ABSTRACT
As a society, we have a certain ambivalence about aggression in sport. On the one hand, as Russell (1993) has pointed out, sport is perhaps the only peacetime setting in which we not only tolerate but actively encourage and enjoy aggressive behaviour. In the notoriously violent ice hockey, violence clearly sells, attendance at matches being positively correlated with frequency of violent acts (Jones et al, 1993). On the other hand, there is a moral panic regarding football hooliganism, and in recent years there have been a string of high-profile court cases in which athletes have pursued cases against others who 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.
