The world cup, football-speak and national identity

NTU linguist Dean Hardman reflects on the status of 'football talk' in anticipation of this years World Cup.


When the football world cup comes around once every four years, it seems like the nation is gripped by World Cup Fever. Not only is there wall-to-wall coverage of the actual matches; extra television programmes devoted to talking about the matches are aired, while football permeates every other televisual and media genre. Football, already the advertising vehicle of choice for a whole range of brands and products, is used to promote everything from soft drinks to washing powder, from credit cards to chocolate. There doesn’t seem to be a product or service whose brand managers don’t see the world cup as a prime opportunity to increase brand awareness.

Clearly these advertisers are drawing upon the high level of interest that the world cup generates among otherwise casual viewers of the game. Everyone during a World Cup, especially but not exclusively when a home nation is involved, has an opinion on football. These range from the team and game-specific: “Rooney’s injury holds the key, they’ve got to play 4-4-2”, to the more general: “England have got no chance”, and from the positive: “I’m so excited about tonight’s game”, to the negative: “I can’t believe they’ve cancelled Eastenders for this.” Whether the speaker or writer has any specialist knowledge or not, or whether their opinion or comment is positive or negative doesn’t really matter: all this shared focus on football and talking about the world cup helps to reinforce social identities and helps us to construct a shared sense of group identity. Ultimately this might be a shared sense of Englishness that talking about the England team creates. However, it might just as easily be a shared sense of Scottishness when talking about a strong desire to see England fail, or a shared anti-football agenda.

Casual viewers also begin to draw upon the footballing lexicon for the first time in four years. “Beating the offside trap” is inserted awkwardly into sentences, alongside the notion of “hitting a barn door with a banjo” or “making an impression early doors” as “squeaky bum time approaches”. The Ivory coast might need to “shut up shop”, while everyone wants to know who will survive the “group of death”. Again, having a shared national footballing lexicon to delve into also helps to oil the wheels of communication and reinforces a sense of national togetherness and cohesion.

Whatever one’s feelings are towards the world cup, it is absolutely unavoidable. It is going to be all but impossible to spend the month of June in the UK without being bombarded with images of footballers selling ice-creams, or hearing colleagues speak, sometimes inarticulately, about events in South Africa. At the same time, though, for one month only, talking about football becomes a key way in which vast swathes of the population signify membership of a whole range of social groupings and identities. For a limited time only you need never be stuck for something to say, it’s the event that we can all feel part of.

(Image: mrfrogger; permissions)

Match Attax

Ben Taylor discusses the cultural and economic significance of football trading cards among children.

On 12 March, Match Attax Extras were released in the UK. These are Premier League football trading cards which are currently among the most sought after collectibles for children of primary school age. They are produced by Topps, an American company which has a long history of producing baseball trading cards in the US.

There is nothing particularly remarkable about football cards. Cigarette manufacturers first issued collectible cigarette cards featuring football players over 100 years ago. By the 1960s, Panini had launched collectible football stickers, still widely available today. Match Attax, launched in 2007 to replace Shoot Out cards, consist of over 400 cards featuring Premiership footballers released early in the football season. Each player receives a star rating, and the collection includes a number of limited edition cards. Match Attax Extras are an additional crop of over 100 cards reflecting mid-season transfers, players who have scored hat-tricks and fans’ favourites. The brand in part is marketed as a game: collectors can put together their own team and pitch themselves against another team in a match played out in relation to respective players’ star ratings. A world championship is due to be held in Hong Kong later this year. However, it is as a trading card game that Match Attax has really caught on, with cards being exchanged in playgrounds, toy shops and on websites such as eBay.

From a cultural studies perspective, there are three points I would raise here. The first is that the popularity of Match Attax is a reminder that we need to retain an interest in what goes on beyond electronic media forms. All too often, the discipline of cultural studies has become too media-centred, assuming that media experience is definitive of our experience per se. This media-centredness is often shared by broader debates about children and leisure, where anxieties are frequently expressed about the long hours spent in front of a screen, watching television or playing video games. Beyond the media attributes of Match Attax cards themselves, then, we need to undertake a rather different form of analysis of the practices of collecting and trading which surround them.

My second point concerns how we might interpret these practices. In one of the few pieces of academic work which explores trading cards, Daniel Cook argues that the practice of trading them represents a ‘form of training […] for competitive capitalism’ (Cook, 2001: 95). While in one sense there is clearly some legitimacy to this interpretation, in another sense the process of swapping cards is an example of commodities being reused without any exchange of money taking place. In this respect, it is a practice which represents a departure from the dominant forms of consumption found within capitalist society.

My third point relates to the commodification of sport. I am currently reading Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport, and in one of the essays in the book Garry Whannel explores the manner in which the commodification of sport enjoys both an economic and a cultural dimension (Whannel, 2009). This is clearly the case with Match Attax. Their success can be subjected to a fairly obvious form of economic analysis. They are, for example, manufactured under licence from the Premier League. A target for young children’s pocket-money expenditure, the release of the Extras series in the latter stages of the football season can be seen as particularly exploitative. But this economic analysis needs to be triangulated with an analysis of the cultural coordinates of Match Attax. As Whannel notes, the increasing commodification of football ‘has generated new cultural practices and rituals of consumption’ (2009: 84). Match Attax are one such practice and ritual. While they might seem peripheral to the core activities of Premiership football, they are quite central to the leisure practices of many schoolchildren, a vehicle for friendship and social contacts. In many cases, they generate a capacious knowledge of football and go hand in hand with a more general passion for the beautiful game, which in turn might lead to other forms of consumption of football-related commodities (replica kits, match tickets, satellite television and so on). Whannel is therefore correct to argue that we need to pay ‘close attention to the multiple levels in which’ commodification occurs (2009: 84), and I hope it is clear how the case of Match Attax illustrates this.

Cook, D. T. (2001) ‘Exchange Value as Pedagogy in Children’s Leisure: Moral Panics in Children’s Culture at Century’s End’, Leisure Sciences, 23:81–98.
Whannel, G. (2009) ‘Between culture and economy: understanding the politics of media sport’ in B. Carrington and I. McDonald (eds) Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport, London: Routledge.
(Photo credit: robdebsgreen. Permissions.)

Media Anaysis, Media Production and Irate Users

What motivates us to analyse the media? By Dean Hardman.

As analysts of the mass media in general or of media discourse in particular, why do we do it? It’s likely that reasons can vary from person to person and that we all have our own. Chief of these, I suspect, is an innate curiosity and fascination with culture – a particular personal interest in film or television and their effects on people’s lives, for example. In my case, there are two main motivations. The first is outrage that I’ve often felt at ideologically loaded and biased reporting that I’ve seen in newspapers and television, the control or hold they seem to think they have (and do have) and a feeling that by pointing these out in a scholarly fashion, that the world will be, somehow, better. This is almost certainly very naïve.

The second is just mere fascination, and it is that fascination that has led me recently to dip my toe into the water of media production and to actually have a go at participating in the media. One relatively recent phenomenon in electronic mass media is 'user generated content' and 'interactivity'. Many media professionals – the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, for example – rage about the inane nature of user contributions, yet it seems to be the latest fad, with all national newspaper websites enabling readers to leave their thoughts in blogs (not unlike this one). Such user generated content is encouraged (or at least allowable) on the football website 'Football 365'. Here - and here - are two examples of my own contributions to the site, along with 'user comments'. These range from interesting thoughts on the issues raised in the pieces, to inane observations written by people who don’t appear to have even read the articles in question. Best of all, are the foul-mouthed aggressive responses, railing against the inanity of the articles themselves. Any thoughts about why people are motivated to abuse 'journalists' or bloggers are welcome in the comments section at the end of this blog.

My final excursion into the media production game comes in the form of a short sitcom script I entered into a competition called the Sitcom Trials. The play, 'From Riga to Rotherham' deals with issues of immigration and displacement, although suggesting that it is in any way more cerebral than that would be stretching things considerably. If you’re around the Leicester Square Theatre on Wednesday the 4th March, do pop in – although perhaps leave the 'interactivity' until after the show.

(Picture source: ario j's photostream)

Guest Paper: Black Genes and White Sweat

Jacob Van Sterkenburg from Utrecht University will be giving a guest paper entitled 'Black Genes and White Sweat: Constructions of Race and Ethnicity in Sport Media' on Wednesday March 4th as part of the on-going ICAn seminar series.

Continuing immigration is one of the great challenges that contemporary western societies are faced with. According to Brubaker et al., race and ethnicity even ‘count among the most significant social and cultural structures of modern times’ (1994: 53). Meanings given to race and ethnicity are not only influenced by institutions like the family, education or paid labour, but also by the media. Due to its popularity, the sport media are an important factor in the expression of meanings given to race and ethnicity.

In my presentation I will discuss my research project that employs a qualitative content analysis to study the representations of racial and ethnic groups in the Dutch sport media, in particular in football on television. By studying representation of race and ethnicity in televised football, the project hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the ways race and ethnicity are socially constructed through popular (media) culture. The project is situated within the disciplinary framework of cultural studies and social cognition theory. The constructions of race and ethnicity in mediated football will be studied by analyzing Dutch football during matches of Dutch teams played at the highest professional level in The Netherlands (the Eredivisie). We draw on grounded theory to apply a method of conducting verbal content analysis that is sensitive to the contextual character of race and ethnicity.

The event takes place from 4.00-6.00 pm in GEE219, Clifton Campus, NTU. Everyone welcome.