“Sport is essentially unnatural, given that it is organized, enacted, and reproduced through language and other communicative practices in ways that echo and maintain particular cultural forms and their ideological underpinnings”.Footnote1
In 2010, the communication scientists Meân and Halone introduced their collection of papers on “Situating Sport, Language, and Culture as a Site for Intellectual Discussion” in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology by claiming that “(t)he articles in this special issue provide an opportunity to illustrate how the domain of ‘sport, language, and culture’ can become a burgeoning site for future intellectual discussion”.Footnote2 The collection of papers in this thematic issue aims to advance this intellectual discussion by presenting up-to-date research on the intricate relatedness of sport, language, and culture. In particular, it further deepens our understanding of the prominent role that language and discursive practices play in a domain that is still often associated primarily with physical activities.
While there is by now a sizable scholarly literature on the various linguistic aspects of sports, these publications often originate in discourse and communication studies, thereby setting a different focus (e.g. the Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication or the Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media). In contrast, this thematic issue brings together cutting-edge linguistic research based on theories and models that focus on formal, functional, social-constructivist, interactional and applied aspects of language and discourse in the domain of football. For such linguistic research it is paramount to work with and analyse authentic, i.e. contextualized language data as can most recently be found in the collection edited by Caldwell et al.Footnote3 While the latter covers a range of different sports, the present thematic issue zooms in exclusively on football as the major spectator sport in Europe and South America that has in recent years also gained popularity in the UAE, Asia and the USA.
Football has witnessed a continuously growing popularity and intensive coverage in various kinds of traditional and new media, and besides the traditional association between football and men, female football has most recently gained impressive grounds as the media attention and spectator numbers in the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Championship in England and the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand impressively illustrate.Footnote4 Playing football no longer automatically means football played by men. While football’s increased popularization and public attention has also led to more research on football across various fields and disciplines such as sports psychology, sociology of sports and educational sciences/sports pedagogy, linguistic research on football is still a relatively recent academic (sub)field. Findings are scattered across various publication outlets, with only few thematically focused collections existing to date.Footnote5 So far, no linguistic journal or book series is dedicated solely to this type of sport. To conclude, in the spirit of Lavric and colleagues’ pioneering volume,Footnote6 the present collection of international papers sets out to continue to “illustrate the richness of linguistic analysis in connection with football”.Footnote7
When approached from a linguistic angle, research on football can assume various perspectives: According to Billings,Footnote8 one can study how football is enacted, how it is (re-)produced, how it is consumed and organized. Besides these adopted perspectives, the many protagonists of the game such as players, coaches, fans, officials, referees, journalists, commentators, investors etc. and their communication, both in its forms and functions, can be at the centre of linguistic attention. All of these perspectives presuppose language and discourse(s) that can be investigated from various linguistic branches using different data sets and applying different, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research designs. At the centre of such linguistic research, we find lexical phenomena such as naming practices of football stadia,Footnote9 pragmatic phenomena such as wordplay and humour in TV interviews or football reports,Footnote10 but also interactional phenomena such as talk in football audiences or various forms of fan communication.Footnote11 Social phenomena related to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race in football (discourses) are also (socio-)linguistically analysed.Footnote12 Other research is dedicated to specific text types or genres such as post-match interviews or live-text commentary.Footnote13
Generally speaking, linguistic research has become more diverse and interdisciplinary with an increasing number of studies looking at football language from a more varied methodological perspective addressing a broad range of yet under-researched contexts.Footnote14 At the same time, the emergence of new genres of sports reporting and possibilities for social interaction in the age of online computer-mediated communication and social media has opened up many new and innovative ways of studying the language and discourse of football and its accompanying audio-visual modes from a multimodal linguistic perspective.Footnote15
The contributions in this thematic issue add to the current efforts of broadening and deepening the scope of (applied) linguistic research on the language and discourse(s) of football. They stem from a panel organized by the editors of this thematic issue organized at the International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA) (online) in 2021 as well as from members of the international research network “Applied Linguistics in Sport” within the Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA).Footnote16 The six papers make use of a broad range of authentic data in Belgian Dutch, Czech, English, and German and introduce methods such as lexical (frequency) analysis, thematic analysis, linguistic ethnography, or discourse analysis to examine the language, communication, and discourse(s) of football in and by a variety of genres, participants, and stakeholders on and off the pitch and in various contexts of use.
The first paper entitled “‘Football as opportunity!’ The potential of inter- and transdisciplinary research to explore and transform gender inequalities: A special focus on qualitative linguistic discourse analysis” by Eva-Maria Graf and Melanie Fleischhacker addresses existing gender inequalities in female football and how they might be explored and transformed by means of inter- and transdisciplinary research. They outline the agenda and benefits of a collaborative research project between linguists, anthropologists, sports educators and economists with various practice partners. The potentials of qualitative linguistic discourse analysis in exploring the causes and characteristics of gender inequality in (female) football are illustrated through first findings.
Next, Jan Chovanec in his study “‘Bigger than football’: Racist talk on and off the soccer pitch” addresses racism as a major social and cultural problem that has plagued football for a long time. Chovanec takes as his point of departure the media coverage of a series of controversial incidents during a recent UEFA Europa League match that included an alleged verbal act of racial abuse between two players. He analyzes the similarities and differences in how this media coverage was reflected on in public online discourses in two different cultural communities: the UK and the Czech Republic. The findings reveal how the users tend to reframe the underlying racist issue, trivialize it through humour and relativize its seriousness. This indicates that the discourses surrounding football are an important area to understand the fans’ complex constructions of group identities and how specific socio-cultural contexts influence race-related controversies and perceptions.
Two contributions address different forms of fan communication in the football stadium. In “Politics and fan communication in football stadia in Germany – A multimodal linguistic analysis of protest banners” Marcus Callies adopts a netnographic approach and analyses the linguistic-semiotic characteristics and (meta-) pragmatic functions of fan banners, one of the most visible and attention-getting forms of direct fan communication in the stadium often used to protest the increasing commercialization of the game and to express the supporters’ views on wider socio-political issues. His analysis focuses on banners displayed during massive fan protests in February and March 2020 in stadia across Germany. The findings suggest that meaning-making through fan banners and the interpretation of the often implicit and coded messages conveyed through such banners necessitates an understanding of the interplay of materiality, colour, text, imagery and sometimes temporality.
In “Fan identity and football culture: locating variation in the discursive performance of football fan identities in a UK stadium” Thomas Worlledge and Kieran File critically assess the common stereotype of the football fan as hooligan with the help of insights derived from a linguistic ethnography of football fans at an English professional football club. The authors analysed field notes documenting fan behaviour – including songs, talk directed at players on the field, interactions amongst fans, as well as reactions to on-field events across different sections of the stadium. The findings challenge the stereotypical notion of the football fan as hooligan and highlight distinct subcultures being constructed within the same stadium through different behavioural tendencies and expectations regarding acceptable behaviour.
“Celebrating goals and surrounding the referee – adapting interaction on the pitch in times of social distancing in the English Premier League” by Catherine Diederich and Aline Bieri addresses the effects of social distancing measures introduced on the football pitch in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors examine to what extent the protagonists on the pitch have adapted their joint communicative acts such as goal celebrations and surrounding the referee in view of social distancing measures. Based on an exploratory, qualitative multimodal analysis of goal celebrations and the issuing of yellow and red cards in broadcasted Premier League games pre- and post-lockdown during the 2019/20 season, the findings uncover how players show occasional hesitation to gather closely with other players to celebrate a goal and their deviation to more common practices of engaging with others during the pandemic, for example fist bumps.
The concluding paper examines the global influence of the English language on football terminology. In “English and Dutch terms in Belgian Dutch soccer reporting: A mixed-methods approach” Quinten Hiel and Eline Zenner present two case studies on football reporting and the choice of terminology in Belgian Dutch mass media to better understand the choice between sports terminology borrowed from English (e.g. keeper) and local alternatives (e.g. Dutch doelman). They examine the frequencies of English words and Dutch alternatives for twenty football-related concepts in three genres and analyse semi-structured expert interviews with journalists who reflect on the position of English-language terminology in (their own) reporting. The results contribute to our understanding of how the language of football has been and is being shaped through the interaction of the individual and the collective, the local and the global.
While Soccer & Society previously published issues featuring contributions at the interface of football and media (issues 16: 5–6 and 17:3), there has not yet been a thematic issue on the vast and rich interdisciplinary field of the linguistics and discourse(s) of football. Given the omnipresence and omnirelevance of language and communication in football on and off the pitch, we are convinced that the present issue will be of significant interest to the readers of Soccer & Society.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Halone and Meân, ‘Situating Sport, Language, and Culture as a Site for Intellectual Discussion’, 254.
2. Ibid., 386.
3. Caldwell et al., The Discourse of Sport.
4. Statista, ‘Highest-attended games in the UEFA European Women’s Championship (EURO) as of July 2022’. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1320005/highest-attendance-womens-euro-all-time/
5. See Lavric et al., The Linguistics of Football; Caldwell et al., The Discourse of Sport; Callies and Levin, Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports.
6. Lavric et al., The Linguistics of Football.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Billings, Defining Sport Communication.
9. Gerhardt et al., ‘Naming Rights Sponsorship in Europe’.
10. Chovanec, ‘Wordplay and Football’; File and Schnurr, ‘That Match was “a bit like losing your virginity”’.
11. Gerhardt, Appropriating Live Televised Football Through Talk; Tolson, ‘Proper Football People’; Hauser, ‘Fanchoreografien als koordinierte Formen kommunikativen Kollektivhandelns’; Callies et al., ‘Forthcoming. The Discourse of Stadium Renamings’.
12. Johnson and Finlay, ‘Do Men Gossip?’; Kennedy, ‘Talking to Me?’; Schnurr and File, The Language of Inclusion and Exclusion in Sports; Graf and Fleischhacker, ‘Within Binaries Instead of Beyond?’.
13. e.g., Wilton, ‘The Interactional Construction’; File, ‘That was a bit daft though, wasn’t it?’, ‘You’re Manchester United Manager’; Meier-Vieracker, ‘The Evolution of Football Live Text Commentaries’.
14. Caldwell et al., The Discourse of Sport.
15. Chovanec, The Discourse of Online Sportscasting.; several papers in Callies and Levin, Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports; Fleischhacker and Graf, ‘Snap-by-Snap!’.
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