ABSTRACT
Introduction Player violence, involving behaviours encompassed both within, as well as outside, the rules of sport, has traditionally been condoned in many settings as ‘part of the game,’ and rationalized as ritualistic or harmless. This may be witnessed in the way in which aggressive, high-risk or injurious practices that would be socially or legally intolerable away from sport are encouraged, and even expected, to occur in sport. In many countries, sport is immersed in fervent cultures of aggression, hubris and risk, which compromise participant safety and, ultimately, limit the possibility of safe sport. These cultures may have influenced research on sport, since sociologists have paid far less attention to player violence than to crowd violence.
