Sports are governed not only by formal rules but also by unofficial, implicit conventions that determine how rules are applied in concrete circumstances.

Conventionalists argue that an adequate account of sport must appeal to collectively agreed-upon norms called ‘conventions.’ Fred D’Agostino, the pioneer of conventionalism, maintains that the conventions that operate within a game constitute the ‘ethos’ of the game. The ethos of a game is the ‘set of unofficial, implicit conventions which determine how the rules of a game are to be applied in concrete circumstances’ (D’Agostino, 1981, 15). Thus, from a conventionalist perspective, sports compri