by Chris Harris
Watch a football match and, along with the passes, the saves, shots of the crowds, you see players gobbling onto the pitch. It is just an accepted and disgusting part of football. Yet, once you start noticing it, it becomes impossible to ignore, it is just rank.
It’s down to the amount of saliva produced through high energy sport, right?
Wrong, switch sports. Rugby. Hockey. Tennis. Athletics. Cycling. The exertion is just as intense, often more so. These athletes are working at the limits of aerobic capacity, breathing heavily, dehydrated, under pressure — yet the spitting largely disappears. Which raises an obvious question: why football?
The usual explanation is physiological. Footballers will tell you it’s just a bodily response to intense exercise, thick saliva, dry mouths, heavy breathing from excessive exercise. All of which is true, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. Every high-intensity sport produces exactly the same conditions. If spitting were simply a biological necessity, it would be universal. Wimbledon would be intense games of tennis interspersed with players gobbling on the turf. It just not done.
What football does differently isn’t physical, it’s cultural. Football creates the perfect environment for the habit to flourish. Players spend long stretches standing alone, walking between phases of play, waiting for restarts. There’s space, isolation, and crucially, no immediate social consequence. Add football’s stop–start rhythm, bursts of effort followed by stillness, and players become acutely aware of minor discomforts. Sticky saliva. Dry mouths. An unpleasant taste. So they spit. Importantly, nobody challenges it.
Compare that with rugby. Constant close contact makes spitting socially unacceptable almost instantly. You’re face to face in rucks, mauls and scrums. Peer pressure alone shuts it down. Rugby also carries a strong internal discipline culture. Behaviour that looks grubby or disrespectful tends to be policed informally by teammates long before referees get involved. Add mouthguards, which reduce saliva pooling and make casual spitting awkward, and the habit never takes root. Although often a brutal sport, gobbing is considered, correctly, disgusting, just not etiquette.
Football’s television coverage makes the problem more visible, but it doesn’t create it. Close-ups catch players in isolation during pauses, with nowhere to hide. Rugby cameras follow collisions and movement; football cameras linger on downtime. The lens isn’t inventing the behaviour. It’s simply revealing what football has normalised.
Perhaps the most telling detail is how early the habit appears. Young footballers spit even when they’re barely exerting themselves. They do it because senior players do it. It’s learned behaviour, part of football’s visual language, a small performance of toughness, effort, authenticity. Other sports simply never modelled it, so it never became embedded.
The pandemic quietly proved the point. When spitting was temporarily banned, footballers largely stopped. There was no collapse in performance, no health crisis. The behaviour disappeared when the culture changed, and returned when enforcement faded. This tells you everything you need to know about football: it is a law unto itself, where players have the power. In the same way, Rugby and Cricket have codes of conduct, ethical etiquette, footballers and FIFA and UEFA have no problem with industrial scale cheating, simulation, and referee intimidation. They could ban it tomorrow, and it would stop, but football governance has always been a shambolic affair and as long as the money comes in, low standards can be maintained.
Footballers don’t spit because they have to. They spit because they’re allowed to. Other sports demonstrate that the same physical demands can exist without normalising the habit. Football could reduce it overnight with mild cultural pressure. It just hasn’t decided that it matters. And for a growing number of viewers, particularly casual fans, parents, and newcomers to the game, it increasingly does.
#Lewes FC #Footballers Spitting #Footballers Gobbing #Disgusting Football #Bad Habits
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