Ethnography of Sport: some observations and suggestions

The considerable social meaning and economic significance of sport in contemporary society is evident in a myriad ways. Ranging from huge financial contracts between media corporations and professional football clubs to young children saving up their weekly ‘pocket money’, so as to purchase their first item of sports equipment. Yet sociological analysis of sport as a meaningful category of social action is a ‘relatively new development’ (Rouncefield and Tolmie 2013, 3). The outcome being as Molnar and Purdy (2016, 1) have noted ‘the field of sport and exercise studies is a late bloomer in terms of letting itself be inspired by what we may refer to as the qualitative and ethnographic turn’. However, the blooming has recently flourished and there is now a growing field of ethnography focused upon a spectrum of sports (for details see Collinson, McNarry and Evans 2021, 601; Hockey 2021, 135-136; Meyer and Wedelstaedt, 2017; Naess, 2017, 51; Sparkes, 2017, 11-16). Social life is both complex and dense in terms of interaction between people in both public and private domains. Thus, corporeal, emotional and cognitive processes at both individual and collective levels change depending on context. Hence, the football stadium and its few maintenance staff on a Wednesday morning, is a different social phenomena from that same ground on a weekend afternoon, with two teams and 50,000 fans present. To analytically explain and depict this complexity and density necessitates a particular approach to investigating social life. Ethnography was developed with the objective of meeting this general intellectual challenge initially in anthropology and later sociology (for a summary see Skinner and Edwards 2005, 406-407). The focus of its method is then to comprehend and portray the depth of interaction present and its consequences for individuals, groups and organizations, both outside of and within sport. What follows are some observations on certain fundamental aspects of the ‘craft of ethnography’ (Atkinson 2013).