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

Abstract

This paper presents a series of emerging research avenues and agendas for under-represented aspects of sport-related drinking. Extending the findings of a previous paper, which mapped the dominant themes in sociological treatments of drinking and sport to date, this paper argues for the importance of widening the empirical and theoretical base so as to better understand and explain the diversity and complexity of drinkers and drinking in sport. Drinking by female fans and sportswomen, non-drinkers in drinking environments, the role and place of religion, ethnicity, gender and social class in practices of inclusion and exclusion in sport-related drinking practices and the plurality of masculinities, among others, are all presenting new kinds of relationships to sport and alcohol that have not been subject to sustained critical sociological scrutiny from within sport. The research questions and the problematics these raise for studies of social and cultural aspects of sport (and drinking) highlights the need to reassess and reinvigorate the theoretical frameworks and dominant orthodoxies that drive social research into the sport–alcohol nexus.