Creating Deviance: Criminality and Elite Amateur Soccer in the Fiji Islands, 1975-2015

Abstract

This article considers criminality within elite amateur soccer in Fiji, covering the period 1975-2015. My discussion includes examples of on-field behaviour, which breaks codes of sportsmanship, such as the "throwing" of games; and off-field behaviour, such as robberies of jewelry stores committed by one prominent ex-player. This same ex-player also escapes police while warming up for a match on the pitch. We see the ex-player involved interpreting his own conduct, 25 -30 years after the fact, in a way suggestive of existentialist or Foucauldian ethics. But his now assistant village headman status gives an implicit Kantian moral force to his arguments. Crucially, the article emphasizes the key distinction between village and town space and between village mores and town-based (criminal) laws.