The aim of the article is to understand the meaning of subversive situations and collective storytelling in a Swedish male second division handball team. By subversive we mean situations and stories which exceed the limit of what is seen as legitimate outside the secret alliance of the group. The article examines how alcohol functions to transform the scene in which a situation or a collective story becomes subversive.

One of the authors spent several years as an active member in the handball team, collecting ethnographical data both from sports settings and related situations involving storytelling, for example, at parties, in dressing rooms, and during team trips to other Nordic countries. In addition interviews were conducted with 17 members of the team. 

The storytelling and the subversive situations make it possible to create an alternative world, in which the members of the team can overstep different types of rules of conduct and civilized behaviour. This is made possible in part because of the meaning attached to alcohol as a transformer of social reality and also because of the character of the social group as homosocial and secret.