“All I know most surely about morality and obligation I owe to football”,
Does Sport Build Character?
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A Progress Report on a Victorian Idea - Dominic Erdozain
Abstract
This paper discusses the Victorian idea that sport builds character, which was one of the inspirations for the modern Olympic movement and remains central to policy debates on sport. The argument is that sport, even in the highly moralised context of ‘muscular Christianity’, failed in this character-forming role, and should not be seen as a source of moral regeneration. The paper argues that the tendency to over-moralise sport, like the commercialisation of sport, has the effect of diminishing the ‘play element’. Recovering sport as play, it is argued, is essential unlocking its potential to lift the spirit—if not to build character, as the muscular Christians believed.
The author summarizes his argument: “My contention is not that sport cannot contribute to personal or collective moral development. With the right supervision, coaching and administrative culture, it can. The argument is that, by itself, sport nearly always fails to generate virtue—for reasons that are largely intrinsic to it”.
He continues: “My particular concern with the sport-builds-character discourse, however, is that it is counter-productive. In the attempt to build on sport, sport loses its freedom as play, and it is the demise of the play element that is perhaps responsible for so many of sport’s ethical failings”.
An interesting aspect of the paper is the material on how Samuel Coleridge influenced Charles Kingsley, one of the pioneers of the Muscular Christianity movement. He also presents material on the role of GEL Cotton that I had not come across before.
I also liked the image evoked by the sentence: “Sport was the new solvent, and it sat between its older friends of drink, gambling and vice, and its new patrons, religion and virtue”.
The paper is very readable and gives valuable information and insights from an historical perspective.