In this guest blog, Andrew Misell of Alcohol Concern Cymru reflects on the recent annual conference, Hitting the bar, which took place at Cardiff City Stadium on 26 September 2017. Alcohol Concern recently merged with Alcohol Research UK.
At the recent Hitting the bar conference the question we addressed was almost as intractable as ‘Will Cardiff City ever make it back to the Premier League?’ – can sport can ever have a healthy relationship with alcohol?
Whether you’re a spectator or a player, celebrating wins or commiserating losses, alcohol probably plays some part in your sporting life. Even if you don’t drink, many of our major sporting events are sponsored by alcohol companies, and grassroots sports clubs are often reliant on alcohol industry funding and alcohol sales at the bar.
There’s a paradox here: many of us play sport to stay mentally and physical healthy and happy; but sports events often take place in the context of heavy drinking that takes us a long way away from those goals. Also, while sports clubs aim to bring people together to enjoy a shared enthusiasm, a heavy drinking culture can exclude all sorts of people: families with children, people from communities where drinking is not the norm, or just fans who don’t like being around drunk people.
The state of play
Following an opening address from Welsh Minister for Public Health, Rebecca Evans AM, who made clear the Welsh Government’s commitment to reducing alcohol harms, Dr Pat Kenny (Dublin Institute of Technology), pointed out that sports sponsorship was about far more than brand recognition. While many might say that it’s only a name on a jersey, sponsorship helps alcohol companies imbue their brand with the emotions and values associated with that sport or a particular event. It’s a powerful tool and, as Dr Kenny pointed out, “If [a brand] spends £1 million on sponsoring your event, [it will] spend on average £2.2 million more promoting that sponsorship.” Much of this additional expenditure goes on social media, which taps into the power of peer engagement: posting or tweeting about a branded event, or seeing your friends do so, is far more engaging than simply noticing a logo or a poster. While people from the alcohol industry often argue that advertising doesn’t increase the size of the market, Dr Kenny’s not buying it: “We should listen to where they put their money.”.
Richard Purves from Stirling University, gave a real world example of how alcohol brands get around marketing restrictions, discussing how Carlsberg side-stepped strict French alcohol advertising rules during UEFA Euro 2016. The pervasiveness of the brand throughout the tournament despite the regulations was, in Dr Purves’ view, not down to flaws in the rules, but rather inadequate enforcing of them.
Taking one for the team
Dr Carwyn Jones from Cardiff Metropolitan University drew on his extensive research experience in sports ethics (“Yes, there is such a thing”) as well as his personal experience of teaching Sports Studies. He highlighted the role of initiations and celebrations involving huge quantities of alcohol that are common in some sporting environments. In our culture, he said, “social drinking is a form of social capital. We say, ‘he can handle his drink’ as a compliment. We make fun of ‘lightweights’.” In the context of some team sports, demonstrating the ability to drink hard (and still play the next day) can be central to bonding rituals, but also – at its worst – be a brutal way of reinforcing drinking behaviours that reflect those of the heaviest drinkers in the group.
Similarly, Dr Camilla Knight from Swansea University discussed a Canadian study of sports participants in recovery from drugs and alcohol. Many reported that their use of alcohol and other drugs was tightly bound up with their sporting experience – how they used intoxicants to socialise, but also used them to mask pain and to prove strength of character.
Dr Knight highlighted a theme that came up throughout the conference: that drinking and sport isn’t just about sport itself. It is also about toughness, loyalty, group bonding, masculinity, success and failure. Unless we acknowledge and work with the deep feelings that sport and the social rituals around sport create and reinforce, initiatives to improve the drinking culture in sport are liable to fail.
We were fortunate enough to hear more about how this is experienced first-hand from Christian Roberts, an ex-professional footballer who struggled with alcohol misuse. Christian’s story also reminded us that, when it comes to dealing with dependency, often it is the human encounters - in this case, a show of concern from his manager - that can turn things around.
What should be done, and how?
The conference ended with a presentation from Dr Melanie Kingsland from the University of Newcastle, Australia on the Good Sports programme – an initiative to work hands-on with community sports clubs to reduce alcohol consumption and improve inclusivity. Her evaluation found the programme led to reductions in both risky alcohol consumption on match days and alcohol-related harms.
Perhaps most importantly, Good Sports demonstrates the need to work with clubs, providing non-judgemental support rather than issuing public health sermons. Engaging with clubs and understanding where they are, rather than where we’d like them to be, seems likely to be the most fruitful approach to reducing alcohol harm.
For interventions to work, agencies need to understand the motivations, emotions and cultural values involved, and be seen as friends and supporters rather than simply interfering. The pervasive involvement of alcohol industries in sport is not inevitable, and has not always been the case; tackling that influence requires understanding the complex role alcohol plays in the lives of sports players and audiences. This conference showed that research is going a long way towards achieving that goal. Hopefully future trends will show a move in a direction where links between sports and heavy drinking norms are less evident.
Tweets from the conference can be seen here and conference presentations will be made available at: www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/cardiff2017
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