ABSTRACT
Recently, the proposition that politics should be kept out of sport has been endlessly debated. It is a proposition which assumes that politics and sport are two clearly separated fields of life. Anyone, it assumes, can tell the difference between the world of politics — with its political parties, parliaments, international conferences and so on — and the world of sport — games, contests and physical activities. But to describe politics in this way is to leave out a different level of political relations. These relations lie outside the formal arena of party politics, and operate in the maintenance of social patterns of power, domination and subordination throughout the whole of society. It is this aspect of politics that is involved in ‘managing’ a society composed of divided and conflicting classes and groups. It is, as we shall show, a level of political activity that stresses the importance of ideology, particularly, in the role of presenting a divided society as if it was an harmonious unity.
