John Hughson

Supporting the 'World Game' in Australia: A Case Study of Fandom at National and Club Level

While soccer football is the most popular participation team sport in Australia, it lags in the media and spectator sport. Media commentators have long suggested that the ‘world’ game is un‐ or less‐Australian because many teams and clubs are founded/organised around ‘ethnic’ non‐Anglo derivatives. Despite the re‐naming of the sport and the re‐construction of the national club competition around a decidedly corporate managerial structure with big city names, clubs in the lower divisions in each state persist with ‘ethnic’ nicknames. This paper draws upon a case study of a Serbian–based club in the south‐eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We contrast this club alongside the newly formed A‐League team. We employed fieldwork observations, interviews and document analysis to capture and interpret the maintenance of a Serbian identity through the actions of supporters. Our findings suggest that despite likely acceptance of the corporate de‐ethicised model, suburban teams with non‐Anglo ethnic derivatives remain a vital area for both sport and their respective communities.

The beautiful game in Howard’s ‘Brutopia’: football, ethnicity and citizenship in Australia

Writing in the British newspaper The Observer in 2006, Kevin Mitchell commented on the centrality of sport to the Australian way of life: ‘sport defines their culture ... It is their proud, shouting declaration of statehood to a world that is literally and notionally far away’.1 Whether or not Mitchell was peddling a well-worn stereotype of sport-mad Australia he was certainly correct in suggesting that sport has long been and continues to be a core symbol of Australian identity. National teams are often portrayed as the ultimate bearers of Australia’s collective pride. Major sporting occasions such as the Olympic and Commonwealth Games and World Cups and championships provide occasion for the display of national unity and sometimes celebration. Such was the case with the coming together of soccer players to represent Australia in the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Indeed, the World Cup provided soccer with occasion to slip its usual marking as ‘other than Australian’, i.e. the marking of soccer as being from elsewhere, as a foreign game, and for this reason existing on the margins of the Australian Anglophone sporting mainstream. Soccer’s perceived un-Australianness reflects its post-war history of association with ethnic communities of non-Englishspeaking background. Relatedly, the familiar representation of soccer is one of fragmentation, even confrontation. In the latter regard it is not overstating the point to suggest that a moral panic has long existed whereby ethnic groups stand accused within media reportage of using the soccer terrace as a forum for violence, as the stock standard phrase goes, ‘for the settling of age old ethnic grievances’.2 Admittedly, crowd disturbances associated with tensions between certain ethnic groups have spasmodically occurred at soccer matches in Australia, but of greater interest to the cultural analyst is the readiness of the media to amplify such occurrences and routinely typify them as un-Australian. In his paper ‘The Battle of Ideas in Australian Politics,’ published in late 2006, Kevin Rudd argued: ‘For Howard and the political project for which he stands, there is a twist: There is nothing to fear but the end of fear itself.’3 Rudd is now Prime Minister and Leader of the Labor Party at the national government level in Australia. Rudd’s paper claimed that a hallmark of the preceding Prime Minister John Howard and his ousted Liberal (Conservative) government was the marking of events and activities as ‘un-Australian’ and the associated threats posed to national security by the intrusion of ‘foreign’ otherness. During his 11 years as Prime Minister, Howard was

Sport in the “city of culture”

This article examines the emerging intrusion of sport into the realm of cultural policy in tandem with an increased emphasis on culture in civic planning programs. The empirical focus of the article is on the location of sport within recent campaigns by British regional cities to win the title of European City of Culture, to be conferred in 2008. The particular case study considered is the unsuccessful joint bid put forward by Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne and Gateshead. The article looks at how the economic revival of Newcastle has been driven by cultural regeneration, and at how sport has assumed a prominent place within the cultural symbolism and iconography of the city. Consideration is given to the policy background and implications; in particular, the developing links between sport policy and cultural policy and sport considered in relation to the “creative industries” and the arts as more traditionally perceived. The article offers critical reflection upon the role of sport within the desired cultural democracy of the planners and promoters of the “city of culture”.

‘This is England’: sanitized fandom and the national soccer team

This essay examines attempts by The Football Association to develop an official supporter’s group for the England men’s national team. It is argued that The FA’s perception of desired fandom relies on the continued imagining of an outdated ‘hooligan’ stereotype, associated with ‘rough’ white working‐class masculinity and related subcultural gatherings such as skinheads. The FA’s quest for a new England fandom articulates with broader public discourse on a ‘new’ England – i.e. making football fandom relevant to a multicultural society. While such an ambition is admirable in principle, this essay warns that The FA risks abetting a tendency to culturally and discursively marginalize the lower echelon of the English white working class. As such, the essay is not only of interest to football scholarship, but also to readers interested in current debates about English national identity and whiteness.

Not just Any Wintry Afternoon in England: the curious contribution of C.R.W. Nevinson to ‘football art’

This paper considers the painting Any Wintry Afternoon in England (1930) (AWA) by the prominent artist and social commentator C.R.W. Nevinson (1889–1946). The painting is one of few, and perhaps the best-known, by an English fine artist to take football as its subject matter during the first 40 years of that sports professional existence. The paper concentrates on gaining an understanding of this painting within the context of Nevinsons biography. Of course, a painting may well be admired by viewers without any knowledge of the painter at all, and no issue is taken in the paper with the possibility of totally independent readings. But from an art-history and cultural-history perspective, knowledge of a painters biography is significant in allowing for consideration of the artwork as a product of its time. In the case of AWA, knowledge of Nevinsons hostility to sport supports the view of a leading critic, on the occasion its of its exhibition, that the painting was intended as a satire on the mass popularity of football in England in the 1920s. Forearmed with this knowledge, wariness can be taken against subsequent attempts to locate AWA within a genre of ‘football paintings’ that represent an enthusiasm for the game. Nevinsons earlier involvement with Futurism had acquainted him with that movements tendency to take aspects of popular culture as inspiration for art. But Nevinson took football as a derisory subject matter rather than inspiration and in doing so put AWA at odds with the contemporaneous visual representations of football that had begun to appear in popular mediums such as postcards and film. Yet, contrary to some wishful interpretations though it may be, AWA, owing to its very contrariness, remains an important historical image in the visual representation of football as popular culture.

‘The first ever anti-football painting’? A consideration of the soccer match in John Singer Sargent’s Gassed

The essay presents a discussion of Gassed, a large oil painting by John Singer Sargent displayed at the Imperial War Museum in London. Completed in 1919, Gassed is the major achievement from Sargent’s commission as an official war artist at the appointment of the British War Memorials Committee during the latter period of World War I. Prominent in the painting is a group of soldiers, blinded by a mustard gas attack, being led to a Casualty Clearing Station tent. In the distant background of the painting, another group of soldiers can be seen kitted out in football attire playing a match. The significance of this football imagery is our point of enquiry. As the title suggests, some recent interpretations regard the painting as offering critical reflection, from the time, about the symbolic links between sport and war. However, whilst the painting may certainly be left open to this type of viewer interpretation, archival and secondary resource material-based research does not support such a critical intention by the artist. Yet, nor is there evidence that Sargent’s intention was the projection of war-heroism. Rather, Sargent’s endeavour to faithfully represent what he observed allows Gassed to be regarded as a visual record of routine activity behind the lines and of football as an aspect of the daily life of British soldiers during the Great War.

Ethnography and `physical culture'

‘Physical culture’ is a term not prone to usage in contemporary times. An encyclopaedia search will commonly refer the enquirer to the ‘physical culture’ movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s. This movement, best illustrated by Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine promoting muscular growth through strenuous physical exercise including the lifting of weights, gave impetus to the activity that we now refer to as bodybuilding. The origins of the term are European. For example, the closely related German word Leibesubungen was used in medical enquiry to describe the healthy development of the human body through physical exercise. An institutionalized commitment to physical culture was exhibited by the founding of the German College for Physical Culture in Berlin in 1920 and, in 1924, the first sports medical journal was published by the German Association of Physicians for the Promotion of Physical Culture (Hoberman, 1992). A subsequent pejorative connotation stems from Hitler’s interest in physical culture exemplified by sporting achievement as a formal display of German superiority. The term is also negatively associated with what is perceived as Spartan-like physical training methods used in the post-war schooling systems of Eastern Bloc nations such as Poland. Such response smacks of Cold War bias, as what was done in the name of ‘physical culture’ in one country may differ not so greatly from what was done in the name of ‘physical education’ in others. Physical culture has been chosen as the theme for this special issue of Ethnography divorced largely from the historical baggage that accompanies the term. As indicated in the call for papers to the issue, ‘physical culture is taken here to mean human physical movement occurring within recognized cultural domains such as sport, dance and theatre, and, more broadly, outdoor and indoor recreational activities involving expression through physicality’. At first, an issue focusing exclusively on sportive activity had graphy

Sport in the city: cultural and political connections

There is little doubt that sport holds a prominent place within cities. Clearly the most glaring examples of sport’s influence on the city are in relation to infrastructure. Facilities such as arenas and Olympic-sized swimming pools are what many now come to expect of a modern city. Stadiums in particular are some of the most striking (though not always aesthetically appealing) structures on urban skylines, and are significant for the simple fact that they generate so many spillover effects including: the need to relocate or displace nature, heritage buildings and even citizens; and the need for added public transport and parking facilities. Beyond these structural effects, contemporary civic connections with sport are also significant because they so often reveal a complex process of constructing a credible (but fragile) sense of identity for local citizens. It is telling, for instance, that when civic elites extol (and conflate) sport’s links with ‘community’, they do so for the simple reason that to speak out against one is to speak out against the other. Indeed the strong connections between sport and the city arise from the almost infinite claims that can be placed on sport in terms of its benefits. In municipalities the world over, the main justifications and debates when it comes to sport concern its capacity to achieve health benefits, reduce crime, relieve neighbourhood tensions, induce economic regeneration, retain ‘human capital’ and so on. Regardless of the truth of these claims (and the fact that sport can just as easily exacerbate urban problems as ‘fix’ them), sport’s malleable qualities make it a strategic and resilient instrument for any number of interests to mobilize around. We are grateful to be given this opportunity to pursue our interests in these connections. The seeds for this volume were planted at the ‘Sport in the City’ symposium held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, in November 2007. The symposium was generously funded by Otago University’s School of Physical Education, owing much to the support of the School’s then Acting-Dean Michael Boyes. Three of the papers in the volume were presented in earlier versions at the symposium (others have been published in a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy 14, no. 4, 2008), viz., the papers by Davies, Kohe, Sam and Scherer, and Spirou. Other papers have been subsequently commissioned. It has now been a decade since Chris Gratton and Ian Henry’s edited collection entitled Sport in the City: The Role of Sport in Economic and Social Regeneration. The book is still relevant today because the issues of urban regeneration, mega-events, sport tourism and

‘The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice: Reflections on the “New” Cultural Turn in Sports History’

The paper commences with an admission that its title has been used before, perhaps by several people – but certainly, to my knowledge, by Gilbert Adair for the title of his book The Postmodernist A...

Special Issue: Sport and cultural policy in the re-imaged city.

Sport is seen as an increasingly important dimension of civic planning programmes and has moved to the forefront of agendas for cities of the present and future. This has occurred as the barriers between so-called ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture are apparently breaking down. Sport is no longer necessarily viewed in fundamentally oppositional terms to the arts, but as an important dimension in plans for the cultural regeneration of cities. Urban regeneration through cultural means has moved steadily onto civic planning agendas in western nations since the 1980s, culture thus taking on increasing responsibility for the economic renewal of cities. Urban economic regeneration is most visible in the commercial rejuvenation of rundown city quarters where trendy bars and coffee houses have replaced shabby shopfronts and taken over formerly grand buildings such as banks and even churches. More traditional cultural sites such as art galleries and museums have also undergone refurbishment – construction in some cases – and entered the commercial fray with the gift-shop becoming an integral part of the gallery visit as a cultural experience. Dedicated initiatives such as the European Capital of Culture, instituted by the European Union in 1985 have heightened the clamour towards civic renewal and reinvention through culture conceived in all-encompassing terms. My own case-study of Newcastle/Gateshead’s ultimately unsuccessful bid for the title of European City of Culture 2008 (Hughson 2004) was an investigative foray into how sport, having seemingly acquired the status of culture, became an integral symbolic component of that city’s bid. The Newcastle/Gateshead campaign relied heavily on imagery of cultural landmarks; traditional sites such as the Tyne Bridge, Grey’s Monument, the Theatre Royal and the Georgian architecture of John Dobson’s Grey Street were matched with more recent sites such as the Baltic Gallery and Antony Gormley’s imposing ‘Angel of the North’ statue. Taking its place within this montage – both in photographic and video publicity – was St. James’s Park, home stadium of Premier Football League club Newcastle United. Whereas football stadiums tend to be located outside of city-centres, St. James’s Park is situated on Newcastle city’s western edge with elevation; it can be seen from numerous vantage points within the city. This real visual prominence undoubtedly aided the projection of the Stadium, and hence football, onto the symbolic landscape of the ‘city of culture’. Removed from the imagery and related hype, a number of questions are raised for those prepared to look critically at the drawing of sport into the realm of culture, in campaigns such as Newcastle/Gateshead’s for the European Capital of Culture title. My own study particularly questioned how football was used to contrive an affectation of cultural democracy at work. The sporting front, it was argued, had the purpose of conscripting those not