Sporting sanctions as symbolic violence: an evaluation of how the Football League communicates with fans who challenge the legitimacy of the sporting sanctions policy

Abstract

Since 10 May 2004 the Football League (FL) in England has had in place a set of ‘Sporting Sanctions’ regulations to ‘sanction’ clubs that go into administration. By going into administration, a club loses its membership of the league and the FL will only allow membership to be transferred back to the football club if they come out of administration via a company voluntary arrangement, an agreement between an insolvent company and the creditors. By the use of a simple narrative analysis and a biographical approach, the essay draws upon Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic violence to explore from a fan’s perspective a number of key questions: What are these sporting sanctions? Why were they introduced? And what does the FL hope the sanctions to achieve? The conclusions suggest that insolvency policy and the discourse that the FL uses to describe it have the look and feel of a ‘cultural arbitrary’. The FL makes the naive assumption that putting a governance mechanism in place to penalize clubs that go into administration will achieve the desired outcome irrespective of the hazards that put pressure on clubs’ finances.