Is young athletes’ bullying behaviour different in team, combat, or individual sports?

I have been an athlete since I was a child, so I have always been inside the world of sport and seen the best and the worst parts of it. In my opinion, it is very necessary for kids (and also grown-ups) to do some kind of exercise and have fun outside school in any of the extracurricular activities that the same school or other organizations of the neighbourhood organize for them, but I also believe everyone should practice a sport at some age because it teaches a lot of important lessons and values that will have a positive impact in the development of physical and mental abilities for the rest of the days. And the best part is that there is a big variety of sports with different characteristics, so I think everyone can find at least one that they like. It is also a great situation to have fun with friends and meet new ones, creating and developing strong relationships.

The bad part of it is that, where there is a strong potential for social life, there is also potential for people being left apart, for the creation of smaller groups inside a team, for strong rivalries or jealousy between teammates or rivals, and for bullying, of course. During my life experience in sport, I have never seen explicit bullying around me, but I have seen some of the other things I mentioned before in a low degree, and I know some kids or teenagers that had to change to other teams because they didn’t feel well in that environment and needed a change, maybe because of some bad experiences with bullying (I can’t say exactly what happened because it never happened in my team and I only heard some comments or rumours).

To learn more about this topic, I have read an article from a study that analyses possible patterns in athletes to try to make it easier to prevent bullying in sports. More specifically, the study wants to find possible relations between bullying behaviour and the type of sport the athletes participants practice, in this case divided into three groups that are: team sports, combat sports, and individual sports.

Unfortunately, the study couldn’t find significant differences between the three groups of sports. The study had a good number (664) of teenager athletes, and the sample was very diverse in gender (390 male, 274 female) and type, having athletes from 24 different sports divided in the three groups mentioned before that included school and federate sports. 

The main things that can be seen in this study are that the prevalence of bullying in sports is low, but exists, and that there are no significant differences in the prevalence of bullying between the three groups of the study. However, the study verified that victimization is higher in combat sports and that bystander and aggressor roles are more frequent in team sports.

The article emphasizes in the importance of teaching coaches, managers, parents, staff and the athletes themselves that bullying exists in sport and how to prevent it, detect it and fight against it when it occurs, the same way school teachers are prepared for this kind of situations (at least theoretically). Finally, the authors say that this study is one of the first of this kind and believe that this topic of “bullying in sport” should be explored deeper in the future.

Marracho, P., Pereira, A. M. A., da Graça Nery, M. V., Rosado, A. F. B., & de Castro, E. M. R. T. (2021). Is young athletes’ bullying behaviour different in team, combat or individual sports?. Motricidade, 17(1), 70-78.