ABSTRACT
Summary As a society, we appear to have a certain ambivalence about aggression in sport. On one hand, as Russell (1993) pointed out, sport is perhaps the only peacetime setting in which we not only tolerate but actively encourage and enjoy aggressive behaviour. On the other hand, there is public outrage regarding football hooliganism and in recent years there have been a string of examples of athletes pursuing court cases against others who have deliberately injured them. One reason for this apparent ambivalence is that we tend to see aggression very differently in different situations. Before we proceed any further it is perhaps useful to look more closely at how we should define aggression.
