Sport, media and populism: Why Polish soccer fans matter to European politics

Toward the end of his life, the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1996) observed how much Europe’s map had changed since his birth. Of Polish descent, Hobsbawm regarded changing borders in Central and Eastern Europe as evocative testimonies to the power of ‘invented traditions’, the myths nations needed to live as ideas to which people could subscribe (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992). In December 2023, The Economist noted Donald Tusk’s victory in the Polish general election against the incumbent Law and Justice Party would, by necessity, instigate a new era of national narration. One of the new Prime Minister’s urgent tasks was to undo years of political discourse where racist populism stoked fears that Poland would cease to exist. The influential news magazine further noted that media influence had been central to the PiS’ efforts to capture public common sense. Thus, examining how online football talk contributes to ideas about race and belonging in Poland is an essential topic in a year when populist thought will figure in multiple global elections. Tusk’s elevation was globally significant as the ‘black swan’ apparently proving that populism is not an inexorable force.

‘Meanings given to race/ethnicity in everyday football talk’ presents football as one of the places where young Poles construct race. The paper argues bigoted positions are easily adopted since match commentaries regularly trade in racist tropes. Thus, the study is relevant to the existential challenge facing Poland, Europe and indeed the world as an examination of the distinct role that particular media genres play in normalising racism. Media couple sporting performances and the bodies enacting them to ideas of racial difference that rationalise whiteness as the political centre.

To further the project, it is worth paying more attention to the concept of the preferred reading and how that idea has been developed through studies of racism in media sports. As the authors rightly point out, Stuart Hall (2009) developed the idea to explain how media works politically. Whether in the news or elsewhere in popular culture, media furnish audiences with stories that offer lessons on how the world works. Such stories draw on dominant perceptions of why reality is as it is and what can or should be done about social issues. Audiences do not have to accept such accounts, but they do have to engage with them. Therefore, media power lies partly in the ability to present audiences with the same common sense time and time again, no matter what they make of those stories. When it comes to televised football in Poland, for example, the authors establish that viewers are consistently presented with commentary othering black players, indicating that contemporary soccer discourse in the nation features the same racist tropes that have been noted in other sports, times and places.

The preferred reading concept aspired to appreciate interactions between media and other social institutions as bodies that were invested, in various ways, in preserving capitalist markets. As time progressed, scholars applied Hall’s work to examine how media sport’s place in capitalism provokes particular kinds of political engagements. Throughout the debate, processes connecting the performances of black bodies to politically charged cultural meanings consistently featured. Through exploring this evolution, it is possible to specify why the project of exploring central and Eastern Europe’s football fans to race in sport has a significant role to play in a year when the question of how Europe imagines itself is of particular global significance. The preferred reading notion is not limited to the relationship between media and its audiences. Further, suppose we wish to grasp how media exert distinct political forces. In that case, it is crucial to understand that this power represents the annexation of other kinds of cultural influence exercised by other dominant institutions.

Preferred readings

Let us begin by looking at Hall’s definition:

There is a pattern of ‘preferred readings’, which both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized. The domains of ‘preferred meanings’ have the whole social order embedded in them as a set of meanings, practices and beliefs: the everyday knowledge of social structures, of ‘how things work for all practical purposes in this culture’, the rank order of power and interest and the structure of legitimations, limits and sanctions. (Hall 2009, 34)

Here, Hall argued that media were part of an institutional framework involved in putting ideology into practice by manufacturing consent. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Hall et al. 1978) was a lucid exemplar of his thinking. Hall and colleagues charted how legal and media discourses interacted to manufacture the so-called ‘mugging’ crisis, a new, racist way of regarding and acting toward street crime. Mugging, the State and Law and Order examined news coverage and judicial statements to argue that in 1972 Britain, the numbers of arrests for street robbery and the sentences they attracted both skyrocketed after media stories presented such crimes as especially insidious when perpetrated by young black men.

Hall’s work on the essence of media power thus started by considering practices assigning politically exploitable meanings to the actions of black bodies. Succinctly, the production of the black body and its actions as a threat was, Hall argued, a synecdoche of media’s involvement in capitalism’s preservation. The idea that the preferred meaning was a method to examine this function is essential to understanding how it relates to football, discourse and politics today. This project is deeply resonant with the present situation because it too scrutinised how social crises were popularly seen as symbolising the failures of multiculturalism, not capital. Media mattered, Hall thought, as means to secure new popular investments in discourses equating belonging and whiteness already articulated by other institutions.

Sport, media, politics

According to Ben Carrington, ‘multiculturalism is seen as a political intervention into and philosophical interrogation of the silences of western thought and practice, wherein the racial others and forms of racial imperialism that helped to shape the west – the constitutive outside – return to reveal the deeply racialized foundation of the west’ (2010, 129). This observation was made while applying Hall’s theories to the analysis of the politics of media sports. Carrington drew extensively on Hall to explain how the media assumed the Imperialist project naturalised white hegemony. Through developing the idea of the ‘white sports media complex’, Carrington, like Hall, outlined how sport merged with capitalism as the former became an economic hub of global media systems. Sport’s power function shifted from disciplining bodies to aggregating audiences. Developed in the work of Sut Jhally (1984) and David Rowe (2013), the ‘media sport cultural complex’ explains how global media transformed sport into a drama whose primary role was to attain advertising and subscription revenues. For Carrington, a by-product of this transformation was that the racist assumptions already encoded in the logic of games like football became enmeshed in media discourses. This, in turn, created new kinds of ideological work. In particular, the expression of racism within football commentaries had to be sanitised to protect the sports commodity form (Carrington 2011).

As an example, Carrington described the infamous incident when Ron Atkinson, a famed English football manager turned TV pundit, was recorded racially abusing French international Marcel Desailly during a match that was being broadcast to international audiences. Atkinson used the slur, believing he was off air, and went to considerable lengths to apologise for his words in the aftermath. For Carrington, the key to this incident lay in the fact that, as live microphones continued to record, none of Atkinson’s (also white) co-commentators challenged the racist epithet. At that moment, it became clear that racist expressions were not anathema in television discourse, hence Carrington’s ‘white media sport cultural context’.

Racism is, therefore, embedded in sports media content in a particular way. The point that Hall and Carrington make is that structural factors make racist logic difficult to dislodge from media sports rhetoric. According to Carrington, a prime challenge in addressing racism in sports is the many occasions where media figures and audiences denounce bigotry while refusing to countenance the situations guaranteeing its reproduction. As an example, one can point to the ‘common sense’ among presenters and fans alike that one can express racism without being racist. As Carrington noted of the Atkinson incident, the man and many of those around him were keen to dismiss the racist comment as ‘banter’. What Atkinson meant by this was that his use of a racist epithet should be understood in the context of a sport where players, pundits and fans regularly swap jovial insults. Soccer scholars have established the widespread deployment of ‘banter’ to distance bigoted expressions that occur within the game across grounds, bars and screens from the acknowledgement that racism and homophobia are problems that need to be solved. Banter:

In its most simple form, banter has been described as the exchange of barbed comments that are obviously untrue and purposively impolite, focusing on a personal trait, habit or characteristic that is projected onto the target(s), who, in turn, are expected to reciprocate with a retort of their own making … Banter, is deliberately intended to be cutting, sometimes scathing, but always humorous and playful (Dixon, Cleland, and Cashmore 2023, 1)

Dixon et al. define banter as a speech form that facilitates racist expressions from people who do not consider themselves to be bigoted, observing that, in practice, banter tends to reflect culturally dominant perceptions of the time. Given that banter is a part of football discourse, inflected by inequality, and given that it has also been identified as a mode where people can express racist ideas without accepting that their words play a role in perpetuating racism, the banter concept helps to explain how racism forms a ‘preferred reading’ in soccer speak, as an idea that is difficult to dislodge or condemn without equivocation. In fan logic, ‘banter’ is central to football’s pleasure, where spectatorship plays an active role in the sport. Supporters will, for example, justify hurling racial insults at opposition players because this is simply an effective device to help their team by distracting the other side (Lusted 2009; Moran 2000; Robson 2000). Racist banter is primarily seen as ‘accidental’; it is feasible to think that a fan can express a racist idea without being racist because those words play a different role in that mode of sports talk.

Moreover, efforts to equate such expressions with other forms of hate speech are themselves a threat. In fan logic, such complaints come from people who do not understand football’s language, and their interventions risk eroding the social pleasures and bonds that soccer offers (Müller, Zoonen, and Roode 2007). Racism is undoubtedly bad for society, but so too is acting against these particular kinds of racist expressions existing within football’s language game.

Poland’s relevance in the politics of sports media

The fear is that racism’s smouldering presence in soccer speak renders supporters vulnerable to right-wing recruitment. Under certain circumstances, such fears have come to fruition in Poland. Kobierecki, Kossakowski, and Nosal (2022) wrote an important study examining how racism is activated through the interactions between hegemonic national identity rituals, social crises and online mobilisation. The authors support that Polish football fans are relevant to the historically significant role that CEE (Central and Eastern European) nations play in imagining Europe. Throughout the twenty-first century, CEE fans have featured in many incidents where black players have been racially vilified in televised games across the region. Thus, CEE soccer fandom has come to be associated with right-wing dispositions. Poland has witnessed how such sentiments can be mobilised to political ends. In 2020, the Covid crisis prompted an instance of ‘opportunistic racism’ through which online soccer fans organised a presence in an ‘Independence Day’ March that fused racist positions with other right-wing sentiments-opposition to LGBTQA + communities, leftists and an anti-establishment opposition to pandemic measures. This, Kobierecki, Kossakowski and Nosal contend, exemplified how media and soccer fandom intersected to articulate Polish national identity as heterosexual and white. Thus, the study from Poland reflects an ominous new kind of ‘media effect’ noted elsewhere. As online media activity becomes part and parcel of the ‘phatic’ appeal of fan cultures, it opens a new media sphere encoding racist dispositions as part of the game’s ‘common sense’ (Penfold and Cleland 2022).

However, it is important to remember that Stuart Hall remained cautiously optimistic that popular culture could also sustain inclusive societies. Nationalist fan activities around 2020s ‘Independence Day’ was what Hall (1988) would have termed an ‘articulation’, a process of cultural work that connected ideas and constituencies that did not necessarily belong together (i.e. libertarian anti-lockdown activists found themselves sharing political spaces with racist and homophobes). Drawing on Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci and in reference to race, Hall (1986) argued that such articulations could always be dissembled and rearranged. The key lay in appreciating how the same social conditions could be represented differently, drawing on the inevitable ‘polysemy’ of social life. As the authors of the main article argue, different social positions afford differing interpretations of the same social conditions.

When it comes to football, it is also true that scholars have looked at fans and seen different trends that are amenable to progressive politics within footballing communities. Tamir Bar-On, like Hall, identifies a ‘Gramscian’ discourse in scholarly thought on football and its impact. Moreover, Bar-On continues Gramsci used football to exemplify his thoughts on the culture/politics nexus:

Gramsci argued that while soccer was a reflection of competitive and individualistic values associated with capitalism, it was simultaneously wedded to the ethics of fair play, official rules and ‘human loyalty’ … Thus, for Gramsci soccer can simultaneously support or subvert dictatorships, extreme nationalism or excessive commercialization. (Bar-On 2017, 192).

The idea that football communities can embrace inclusivity is also well-supported in the literature. Some, for example, argue that across Europe as a whole, the far-right has generally failed to penetrate fan communities (Crabbe, 2006). Others point to histories of anti-capitalist fan activity premised on a rejection of commodification, which, as earlier suggested, has played a role in making racist expressions challenging to dislodge from football talk. Where it is possible to chart histories that have embedded racism in the emergence of the game as a marketised media entertainment genre, at the same time, a coherent alternative history charts an entirely different trajectory where football ‘carries with it the possibility of promoting the voices of the disenfranchised and the marginalised, and as such the potential is always there for nurturing solidarity against a dominant discourse that buttresses the existing social order’. (Kennedy and Kennedy 2013, 118). Evidence suggests that this potential has been realised most clearly in how fans organise to protest what they see as the capitalist exploitation of their clubs. For example, as EPL teams become attractive investment opportunities for global speculators, driven in no small part by TV revenues, so too, their fans have successfully intervened to ensure, at the very least, that clubs cannot proceed as businesses without addressing their responsibilities to serve local communities (Millward 2012).

What is less clear is how these broadly shared ‘fair play’ sentiments translate to other areas of cultural politics. On the one hand, Cashmore, Dixon and Cleland's study (2023) of fans shows a broad acceptance of the idea that sport is political. If ‘banter’ decouples sport and society in the interest of pleasure, these distinctions now seem to be breaking down as it is accepted that when ‘culture wars’ promise political capital, players and teams will inevitably speak out on equality issues. According to some studies, what concerns fans is the fear that football politics never strays beyond the symbolic. Examining football supporters’ attitudes to players ‘taking the knee’ before games as part of the global ‘Black Lives Matter’ initiative, research has discovered that some supporters feared that some might mistake the gesture as action in and of itself (Dixon, Cashmore and Cleland 2023). In other words, the concern is that symbolic action is substituted for less visible, more effective interventions that would address racism, be it ‘accidental’ or ‘opportunistic’, as it occurs across football culture: in clubs, administration, media and stadia. This is an understandable view, given Carrington’s argument that sport often perpetuates racism by creating the illusion of action.

The upshot is that football is recognised as a vital part of the ‘white sports media cultural complex’ that at once makes racism challenging to dislodge from common sense while also offering a space where, under the right conditions, people will see the value of anti-racist initiatives. There could scarcely be a better place to study how this might work than Poland in 2024. Here is a nation where voters have checked the march of global populism. Given its near-universal anti-migration rhetoric, with its clear racist overtones, the question of how fan engagement with racism in Polish football represents a globally significant case study in the political weight of popular culture as an anti-right-wing resource. If large parts of the Polish media sector remain under populist sway, then the question of how mediated soccer might offer a counter-narrative is vital.

Future projects

Examining this question requires an integrated approach. The authors suggest several possible research avenues: examining how players negotiate questions of racial identity or asking journalists how they consider the same issues when writing match reports. Another option, suggested by the focus on the preferred reading, would integrate players, media stories and fan interpretations. And there is an example.

Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football is a book about the fandom experience, written by the South African literary scholar Grant Farred (2008). Farred holds a professorship in Africana Studies at Cornell. His 2008 monograph, however, was about his relationship with Liverpool Football Club, with a particular focus on John Barnes. Barnes was the first black player to establish himself in Liverpool’s first team in 1989. Farred had supported Liverpool for years before that, growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa. That pleasure also constituted a dilemma. Liverpool had been slow to embrace a new generation of post-Windrush black footballers. An infamous image of Barnes nonchalantly kicking a banana from the pitch during a break in play seemingly captured that generation’s struggles. The banana had been thrown at him from the crowd. Long Distance Love, however, regarded the image as a decoy. Other black players had failed to make the grade at Liverpool, among talk of dressing room bigotry. Combined with the question of why rival teams had been more proactive in nurturing black talent, the shame of institutional racism was, in Farred’s view, one that could be plausibly directed at the object of his devotion.

This was, in many ways, a media story. Long Distance Love was, as the title suggests, about a romance sustained from afar via newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. Its narrative hook turned on Barnes’ emergence as a ground-breaking soccer celebratory. Yet Farred argued all of this sprang from histories of capitalist exploitation and racism; the story could not be divorced from Liverpool’s unique place as a hub of the Transatlantic slave trade or the club’s lack of interest in forging ties with the city’s black communities. To understand Barnes or how the fan experience raises the politics of race, it was necessary to consider the articulation of many things: global and local histories, the club's evolution and its adaptation to the transformation turning football into a worldwide media entertainment genre.

A similar approach would tell an important story about how different Polish supporter groups who congregate around various clubs and players, each with their own histories, make different sense of a political moment relevant to Europe, if not the world. What are the articulations through which supporter groups arranged around particular teams, each with their own histories and sensibilities, play roles in the formation of emerging national identities growing in the shadows of populism’s grasp on the media sphere? What role do supporters play in articulating politically resonant ways of being as they synthesise stories about teams, players, themselves and the nation? That is, the question is not simply about how football audiences receive preferred meanings, but outlining the conditions that need to be in place for them to prefer their own visions of inclusive identity.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andy Ruddock

Andy Ruddock is the Head of Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. Ruddock has authored 5 monographs on media and its social influence. He has published on the cultural politics of soccer and martial arts, and is best known for his work on the meanings of media violence.