Football and European Identity

Historical Narratives Through the Press

Liz Crolley, David Hand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134355631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Shifting European identities, cultural loyalties and divisions are often expressed more directly through attitudes to 'the people's game' game than in any other arena.

This book examines European football journalism from throughout the last century to present a unique cross-cultural analysis of changing European national and regional identities.

Building on detailed research into original language sources from across Western Europe, from the early 20th century to the present day, Football and European Identity traces this fascinating evolution.

The resulting cross-cultural analysis of national identity in Europe provides the basis for a unique study of the interplay between football, society, politics and the print media, in three parts:

Part 1: Old Europe national identity in the football writing of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain

Part 2: Nations within a State examines the status of Corsican, Catalonian and Basque identities

Part 3: New (Football) Worlds explores the response of Europe's presses to the emergence of Africa, South East Asia and the USA as major forces in world football

Chapter 1

Introduction

Football and the European press: historical narratives

Football’s conquest of Europe was already well under way as the twentieth century dawned. Born in England, the modern game first became professional there in the 1880s. Other countries saw the emergence of professional football somewhat later but precise dates are unreliable since professionalism was generally preceded by a period of unregulated amateurism and semi-professionalism. There was no national organization of football in France, for instance, until 1919, where professionalism was eventually openly recognized in 1932. In Spain, a national league was established in 1927–28 as professionalism became officially accepted. In Italy football turned professional in 1929. In Germany, political changes curtailed the nascent professionalism in the early 1930s and the national professional Bundesliga was not established until 1962, despite the foundation of the German FA back in 1900 (Hesse-Lichtenberger 2002: 62). Football, then, was professionalized across Europe at different stages in its development, often reflecting the social, historical and political contexts within which it was played (Wagg 1995) and meeting varying degrees of resistance or indigenization. As the socio-economic value of football (and sport more generally) to Europe increased, so did its coverage in the media. Indeed, such is the attention paid to all aspects of football today (from the coverage of matches on television, radio and newspapers, to pre- and post-match analyses, endless radio phone-ins, text alerts on mobile phones, fans’ fora on the Internet and tabloid gossip about footballers’ private lives) in the ever-multiplying media available to consumers that commentators talk now of over-saturation. This has not always been the case, however, and in our analysis of the print media in major European football nations over the last century, which is the subject of the present study, we have been able to track the development in terms of the burgeoning attention paid to football in the newspapers in our sample and, more interestingly, its rôle in the construction of national identities.

National identity

Football writing in Europe’s daily press cannot be read, understood or interpreted within a cultural vacuum. Each media text is contextualized within its own contemporaneous social, political, economic and ideological environment. Thus, media sport communicates information not only about a given football event but also about its cultural milieu. A snapshot of media sport coverage today, for example, might reveal social attitudes towards racism, fair play, the family, religion, money, drugs or even child abuse, and the values mediated might well differ from one national source of data to another. In November 2004, for example, the reactions to racist chanting in a match between Spain and England in Madrid illustrated the differing attitudes towards racism in those two countries. Part of the information communicated by media sport texts over the last century involves national identities. It has long been recognized that sport can offer an insight into a nation’s beliefs and attitudes towards other nations (Blain and Boyle 1998) and a historical exploration of the coverage of football in the print media can enlighten us to how different nations viewed themselves (autotypification) and others (heterotypification) throughout the twentieth century (Blain et al. 1993).

The press takes on the responsibility of transforming a complex and multifaceted reality (the football match and, often, its context) into a readily comprehensible and structurally simple written text (the match report or related article). In doing so, print media discourse employs what Nicholson and Stewart (2003) term ‘interpretive frames’. Frames are the principles upon which selection, emphasis and presentation of media material are based. In other words, frames determine what is significant about the reality that is the object of the print media discourse and, crucially, how it is presented. For the purposes of the present study, one of the most important frames to be identified and analysed in print media discourse on football is that of national identity which, in a variety of ways, supplies meanings already familiar to newspaper readers through which they then make sense of the sporting events depicted in football match reports. The events on the football field are interpreted through existing cultural knowledge. It is the contention here that part of this cultural knowledge involves an awareness of the concept of national identity in general and of the specificities of any given nation’s identity at a particular point in time. Print media discourse on football satisfies expectations in this respect because it is itself part of the interpretive framework for the communication of ideas around national identity. In short, much can be learned about notions of national identity by examining how this interface between football, society and the print media operates.

We have usually taken the nation-state as our unit of analysis. The national daily newspapers sampled are drawn from England, France and Spain (and, to a much lesser extent, Germany). Most of the territories analysed are also nationstates (e.g. Italy, Germany, Japan), with the obvious exception of the focus of Part II: Nations within States. Keating’s definition of the nation-state is useful here and worth quoting extensively:

[The nation-state] represents the coincidence in space of a number of principles of social and economic organization. It is the primary force of collective identity, reinforced and transmitted through culture and socialization. This collective identity in turn provides the basis for social solidarity. The state is the framework for internal and external security. It frames an economic system, allowing us to talk of national economies, with definable, if not impermeable boundaries. It is a set of institutions and a mechanism for policymaking. Where the state as an institutional form coincides with the national as a cultural or felt reality, then we can speak of a nation-state.

(Keating 2000: 29)

Though the relationship between nation and state might change (as has clearly happened in Europe over the last century, particularly in multinational or federal states such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany), the underlying principle remains intact. Certainly, it is true that the nation-state has evolved significantly as a political and administrative unit since the establishment of football in Europe and has arguably become more sophisticated than ever before. The creation of a devolved parliament in Scotland and assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland, the elaborate autonomy of the Spanish Comunidades Autónomas and recent proposals for a degree of autonomy for the French island of Corsica, for instance, mean that our definitions of nationalism, nation, state and, indeed, national identity need to be flexible and explained carefully. Generally speaking, we can regard the state as involving institutional organization and the nation as cultural belonging. The two concepts do not necessarily overlap. Recent transformations of the state involve the increasing importance of supra-national organizational structures, notably the European Union.

However, taking the nation-state as the basic currency poses challenges. It is increasingly accepted within cross-cultural studies that it is an inadequate unit of comparison as it clearly involves multiple cultures and co-cultures (Livingstone 2003). Since we are examining data over a period of a century, we have chosen it as a relatively ‘stable’ unit which is convenient, whilst acknowledging that it incorporates a range of cultures, histories and socio-political environments. We have endeavoured to explain some of these complexities where appropriate. Despite trends towards globalization, particularly in the rise of communications that do not rely on national boundaries (such as satellite television and Internet broadcasting), many national phenomena are still explained within the media within national boundaries.

National identity is, above all, a shared identity, an imagined community (Anderson 1983) but also a cultural product. Processes of national identity are ‘both unifying and divisive’ (Pickering 2001: 89) in that they establish common features that overcome differences within a nation (inclusivity) but also then seek to differentiate that nation from others (exclusivity). As among the strongest producers and consumers of culture, the powerful influence of the media in the communication of national identities cannot be understated. The media form part of a nation’s recorded history and act as a conduit for concepts of national identity to be driven becoming ‘powerful, heritage-laden collective notions offering shared points of reference that help to bind individuals into a national community’ (Crolley and Hand 2002: 8). The long-standing tradition of reading sport as a code for broader national characterization is never more apparent than in football. In this context, the abstract, subjective perception of the nation that lies in the imagination of readers is brought into sharp focus and is articulated as a coherent, almost tangible, homogeneous concept. The print media play a large part in this process. As Hare notes (2003: 120), ‘National consciousness and identity is not a once-and-for-all acquisition within a society.’ National cultural identity is constructed and reproduced by narratives, notably including images and symbols, which portray shared meanings and values within nationhood. Collective identities of this nature are always provisional, in need of continual reinforcement, and it is in this reinforcement that the press is so often implicated. Football, as mediated – in part – by the press, becomes ‘a purveyor of narratives and images of national significance’ (ibid. 121).

Though the focus of the present study concerns the definition and transmission of shared national identities, broader issues regarding the concept of nation-state and nationalism also have a bearing on our research. ‘It is commonly held in the social sciences that nationalism is a movement aimed at the establishment of a nation-state and that the nation-state is the fundamental unit of the world political order’ (Keating 2000: 29). This is also the view of Kedourie (1960) and Hobsbawm (1990), both of whom acknowledge the nineteenth century as the start of the rise in nationalism and recognize its roots as European; hence the huge significance of the conceptual development of the nation to our research as football emerged in Europe and, in particular, international football, which pitted one nation(-state) against another. The vast amount of literature that relates to the creation of nation-states, notions of national identity and nationalism is almost impossible to consume. However, there is a general ‘consensus over interpreting the nation as an instrument of historical and political consciousness’ (Pérez Garzón 2003) while Hobsbawm (1990) demonstrates the rôle of the national football teams emerging prior to the Great War in helping to consolidate awareness of different national identities, thereby linking football studies with wider cultural issues in European history.

The growth of football journalism

Though the rôle of the press in the social fabric of each country and its development in coverage of football might vary slightly, its continual expansion throughout the period is consistent, and English, French and Spanish newspapers in particular share similar patterns in terms of subject content, which developed from briefing the reader with raw facts in the early parts of the twentieth century to more speculative debate over team selection (but still directly match-related debate), then engaging in increasingly creative prose moving from description-based to interpretative journalism, with interests in all aspects of football from serious business, financial or social perspectives to trivia and tittle-tattle. Inevitably, and across our entire sample, there is more material available in later years than earlier. Coverage of football in the newspapers in our sample at the start of the century was much thinner than that of a hundred years later. By way of example, the entirety of the report of France’s first ever home international is provided below to be contrasted with the extensive football writing that now exists in ‘quality’ daily newspapers across the European continent:

Yesterday’s match between France and Switzerland was highly entertaining and the large crowd at the Parc des Princes saw a good game. The French won by one goal to nil thanks to a fine shot by Cyprès and the good game played by the keeper, Guichard. It can be said, though, that the two teams were equally matched and both played admirably.

(Le Matin, 13 February 1905)

In England, sport was at the margins of the ‘quality’ press in the early nineteenth century when editors for The Times, for instance, were highly selective over which sporting events were deemed to be appropriate to their readership and it was left to a separate sporting press to emerge. Horse-racing set the pace for other sports and the interests of gamblers provided the commercial impetus for the publication of Sporting Life (1859 onwards). From the 1870s onwards, a wave of ‘middle-class’ enthusiasm for sport was responsible for the materialization of other sporting publications designed to address the interest in sport of the ‘middle classes’, emphasizing the physical and spiritual virtues of sport (Boyle and Haynes 2000: 26). During this period, the pressure was increasing for the general daily press to include sport in their editions as well. Coverage of football at the start of the twentieth century (still under its more formal title of ‘Association Football’ in order to distinguish it from ‘Rugby Football’) became the norm rather than an oddity in the sports pages of the ‘quality’ press. It generally consisted of short paragraphs, relating factual information or the condition of the pitch and in early reports where there was more lengthy prose (such as on an FA Cup final) the reader had to plough through the entire article to find out the result (it was not until the late 1950s that results were actually displayed prominently in the lead to the article). Photographs were an important step for football coverage and The Times comments enviously on Spain’s impressive array of photographs accompanying their match reports in the mid-1950s (The Times, 9 May 1955). The advent of competing media coverage of football (radio in the 1930s and television as a serious force by the mid-1950s) stimulated a thrust in the extent and quality of football coverage in the print media. This was accompanied by a new era of specialized football correspondents who came onto the scene in the 1950s and 1960s (for example, Geoffrey Green and Brian Glanville) and helped raise the standard of sports journalism as well as broaden its remit to offer fresh perspectives beyond the purely sporting into the realms of the political, financial and social aspects of the game. By the time England hosted the 1966 World Cup, coverage of football in the English print media was already extensive and has flourished ever since.

In France in the early 1900s, writers in Le Vélo, L ’Auto and L ’Echo des sports maintained an elitist conception of sport and largely ignored football (Wahl 1989: 57). Before the Great War, the press favoured rugby as this was the game played by editors and journalists: L ’Auto, for example, often gave over its front page to rugby but, prior to 1914, never once to football (ibid. 129), despite the fact that even in the 1900s there were over 350 registered football clubs in France and only about 140 rugby clubs (Hare 2003: 17). It was during the inter-war years that ‘football and sport in general appear en masse in the pages of general newspapers’ (Berthou 1999: 9), although football still generally played second fiddle to cycling, rugby and even motor sports (ibid. 11). The growing importance of football in France is demonstrated via the appearance of its own specialist press: Football (a weekly publication, founded in 1910), Football et Sports athlétiques (1909, bi-weekly) and France Football, which was founded in 1923 and still exists today as a bi-weekly (Berthou 1999: 9; Wahl 1989: 352). The much renowned sports daily, L ’Equipe, is a relatively late arrival on the scene, first appearing in 1946.

Following the advent of professionalism in 1932, the French press devotes increasingly more column space to football (Wahl 1989: 314) but L ’Auto, for instance, did not cover the first ever matches played in the professional league, preferring instead to cover the Italian Grand Prix (Berthou 1999: 11). Albert (1990: 163) notes how the French press of the inter-war years had to respond to new imperatives driving their content, which had to be adapted to the developing interests of the readers: interests in travel, cinema, radio and, of course, sport. One way of responding to the changing economic environment was to increase the typical pagination of a daily, well into double figures by the late 1930s. Another innovation was to increase the use of photo journalism. Le Matin had pioneered the use of the action shot to accompany match reports in the 1920s and this feature of football writing became even more prevalent after the Second World War (as it did in England and Spain). This early twentieth-century period is regarded by Charle (2004) as the golden age of the French press. At that time, France led the world in terms of circulation figures and the quality of its journalism. The economic difficulties of the inter-war years, coupled with the rise of competitor media (radio, cinema newsreel and, eventually, television) led to a decline in the fortunes of the national daily press from which it has never really recovered. However, the diffusion of the sports press was still significant and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, according to Seidler (1964: 10), ‘France is one of the countries in which the importance of the sports press is greatest.’

The 1980s mark something of a sea change in attitudes to football in France as attention paid to the sport continued to grow in the ‘quality’ daily press. True, one journalist in Le Monde may lament the ‘obsession’ with the game, ‘the tyranny of the high mass that is football’ and the ‘curious’ nature of ‘a planet where anything not to do with football is so readily forgotten [and] relegated to the background’ during major tournaments (3 July 1982). Another, however, may equally well draw attention to football’s qualities and its capacity to generate good copy. Football is like good theatre and outstrips in its importance other cultural phenomena such as music. It might exalt aggressive ‘male, warlike values’ but it does so ‘in an acceptable way’ in which ‘players become symbolic warriors . . . patriots of their club, town or country’. Crucially from the perspective of the present volume, football’s success, the article continues, is due to the fact that it has gradually taken over the rôle of representing the collective that used to be the domain of religion and the military to the extent that the heroes of the day are now footballers. Both the process and the end product are more than worthy of attention in the press and it is right that football commands the space it does in newspapers (Le Monde, 4 July 1982). By the 1980s, even the somewhat staid Le Monde was also, occasionally, using photographs to illustrate its football match reports and its coverage of the 1986 World Cup finals in Mexico stretched to at least one full page a day, signifying a significant step up in coverage from previous tournaments.

In Spain, the first coverage of sport was published in the generalist press towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, specialist sport publications were already in circulation. Altabella (1987) claims that El Cazador, edited in Barcelona in 1856/57, was the first such publication in Spain. El Mundo Deportivo is the oldest surviving sports paper, also printed in Barcelona. Founded in 1906 as a weekly, it became a daily paper in 1929. In actual fact, the first daily publication was Excelsior, edited in Bilbao between 1924 and 1931. For those Spaniards with an interest in sport, four main sources of information existed at this time: generalist dailies, specialist dailies, the Hojas del lunes (special Monday editions) and magazines dedicated usually to individual sports (Jones and Baró i Queralt 1996: 28). Indeed, though there were still few newspapers with a national circulation, the period between 1910 and 1920 – a period of increased leisure time and development of mass media – was something of a boom period for the sports press in Catalunya, when some 30 specialized titles were founded covering a range of sports. Jones and Baró i Queralt (1996: 42) note the strong Catalan nationalist leanings of some of these publications. Many were short-lived and few survived the Civil War (1936–39) when little sport was played and paper was a scarce commodity anyway.

The amount of sport coverage in the Spanish national press expanded slowly during the first half of the twentieth century and, as a market for football was identified, the space devoted to football increased. By 1925, football was the main sport covered in the generalist press with the exception of bullfighting, which still enjoyed a relatively high level of publicity. Unless it was the bullfighting season, main features and articles on the sports pages were by the 1930s usually football related. It had become ‘el deporte rey’ (literally, ‘the king of sports’). Nevertheless, coverage was still sparse and was frequently limited to dry factual data regarding team selections.

Today, Marca leads the market in Spain’s daily print media as the best-selling daily sports publication, accounting for over 60 per cent of sales among the sports press (followed by As, Sport and El Mundo Deportivo). Established in 1938 in San Sebastián, Marca transferred its activities to Madrid in 1942 and generally vies with El País as the most widely read daily publication in Spain. Today, daily newspapers devote around 7–10 per cent of the total column inches to sport and, as in England and, latterl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedications
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1
• Part I Old Europe
• Part II Nations Within States
• Part III New (Football) Worlds
• Bibliography