‘This must be the only sport in the world where most of the players don't know the rules’: operationalizing self-refereeing and the spirit of the game in UK Ultimate Frisbee

A recurring theme throughout the literature pertaining to the development of sports and games is the construction of rules or laws. However, it is well known that, in reality, there is much more to ‘playing by the rules’ and in practice sport participants are generally considered to be both playing according to and in the spirit of the rules. This distinction is termed ‘formal and informal fair play’. Using an ethnographic approach data were gathered in the Ultimate Frisbee community in the UK from 2004–7, through participant observation, the conducting of interviews and the examination of documentary evidence. This paper reports upon the ‘inner workings’ of the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, specifically within the UK, and provides an insight into how, in this sport, the constitutive rules work in practice, which is of particular interest given that it is self-refereed. Of further interest, too, is the application of constitutive rules within a pervasive ‘ethos’, which is referred to in Ultimate Frisbee as the ‘spirit of the game’.