Maximilian Walder & Jacco Van Sterkenburg, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Keywords
Audience reception study; race; ethnicity; football broadcasting; stereotypes
Abstract
The English Premier League is the most popular men’s football league in the world, attracting 4.7 billion viewers worldwide (Dubber & Worne 2015). Domestically, 51% of the Brits watch and follow the League weekly (Nielsen Sports 2018), which makes men’s Premier League football an important part of the national English culture. Drawing on a cultural studies perspective, we argue that televised football functions as a place where hegemonic discourses are built, reproduced, and transformed, and where popular categorizations are (re)created and reinforced. One very prevalent social discourse reproduced in and through mediated football is that of race/ethnicity. Televised games of Premier League football feature footballers from various racial/ethnic backgrounds from around the world playing together (which often reach millions of viewers), making it a fertile ground for meanings given to race/ethnicity. Researchers in the past have mainly focused on sports reporting and concluded that journalists tend to present a biased view on athletes and their abilities, linking athletes of color to physical skills and “white” athletes to mental skills (e.g. Rada & Wulfemeyer 2005; Buffington & Fraley 2008; McCarthy et al. 2003). In the way sports broadcasters talk about the athletes they shape not only the discourse about the players at hand, but also the discourse about the social group these athletes are part of (Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers & De Leeuw 2010), thus reinforcing racial/ethnic stereotypes. Whereas former studies mostly focused on the media content, our study analyzes televised men’s football audiences and how they give meaning to race/ethnicity. An analytic focus on the football media audience is lacking in much of the research in the field (idem 2010). Furthermore, we also focus on how these audiences interpret the role of the football media in representing race and ethnicity. The research question can be read as follows: How do audiences of televised English football give meaning to race/ethnicity and how do they reflect on the media’s role in their representation of race/ethnicity? For this paper, race/ethnicity is seen as a social construct, which is constantly renegotiated and defined in and through discourse (Hall 1980; 1995). The paper furthermore uses race/ethnicity as one single, conflated term, which reflects how the everyday use of trace and ethnicity usually combines biological characteristics and cultural traits. While content analyses in sports broadcasting often used a priori categories for race/ethnicity in the past (usually the categories of Black and White), this study follows Van Sterkenburg et al’s (2010) suggestion to a more grounded theory, data-driven approach moving away from fixed categories. In practice this means that priority is given to how the interviewees define race/ethnicity categories themselves. The researcher’s job is then to reflect on those categorizations and explore what they mean.To create the feeling of an everyday conversation, audiences were interviewed in focus groups. Three video fragments were used throughout the interview to stimulate a discussion about race/ethnicity in British televised men’s football. The first clip was used as a ‘settle-in’ exercise for the interviewees and presented match highlights of an England international game, while not explicitly touching on race/ethnicity in football. It did, though, show racial/ethnic diversity on the pitch and subtle biased broadcasting regarding the representation of a “White-British” and a “Black-British” player. The second fragment was intended to trigger the discussion more bluntly, presenting a pre-match discussion about the then Black Belgian Manchester United player Romelu Lukaku, in which he was described as a “beast of a player” and as « he plays like a pussycat and you know there is a tiger there underneath the surface”. The third fragment (showing Lukaku reflecting on biased media coverage) then was intended to trigger a discussion about the role of the media in shaping in the discourse about race/ethnicity in men’s football and beyond. Results suggest that the discourse about race/ethnicity of audiences of televised men’s football in the UK is diverse, ambiguous and often paradoxical. Overall there is a consensus that stereotypes are still being reproduced by media, the interpretations of this varies though. Moreover, some respondents are very critical about racialized (media) stereotypes while others do not see them as a problem. Findings differ from previous studies in some important ways and are discussed within a broader societal context.