The rewards to the successful in professional sport, and equally the failure to obtain them, can tempt participants to go beyond the violence and dispossession sanctioned by the rules. Thus many late nineteenth-century commentators feared that, unless it was strictly controlled, sports professionalism would inevitably lead to corruption and misconduct:

The history of prizefighting was testimony to what could happen to a sport if professionalism got out of hand. Increasingly from the 1820s on, fights became unpredictable - not, however, due to closeness of competition, which might have been acceptable, but because of corruption, which was not. Despite the pretensions of the Pugilistic Club, the sport had no real ruling body and no steps were taken to rectify the situation.