‘Bad behaviour trickles down’: exposing football’s integrity problem

What do the following have in common? Falling to the ground and clutching your head without having been touched. Shouting abuse at a teenage referee. Staging tournaments without an open bidding process. Setting up a breakaway league. Punching a Sunday league opponent.

Each example showcases a side of football that harms the health of the game (not to mention those on the wrong end of such behaviour). According to Dr Dan Hough, however, they are also indicative of a problem that particularly afflicts football: a consistent lack of integrity.

Hough is a professor of politics at the University of Sussex and the author of a book, Foul Play, about football’s integrity problem. “I’m a football fan who sees that, while the game isn’t going to hell in a handcart, it has a whole host of problems that sometimes it doesn’t even recognise,” he says. One consistent thread is a failure to do the right thing.

“Integrity is supposed to be about nudging people towards doing better things,” Hough says. A person of integrity is someone who holds and lives by moral principles. “Some people do do better than that and they just happen to be in every other sport that’s played. In football, the values that underpin doing things in the right way are not thought of nearly in the same way that they were in the past. I think overall what drives people is not thoughts of fair play, but thoughts of winning the game. That has become the be-all and end-all whether you’re playing for Manchester City or whether you’re playing for [a grassroots club’s] under-sevens, and that’s the problem.”

We see the effects of a lack of integrity in the professional game on a weekly, or daily, basis and for many it is souring their experience of the game they love. Bad behaviour trickles down too, and Hough has experienced it as a veterans player, occasional referee and coach of a children’s side at grassroots level. It’s not just a case of people, often parents, imitating bad behaviour, he says, but the sharing of the same motivations.

“There’s a whole cohort of individuals for whom the glamour and the riches of being a Premier League footballer are so enticing that they would do anything to try and get their son daughter in that position,” he says. “And very very quickly the innocent seven-year-old who just runs around after a bag of wind also has realised what this is all about: it’s about being Trent Alexander-Arnold.”

How to fix it? Hough outlines two models for introducing integrity. The first is the stick approach, which is being deployed by football’s governing bodies in an attempt to crack down on unsporting behaviour. “You can make an impression on indiscipline and dissent with a stick but the longer-term plan has to be about teaching people why integrity matters,” Hough says. “I think we have to explain why institutions save us from ourselves and that institutions aren’t always things that you see; they’re rules, they’re norms, they’re patterns of behaviour.”

Hough’s first step for engaging with the problem would be for Fifa, which uses the term integrity only when discussing match fixing, to create an “integrity commission” to assess the scale of the issue. But he argues a major driver for change would be our own actions. “I’m pretty realistic about what that means in practice but I think you’ve got to walk the walk a little bit and you’ve just got to try and find ways of making certain behaviours not the way we do it any more,” he says. “I think we’ve got more power than we realise as individuals.”

England fans at the European Championship in 1988. Hooliganism declined in the 1990s. Photograph: Mike Goldwater/Alamy

He cites the decline of hooliganism in the 1990s as an example. “It did involve big critical junctures, such as Heysel, but things also changed within society that prompted less of that stuff. It doesn’t mean everyone behaved well but I think there is a reasonable agreement that they behaved a bit better, so we as individuals have got to see it as our problem, not just the game’s problem.”

For Hough that comes down to things as simple as telling the truth about whose throw-in it is when a ball goes out of play, or acknowledging a foul even if the referee has missed it. Clearly it also means refraining from abusing people, whether dressed in black or otherwise. At the same time, he says, “the idea that there are just two or three things to do is very dangerous and could quite possibly make things even worse. I think it’s important to acknowledge that. But the fact that it could be worse shouldn’t stop us from trying to make it better.”

Ultimately, Hough believes the benefits of building a sport that values integrity are substantial and that the current state of affairs benefits very few people. “If sport’s going to be worth playing at any level then there has to be some sort of level playing field,” he says. “I don’t mean every club in the Premier League has to have the same amount of money, but I think there has to be rules about what you can and can’t do - what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate – and many of those rules are going to be not written down. I think if you can’t agree on on a basic understanding that we’re going to compete on a relatively even keel then I don’t think you’re getting much out of sport, and I don’t think sport is getting much out of you.”