The mediated nation and the transnational football fan

Abstract

This article draws on preliminary findings from a qualitative study of the relationships between sport, media, identity and national cultural citizenship in Greater Western Sydney, Australia’s most dynamically diverse urban region. It addresses the place of sport, including association football (soccer), in the lived experience of those who, under conditions of intensifying and proliferating ‘mobilities’, engage in the quotidian process of negotiating their orientation to nation and, especially, to national culture. It explores, in interviews with Australian residents and sport fans from a range of backgrounds, the interplay of sporting taste, media sport uses, affectivity and orientation to the national. The article concludes with the analytical observation that Australia’s historically-inherited ethnic hierarchy extends to Anglo-Australians a certain licence to play with or even repudiate national sporting loyalty, while subjecting citizens and residents from non-Anglo (especially Asian) backgrounds to a stricter test of demonstrating loyalty and obedience to nation through sport.

Notes

1. Rowe, ‘Sport and the Repudiation of the Global’; Rowe, Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures.

2. See, for example, Musa’s chapter on mediated football fandom in sub-Saharan Africa. Musa, ‘The Political Economy of Football Viewership in Africa’.

3. Urry, Mobilities.

4. Hutchins and Rowe, Sport Beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport.

5. Inglis, Sightlines: A Stadium Odyssey.

6. Ibid., 29–30.

7. Ibid., 80.

8. Bakowski, ‘Barcelona Create Mausoleum Where Fans Can Pay to Have Remains Stored’.

9. Hinch and Higham, Sport Tourism Development.

10. BBC Sport, ‘Football Fans United in Opposing Olympic Stadium Move’, October 11, 2011, http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/15261524 (accessed February 26, 2014).

11. Millward, ‘Fan Movements in the Network Society: Project, Resistance and Legitimizing Identities among Manchester Unites Supporters’.

12. Hajkowicz et al., The Future of Australian Sport: Megatrends Shaping the Sports Sector Over Coming Decades.

13. Marks, ‘How the Westies Won’, Griffith Review 41, June 5, 2013, https://griffithreview.com/edition-41-now-we-are-ten/how-the-westies-won (accessed February 26, 2014).

14. Baker and Rowe, ‘Mediating Mega Events and Manufacturing Multiculturalism: The Cultural Politics of the World Game in Australia’.

15. Hallinan and Hughson, The Containment of Soccer in Australia: Fencing Off the World Game, 1.

16. I acknowledge the Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant ‘A Nation of ‘Good Sports’? Cultural Citizenship and Sport in Contemporary Australia’ (DP130104502) and thank Drs Vibha Bhattarai Upadhyay and Maria Chisari for their research assistance.

17. Commonwealth of Australia, 2013, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond, 43, http://www.citizenship.gov.au/learn/cit_test/test_resource/_pdf/our-common-bond-2013.pdf (accessed November 4, 2013).

18. Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, & Television in a Neoliberal Age, 35.

19. See, for example, Burdsey, British Asians and Football: Culture, Identity, Exclusion; Carrington, Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora; Thangaraj, Burdsey and Dudrah, Sport and South Asian Diasporas: Playing through Time and Space.

20. Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action; Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.

21. Urry, Mobilities; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.

22. ‘Omnivore’ here is used in a narrower media and sport-related sense than in the original formulation of cultural omnivore theory by Peterson. See Peterson, ‘Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore’.

23. Researcher interview with James, 2013.

24. Gilmour and Rowe, ‘Sport in Malaysia: National Imperatives and Western Seductions’.

25. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Lygon Street Abuzz after Italy’s World Cup Win’, July 10, 2006, http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1683180.htm (accessed February 26, 2014).

26. Researcher interview with James, 2013.

27. See various contributions to Hallinan and Hughson, The Containment of Soccer in Australia: Fencing off the World Game.

28. Cited in Hallinan and Hughson, The Containment of Soccer in Australia: Fencing off the World Game, 4–5.

29. See Malcolm, ‘“It’s not Cricket”: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Inequalities’.

30. Researcher interview with James, 2013.

31. Researcher interview with Martin, 2013.

32. Researcher interview with Martin, 2013.

33. Researcher interview with Colin, 2013.

34. Researcher interview with Colin, 2013.

35. Quoted in Lane, ‘Wanderers Fans Full of Passion, Not Anger’, December 16, 2012, The Sydney Morning Herald, http://www.smh.com.au/sport/football/wanderers-fans-full-of-passion-not-anger-20121215-2bgxy.html (accessed February 26, 2014).

36. Ibid.

37. Ruddock, ‘“Born on Swan Street, Next to the Yarra”: Online Opinion Leaders and Inventing Commitment’.

38. Ibid.

39. Researcher interview with Susan, 2013.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Researcher interview with Anjay, 2013.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Researcher interview with Amir, 2013.

47. Ibid.

48. Rowe, Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures.

49. Foster, ‘Sheedy, You’re a Disgrace’, May 13, 2013, SBS, http://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/blog/2013/05/13/sheedy-youre-disgrace (accessed June 6, 2014).

50. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

51. Rowe, ‘“Events of National Importance and Cultural Significance”: Sport, Television and the Anti-Siphoning Regime in Australia’.