Foreign players and football supporters

The Old Firm, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain

David Ranc

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781784990046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Idéologies politiques

'Mercenaries', 'cheats', 'destroying the soul of (English) football', 'destroying the link between football clubs and their supporters': foreign football players have been accused of being at the origin of all the ills of contemporary football. How true is this? Foreign players and football supporters: The Old Firm, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain is the first academic book to look at supporters' reactions to the increase in the number of foreign players in the very clubs they support week in week out. It shows that football supporters identify with their club through a variety of means, which may change or be replaced with others, and provides the most comprehensive view on football supporters' attachment to their club in the European Union, following the increase in European legislation. Divided into three case studies on Glasgow (Celtic and Rangers), Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal in London, the book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to chart the evolution of the link between supporters and club between 1995 and today. It is based on extensive research through the press of three nations, as well as interviews with officials and supporters. It provides an excellent read for students and researchers in Sports Studies, Politics, European Studies, French Studies and other Social Sciences, or to anyone interested in one of the most original institutions of contemporary western societies: mass spectator sports.

1
Understanding partisan identification

Sociology has largely provided the main paradigms that still frame most social science studies on sport and the understanding of partisanship: the critical, functionalist, figurational and interpretative approaches. These four approaches provide different answers to the central question: what prompts a partisan identification? Thorough research on the means of identification has only been conducted within the figurational and interpretative frameworks. The empirical relevance of some aspects of these theories has been shown in the works of historians, geographers, sociologists and anthropologists on factors of partisanship: class, race and gender, space and place. They have therefore provided the basis for the insights tested and the methods of investigation used in this study.

The determinants of support

Critical approaches

The critical approaches to sport belong to a wider range of sociological traditions according to which the meaning of the participation in sporting or supporting activities is not determined by the individual but is imposed on him or her. The main shared hypothesis for all critical sociologists is that sports form part of a network of institutions promoting social values that reflect the interest of the dominant classes. The subordinate groups believe in them and carry them out, though it is contrary to their interest. Sports appear to be an instrument of the domination of the ruling classes. These theories are reminiscent of Marx’s own in The German Ideology.¹ According to Marx, the superstructure (all social and cultural forms other than the economy) is determined by the infrastructure (also known as the base): the (economic) mode of production. In capitalist societies, there is a division between the masters of production (owning the means of production, capital) and the direct producers (owning only their labour force). One of the chief functions of superstructures is to promote the key ideologies of a given capitalist society in order to reinforce the reproduction of the system.

Orthodox critical theories

The ‘orthodox’ critical theory of sports sociology (developed notably in France by Jean-Marie Brohm and his followers in the review Quel corps?)² is the most salient example of critical theories applied to sport.³ In the aftermath of May 1968, Brohm’s theories took on a dominant position among the sociological studies of sport in France until they were replaced by the theories of Bourdieu’s school in the 1980s. Brohm and the orthodox critic theory owe much to Marx’s theory of ideology. Brohm, for example, contends that the function of sport is to maintain the established order; it is seen as ideologically reproducing the social mode of production through political and ideological enrolment, the diffusion of the bourgeois order and the improvement of the working force.⁴ From this perspective, supporting a club can only be seen as entirely determined by forces at work in society that the agent cannot escape.

Bourdivine theories of sport: habitus and field

Even if they mark a departure from the strict determinism of Marxism, the theories of Pierre Bourdieu⁵ on sport can be related to critical theory, with which they share two common hypotheses. First, sport and other such leisure activities feature in an ongoing struggle for the domination of one class. Second, sport provides the lower classes with the misleading and ideological idea that upwards mobility can be attained through them. Hence it contributes to social control.

The notion of habitus (the shared cultural values and practices that drive the social behaviour of a group), first developed by the Frankfurt school of sociology in the 1930s, is central in Bourdivine writings. When applied to sport, it implies that the decision to take part in a sport as an actor or as a spectator is the result of an unconscious assimilation of tastes. For the ruling classes, taking part in some sport is equivalent to a badge of social distinction. For the subordinate classes, it also acts as a way of emphasising status distinctions within a class (for example between genders). Habitus has found an important development in the work of Christian Piocello, who has argued that there exists a ‘system of sports’. Each social class has its own sport, and the choice made by an individual to play a given sport is constrained by the class to which this individual belongs. This correlation between class and the sport played (or, by extension, supported) may appear very deterministic. Yet, it also emphasises that the agent has the ability to choose between different sports and that agents of the same class may make different choices, or the same choice, but for different reasons.

A second major insight from Bourdieu is the notion of ‘field’ (champ). Sport constitutes a field. There is a ‘sports world’ with its own relation to time (rhythms and history), its own set of rules and values, its own organisation (limits and hierarchies). Jacques Defrance has, indeed, demonstrated⁶ that in the case of France during the second part of the nineteenth century, the institutionalisation of sport led to the autonomy of the sport field. Through the development of sports institutions and their recognition by other social institutions (e.g. the state), sport became a specialised activity with a distinct social organisation. The idea that sport is autonomous has been adopted in many social sciences. For example the French historian, Alfred Wahl, has argued that sport has its own rhythm and chronology that only have tenuous links with the rhythms of general political, economic and social history. Wahl concludes that the history of sport (including football) therefore has to be studied independently.⁷ Consequently, studying an agent’s choice to support a given team must take into account the specific context of the sport field.

Hegemony theory

Hegemony theory has replaced the strict deterministic character of orthodox Marxist theory with the notion of hegemony, inspired by the works of Gramsci. Hegemony theory, in contrast, postulates that values are constantly negotiated between classes through their intellectuals in order to ensure the continuing domination of the ruling classes. John Hargreaves, for example, contends that dominant social classes have to fight and compromise with the subordinate classes to impose their sport-based norms, values and functions.⁸

Morgan has underlined that in Britain and North America ‘hegemony theory has achieved intellectual dominion in critical considerations of sport. It is no exaggeration to refer to hegemony theory in this context as the received critical view on sport’.⁹ Hegemony theory has, therefore, led to a variety of approaches. Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald have applied hegemony theory to the study of relations between dominant and dominated groups to other social categories than class, notably race and gender.¹⁰ The works of John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson have also renewed the hegemonic paradigm as they emphasise the dynamics of agency and power (where power replaces structure as a central element of sociological study). Their methodology has also broadened the scope of hegemony theory as their critical approach intersects with five other approaches: ‘historiography, comparative methods; critical sociology; ethnography; investigative research and gonzo’.¹¹ Hegemony theory has been used by students of the media and sport such as Alan Clarke and John Clarke, who have argued¹² that sport is one among many objects in the media discourse used to reproduce and transmit ideological themes and values dominant in our societies. Garry Whannel, for his part, examined the relationship between sport and television,¹³ highlighting the way that television has remodelled sport. He also argues that representations of sport (or blackness and women in sport) are changing, as they only reflect the compromise between different actors of the society. Hegemony theory therefore puts an emphasis on the necessity to understand an agent’s choice to support within changing social dynamics, and in the light of changing social institutions, like the media.

Functionalist approaches

Functionalist approaches share with critical approaches a common hypothesis: the meaning of sport is to be found at the social, not individual level. Yet, functionalists do not usually pass judgement on the values of social functions, and whether they contribute to domination. According to functionalists such as Gunther Lüschen,¹⁴ society is a whole, a unified system within which sport is only one social institution (among others) which has functions to perform. As such, the sport institution can be said to reflect the society as a whole or it can be compared to other institutions in order to understand which functions it performs.¹⁵ For example, Christopher Stevenson and John Nixon¹⁶ have identified five functions sport performs. Sport contributes to the maintenance of psychological stability at societal level: it performs a socio-emotional function. As sport contributes to the inculcation of social beliefs and groups, it permits socialisation. Disparate individuals and groups are integrated by sports. Used for ideological purposes, sport also performs a political function, but it also provides an upward social mobility function for deprived individuals and groups. Following the functionalists, the individual decision of whether to support a team can, arguably, be entirely determined or simply affected by the role football plays in society. As ideology, ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding partisan identification
• 2 Researching partisan identification
• 3 Glasgow: the Old Firm
• 4 Paris Saint-Germain
• 5 Arsenal
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes