.

For philosophy of emotion, the claims we have defended provide further evidence in support of the claim that collective emotions exist and that there is important philosophical work to be done in investigating the nature of these emotions. Moreover, we hope that other philosophers of emotions will be inspired to investigate the interesting questions that arise when considering the emotions of sports fans. Finally, the claims we have defended raise the question of whether other forms of shame that appear to have other people as their object could be handled in the same way. For example, in feeling shame for a sibling we may feel this shame because we identify as part of that sibling’s family. This is quite speculative, but we think that this is a promising avenue for future research on emotions and collectives.

For philosophy of sport. our claims contribute to the growing research into the nature of sports fandom. In addition, we hope that our argument concerning the special moral obligations sports stars may have in light of these collective emotions will broaden the discussion about the possibility of such special moral obligations. Our argument gives reason to think that this debate should move beyond the narrow focus on admiration and role model duties to consider a broader range of possible grounds for such duties.⁶

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse [1520110];Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [016.Veni.174.104,040.11.614].

Notes

1. For a discussion of the shame experienced by sporting competitors see Emily Ryall’s contribution to this volume.

2. For other accounts of collective emotions amongst sport fans, see Mumford (2012) and Thonhauser and Wetzels’ contribution to this volume.

3. For a detailed and illuminating discussion of the way in which being a fan can inform a sense of identity see Tarver (2017).

4. Thanks to Paul Gaffney for bringing this distinction to our attention.

5. Given the clear and indisputable evidence of wrongdoing by the Rangers management, it seems likely that many fans would have recognised the wrongs committed by their club and so it seems plausible that many violent fans would have suppressed their shame. Thanks to Myisha Cherry for pressing us on this point.

6. This work was support by the NWO (The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research; Grant Numbers 016.Veni.174.104 and 040.11.614) and the Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Foundation (Project number: 1520110). Thanks to Myisha Cherry and Paul Gaffney for comments.