There are robust consequences of the fact that football is football and not something else. The aesthetic personality of football does not submit to a template inappropriately borrowed from elsewhere. One consequence is that beauty should not be awarded privileged status. Any just aesthetics of the game must be properly hospitable to the game’s less hygienic and agonistic features, such as stolid defence, scuffling and scavenging, heroic goalkeeping, visible toil and strain, the intrinsic possibility of failure, the visibly strenuous working (...) with materials, one’s exposed vulnerability to conditions, luck, loss of form and the injured or ageing body, and the visible realisation of a plurality of life values in a self-enclosed domain. This gives football a deep affinity with a Modernist aesthetics. However, ‘traditional’ aesthetics might also have a substantive and precious input into the aesthetics of football. Indeed, it might be that beauty is a legitimate aesthetic category and.. (shrink)

In this essay, I revisit my claims about game structures and amend them by adding achievement-regulated games to previously analyzed time- and event-structured activities. In describing achievement formats, I discuss their heavy reliance on the world of work, their strong dependency on Suits’ lusory attitude, and their relative independence from constitutive rules. I argue that achievement-structured games carry disadvantages not shared by time- and event-regulated activities. I speculate that achievement gaming came first in our evolutionary history, but show that it (...) still holds value for modern players and spectators. (shrink)

Almost four decades ago, Kathleen Pearson examined deceptive practices in sport using a distinction between strategic and definitional deception. However, the complexity and dynamic nature of sport is not limited to this dual-categorization of deceptive acts and there are other features of deception in sport unaccounted for in Pearson's constructs. By employing Torres’s elucidation of the structure of skills and Suits's concept of the lusory-attitude, a more thorough taxonomy of in-contest sport deception will be presented. Despite the ubiquitous presence of (...) deception in sport, few scholars have examined this concept in the sport philosophy literature since Pearson’s contribution. This paper hopes to advance a deeper understanding of deceptive practices in competitive sport and also comment on the ethical permissibility of certain sport skills from a moral perspective. (shrink)