L’usage du concept d’éthique comme mode de gestion et de contrôle des comportements des acteurs. Une étude dans le cadre du football professionnel français

This contribution questions how, in the specific case of professional sport, the concept of sports ethics can be used when focusing on French professional soccer. Indeed, sports ethics is a polysemic concept. Widely covered in sports philosophy and sociology research, its definitions appear to be quite fluctuating. Moreover, the diversity of practice patterns questions this adaptation of the concept to the different specifications of doing sport. Therefore, it would seem necessary – for management research on professional sport – to define sports ethics in a pragmatic manner because of the non-operational nature generated by its philosophical heritage. Indeed, to evaluate positively its effectiveness – as well as that of the regulation operated around sports ethics – would be complex in view of this lack of explicit characterization. To this end, it is proposed to draw an overview of the main works from the literature on "ethics" and "sport". The objective is then to clarify our purpose and the context in which we conducted our research. As well, a variation of the Mercier's analytical framework (2014) on the formalization of ethics in organizations is made from a documentary corpus (n = 95). Thus, results show an increasing explanation of many ethical principles by regulations in the case of professional soccer. A deontological standardization of sports ethics is therefore observed. It then becomes a management and control tool of actors' behaviors, moving away from the philosophical precepts that underpinned it.