The Jersey of modernity: post-national masculinity and South Asian English Premier league football fans

Abstract

The English Premier League (EPL) has sought to expand its consumer base globally over the last three decades, leading to the establishment of fanbases all over the world. South Asian football fans constitute today a significant proportion of all supporters of English football clubs. This has social and cultural effects in South Asia itself, where urban elites are starting to show affinity to football over cricket. South Asian EPL fans participate in a form of ‘post-national’ masculinity that confers them with status as ‘modern’ in the context of neoliberal globalisation. Through the structures of masculinity enabled by EPL fan culture, South Asian fans participate in cosmopolitan ‘global’ communities centred on the football club, contesting the exclusion from modernity that South Asia has been historically subjected to. South Asian EPL fans wearing their team’s jersey, in that sense, amounts to wearing ‘the jersey of modernity’.

Keywords:

• South Asia
• globalisation
• post-national masculinity
• English premier league
• post-colonialism

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• Anthropology
• masculinity
• South Asian studies
• fan cultures
• football
• globalization
• post-colonial studies

Data availability statement

There are no data sets associated with this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Geolocation information

South Asia, South Asian Diaspora, Singapore

Notes

1 To protect their views and experiences, I keep my interlocutors’ identities anonymous, and they have all chosen pseudonyms based on football players they admire in the teams they support.