How do audiences of televised English football construct difference based on race/ethnicity?

ABSTRACT

Our study analyses media audiences of football within the English context. The research question can be formulated as follows: How do young people at a Northern-England university interpret and (re)construct discourses surrounding race/ethnicity in men’s televised football? Results from our focus groups with young football media audiences show how they take a relatively race-conscious perspective in comparison to most earlier studies. At the same time, football talk appears a complex space where racialized discourses are rejected as well as accepted and where meanings given to race and ethnicity intersect with other markers of difference such as culture and nationality.

In tegenstelling tot de meeste eerdere studies analyseert deze studie hoe het televisievoetbal-publiek betekenis geeft aan etniciteit en huidskleur. De onderzoeksvraag kan als volgt geformuleerd worden: Hoe interpreteren en (re)construeren jonge mensen aan een Noord-Engelse universiteit (18–26 jaar) discoursen over huidskleur en etniciteit in mannenvoetbal op televisie? Bevindingen laten zien hoe veel van de geïnterviewde mediagebruikers reflexief zijn in hun betekenisgeving aan huidskleur/etniciteit. Tegelijk blijkt ‘football talk’ een complexe en tegenstrijdige plek te zijn waar raciale vertogen gereproduceerd en tegelijk afgewezen worden en waar betekenisgeving aan etniciteit en huidskleur samenhangt met andere constructies van verschil gebaseerd op cultuur en nationaliteit.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• football
• television
• cultural studies
• cultivation theory

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 While we use the term ‘youth viewers’ and ‘young viewers’ for the 18–26 age group in this study, we realize that ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ are socially constructed concepts and that their meanings can change across time and place. Costera Meijer and De Bruin (2003), for instance, used the term ‘youth viewers’ for those between 18 and 28 years in their study on soap opera reception, while the European Union (in their Erasmus+ program) and the Council of Europe youth sector use the term ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ for the age groups 15–29 and 18–30, respectively (EU/Council of Europe, 2019). Some other academic studies into ‘youth’ and ‘young people’, however, have leaned towards the under-aged group of those between 14 and 19 years (often high school pupils) (e.g. Millington & Wilson, 2010).

2 We want to thank the university lecturers for their assistance in this process, this was much appreciated.

3 A portion of the data analysis and preliminary reporting was part of the requirements of the second author’s Research Master traineeship paper (Walder, 2020).

4 The metric equivalent of 5 feet 8 inches is 172.72 cm. Furthermore, the metric equivalent of 1 pound is 0.453 kg.

Additional information

Funding

This publication is part of the project ‘How racist is televised football and do audiences react?’ of the research programme Vidi which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) [grant number 0.16.vidi.185.174].

Notes on contributors

Jacco Van Sterkenburg

Dr Jacco van Sterkenburg is an Endowed Professor ‘Race, inclusion and communication – specifically in relation to football and media’ at the Erasmus Research Centre for Media Communication and Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Mulier Institute – Dutch Centre for Social Science Research in Sport, the Netherlands. His research focuses mainly on discourses surrounding race/ethnicity and whiteness in multi-ethnic society, with a particular focus on the case of sports media and sport management and leadership. He is currently leading a 5-year international project that explores how discourses of race/ethnicity and whiteness are connected in televised football production, televised football content and audience receptions within diverse European countries.

Maximilian Walder

Maximilian Walder did his Bachelor in Sociology at the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck, AT. He is currently doing the Research Master in Sociology of Culture, Media, and the Arts at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His thesis focuses on audiences of televised men’s football and their interpretation of race/ethnicity. Currently, he is also working as a Junior Researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at Eurac Research, a private research institute in Bolzano, Italy.