Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art 9781501334566, 9781501334597, 9781501334573

Citation preview

Picturing the Beautiful Game

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Picturing the Beautiful Game A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art Edited by Daniel Haxall

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Daniel Haxall and Contributors, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Godfried Donkor, Santo Pogba, 2014, mixed media collage on paper, 50 cm x 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ARTCO Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN :

HB : 978-1-5013-3456-6 ePDF : 978-1-5013-3457-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-3458-0

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Contents List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Notes on the Contributors Terminology and Word Usage Introduction: Picturing the Beautiful Game Daniel Haxall

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Part One Soccer and Mass Media 1 2

From the Oval to the Crystal Palace: The FA Cup Final and its Depiction in the Victorian Illustrated Press Alexander Leese “Hours and Hours of Mundane Moments and Then You Get This”: Motion and Punctuality in the Soccer GIF Luke Healey

19 35

Part Two Soccer and Memory 3 4

Making a Spectacle of Ourselves: Imaging the Supporter at Football and the Fine Arts Mike O’Mahony The Boss in Bronze: Three Statues of Brian Clough Christopher Stride, Ffion E. Thomas, and Nick Catley

51 69

Part Three Soccer and Modernism 5 6

The Footballer as the Figure of the New Man in Italian and Russian Avant-garde, 1910s–1930s Przemysław Strożek From Free Agency to Captivity: Football and Spectacle in Contemporary Art Chris McAuliffe

97 115

Part Four Soccer and Gender 7 8

Feminist Art and Women’s Soccer Jennifer Doyle Gender, Pleasure, and the Look: Female Fans and Men’s Soccer Carrie Dunn

135 155

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Contents Soccer and Global Politics

9 The Politics of Soccer in Contemporary Ghanaian Art Daniel Haxall 10 Adventures of the Triolectic: Art, Politics, and Three-Sided Football Christopher Collier

171 191

Part Six Soccer and Commercialism 11 Over 100,000 Posters: The Unprecedented Commercialism of the 1966 World Cup in England Jean Williams 12 Imagining Reality: Artistic Responses to the Commercialization of the Beautiful Game Ray Physick Bibliography Index

211 231 249 265

List of Illustrations and Tables Illustrations 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 7.1 7.2 7.3

Stephen T. Dadd, “The Final Tie of the Challenge Cup Contests at Kennington Oval,” 1882 William Douglas Almond, “Football Association Challenge Cup Match at Kennington Oval—Blackburn Rovers v. Notts County,” 1891 Stephen T. Dadd, “The Final for the Association Cup at Kennington Oval,” 1891 Henry Marriott Paget, “The Football Association Cup: The Final Tie in the Crystal Palace Grounds,” 1895 Gerald Cains, Saturday Taxpayers, 1953 Football supporters at Fratton Park, Portsmouth, 1948 Gerald Cains, Cup Fever, 2006 Brian Clough statue, Albert Park, Middlesbrough Brian Clough statue, Old Market Square, Nottingham Brian Clough and Peter Taylor statue, Pride Park, Derby Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913 Gerardo Dottori, Football Match, 1928 Enrico Prampolini, Angels of the Earth, 1936 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player—Color Masses in the 4th Dimension, 1915 El Lissitzky, “The New Man,” from Figurines: The Victory Over the Sun, 1923 Gustav Klutsis, Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event, 1928 Aleksandr Deineka, Footballer, 1932 Maurizio Cattelan, Stand Abusivo, 1991 Maurizio Cattelan, Stadium, 1991 Maurizio Cattelan, Cesena 47—A.C. Forniture Sud 12, 1991 Antoni Muntadas, Stadium: Homage to the Audience, 1989–2006 Roderick Buchanan, Work in Progress, 1993–95 Khaled Sabsabi, Wonderland, 2014 Ala Younis, Plan for Greater Baghdad, 2015 Michelle Grabner, The Thing Quarterly Issue 27, 2015 Marriage, “Soccer” (from Fortunate Living Trilogy), 2004 Julia Lazarus, still from Die Brüchigkeit der Spielerinnenkörper (“The Brittleness of the Player’s Body”), 2011

21 25 26 28 61 62 65 80 82 84 99 101 102 105 106 109 111 119 121 122 124 128 129 130 140 141 142 vii

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List of Illustrations and Tables

7.4 7.5 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5

Moira Lovell, “Emily and John,” from Stand Your Ground, 2008 Moira Lovell, “John and Vicky,” from Stand Your Ground, 2008. Godfried Donkor, Santo Eusebio, 2006 Godfried Donkor, Santo Pogba, 2014 Godfried Donkor, Trinity of the Saints, 2009 George Afedzi Hughes, Golden Boot, 2010 George Afedzi Hughes, Rain Balls, 2011 Owusu-Ankomah, Go For It, Stars, 2004 Diagram of a three-sided football pitch laid out for teams Y, R, and B, from The Book of Deptford Match at the Alytus Psychic Strike Biennale 2015 “Triolectical” glyphs left to mark assorted active pitches of a clandestine league Match in the Luther Blissett Deptford League, 2014 Guillermo Laborde, 1930 World Cup Poster Filippo Marinetti, 1934 World Cup Poster Henri Desmé, 1938 World Cup Poster J. Ney Damasceno, 1950 World Cup Poster Herbert Leupin, 1954 World Cup Poster Walter Tuckwell and Associates Limited, 1966 World Cup Poster Joan Miró, 1982 World Cup Poster Peter Max, 1994 World Cup Poster L. S. Lowry, Going to the Match, 1953 Neville Gabie, Goalposts: Belfast, Northern Ireland, ongoing since 1996 Christine Physick, Probably the Best Supporters in the World, 2011 Christine Physick, This is Anfield, 2011 Christine Physick, On the Terraces: View from Lothair Road, 2011

148 149 175 177 177 179 181 184 192 197 198 200 215 216 217 218 220 222 225 226 234 237 242 243 244

Tables I.1 Selected group exhibitions of soccer and art since 1996 I.2 Selected National Museums of Soccer (dates indicate when physical museum space operated)

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4.1 The world’s football manager statuary: completed and planned statues as of January 1, 2017, by nation and chronological order of unveiling

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Acknowledgments In many ways, this book developed from conversations began at two conferences: Football at 150, organized by Jane Clayton for the National Football Museum, Manchester, England, September 2–4, 2013; and Soccer as the Beautiful Game: Football’s Artistry, Identity and Politics, organized by Brenda Elsey and Stanislao Pugliese for Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, United States, April 10–12, 2014. In both cases, the conference conveners formulated art-themed panels that helped plant the seed for an extended study of soccer and art. My editorial approach to this volume, as well as the critical perspectives informing my own research into art and sport, have been greatly enriched by the diverse scholars I have worked with at conferences or through publication projects. In addition to the contributors to this volume, I would like to thank Ridvan Askin, Aline Bieri, Drew Brown, Jeffrey Bussmann, Andrianna Campbell, Jamie Campbell, Jan Chovanec, Jane Clayton, Roxane Coche, Simon Critchley, Catherine Diedrich, Mark Doidge, Brenda Elsey, Can Evren, Elyssa Ford, Borja García, Oscar Guerra, Taylor Henry, Jillian Hernandez, Craig Hovey, John Hughson, Charlotte Ickes, Gary James, Adam Kadlac, Jeffrey Kassing, David Kilpatrick, George Kioussis, Maja Kovac, Eva Lavric, Erin Lehman, Ted Matthews, Lindsey Meân, Derek Conrad Murray, Soraya Murray, Michael O’Hara, John Paul, Cyprian Piskurek, Stanislao Pugliese, Alon Raab, Mahmoud Rasmi, Nathanael Roesch, Emily Ryall, Bridget Sandhoff, Philip Schauss, Raymond Schuck, Jaime Schultz, Jeffrey Segrave, Jennifer Sterling, Preston Thayer, Helena Tolvhed, Kristof Vanhoutte, Connell Vaughan, Travis Vogan, David Webber, Myles Werntz, John B. White, and Grace Yasumura among many others. The Department of Art and Art History and Office of Grants and Sponsored Projects at Kutztown University supported my work on this project, and Cheryl Hochberg, Michelle Kiec, William Mowder, and Jeffrey Werner deserve recognition for their continued support. Special thanks to Alexander Jackson at the National Football Museum and Hannah Williamson at the Manchester Art Gallery for their assistance in researching the collections of each institution. Many of my colleagues at Kutztown University provided invaluable feedback and encouraged this art historian’s foray into sport studies, they include: Rose DeSiano Galjanic, Jason Lanter, Margaret Noel, Lisa Norris, Rebekkah Palov, Heather Ramsdale, and Dan Talley among others. I would also like to thank my parents, siblings, and extended family for their love and support while nurturing my passion for both soccer and art. Of course, this book would not be possible without the tremendous efforts of our authors, and I am indebted to each of them for their time, patience, and excellent work. From our first meeting at the College Art Association annual conference, Margaret Michniewicz encouraged and directed this rookie editor, and I am grateful for her guidance. In addition, Katherine De Chant, Amy Jordan, and Erin Duffy provided ix

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tremendous support at Bloomsbury Academic. I would also like to thank Kevin Eaton and Merv Honeywood of RefineCatch Ltd for their excellent copy edits and production work on the book. As part of internships at Kutztown University, Kassidy Rineer and Emma Osle assisted me with proofreading, editing, and other organizational logistics, and I am thankful for their help. Numerous artists shared their time and insight with our team, and this collection remains a testament to their work. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Kathryn who, although tempted, refrained from issuing me a red card while I worked on this project.

Notes on the Contributors Nick Catley Nick Catley is the third member of a collaborative team with Chris Stride and Ffion Thomas, serving as researcher and editor for the Sporting Statues Project. Nick obtained both his first degree and his MS c in Economics at the University of Warwick, England. He is an auditor at the National Audit Office, London, and co-authored Measures of Job Satisfaction with Chris Stride and Toby Wall (Wiley, 2007, 2nd ed.). Christopher Collier An active three-sided football player, Christopher Collier recently completed a PhD in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, UK . In addition to his thesis, “A Transformative Morphology of the Unique: Situating Psychogeography’s 1990s Revival,” Christopher has published a number of articles and book chapters on the subject. He played at the inaugural Three-Sided Football World Cup, organizes a team in the Luther Blissett Deptford League and continues to develop games internationally at multiple levels. Jennifer Doyle Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, Jennifer Doyle is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015), Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2016), and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006). Carrie Dunn A journalist and academic, Carrie Dunn’s recent books include The Roar of the Lionesses: Women’s Football in England (Pitch, 2016), nominated as one of the Guardian’s best sport books of 2016. She covered the 2011 and 2015 Women’s World Cups for The Times and Eurosport, and is a regular voice on radio, where she co-commentates for a variety of BBC stations. Daniel Haxall Professor of Art History at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Haxall is a former fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and he earned his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. He publishes widely on contemporary art, including collage, abstract expressionism, the African diaspora, and intersections of art and sport.

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Luke Healey A writer and PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, UK , Luke Healey’s doctoral research concerns the relationship between football and visual culture around the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Alex Leese Alex Leese has recently completed a PhD in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. Titled “The Art of Football: Illustrating the Beautiful Game, 1863–1915,” his thesis explores the representation of football in popular print media from the foundation of the FA to the suspension of the English game during World War I. Chris McAuliffe Professor of Art (Practice-led research) at the School of Art and Design, Australian National University and from 2000–2013 Chris McAuliffe was Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, where he established the Basil Sellers Art Prize for contemporary art addressing sport. He taught art history at the University of Melbourne (1988–2000) and Harvard University (2011–2012). Mike O’Mahony Professor in the History of Art at the University of Bristol, Mike O’Mahoney has published widely on the visual and material culture of sport and his books include Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture—Visual Culture (2006), Olympic Visions: The Games in Visual Culture (2012) and The Visual in Sport, co-edited with Mike Huggins (2012). He is currently completing a monograph on Photography and Sport. Ray Physick In addition to the visual representation of sport, Ray Physick’s current sphere of research focuses upon Spain in the 1930s. An article analyzing the aborted Olimpiada Popular of 1936 in Barcelona has recently been published in Sport in History. Presently he is preparing an article on visual propaganda during the Spanish Civil War. Parallel research into the Batallón Deportivo, formed in the autumn of 1936 to support the Spanish Republic in the fight against fascism, is also being undertaken. Chris Stride Chris Stride is a senior lecturer and statistician, based at the Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, combining academic research with peripatetic consultancy and training. He has published across a wide range of social science disciplines, even poking a toe into pure science or humanities upon occasions, and is particularly interested in the use of statistical methods to support and add rigor to research in areas where advanced quantitative analysis would typically be considered

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an anathema. Parallel to his career as a statistician, Chris has a sideline in sport history, focused on material culture, commemoration, and identity. Przemysław Strożek An Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, freelance curator and avant-garde scholar, Przemysław Strożek has authored a number of publications on Italian, Russian, and Central and Eastern Europe Avant-gardes. Currently he is conducting a research project on Sport in the Visual Arts in Eastern Europe in 1918–1939 funded by the National Science Centre in Poland. Ffion E. Thomas A PhD student based at the University of Central Lancashire’s International Football Institute in Preston, England, Ffion Thomas’s current research considers the motivations, significance and impact of football clubs moving stadia, and in particular the visual culture associated with such moves. She is a co-instigator of the University of Sheffield’s Sporting Statues Project, which since 2011 has studied the proliferation of statues of sportspeople in the UK and worldwide. Jean Williams Jean Williams has written extensively on the social and cultural history of sport. She is also a heritage and arts consultant, working with many international sporting museums and community groups on aspects of interpretation, exhibition design, and audience cultivation. Her most recent book is A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport (Routledge, 2014).

Terminology and Word Usage The sport of “soccer” is commonly called “football” throughout the world. With contributors to this volume being an international team, both terms are employed interchangeably. If an author addresses American gridiron football, a direct statement will make that referent clear, otherwise all discussions of soccer or football should be considered analogous.

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Introduction: Picturing the Beautiful Game Daniel Haxall

In 1996, the Manchester Art Gallery and Institute of International Visual Arts presented Offside! Contemporary Artists and Football to accompany the European soccer championships played throughout England that summer. Curated by John Gill, the exhibition featured thirteen artists from the United Kingdom and Latin America in an effort to “make contemporary art more accessible to a wider public” while exploring “the ways in which our national game reflects our image of ourselves, our nation and our relationship with other nations.”1 Towards this end, the show’s organizers sought “significant debates” about soccer distinct from its “documentary” representation, including issues of local allegiance, fan behavior, gender norms, and consumerism.2 In this capacity, Offside helped establish the potency of football as an artistic metaphor, yet despite earning acclaim and influencing subsequent exhibitions of sport in art, many rejected soccer as an appropriate subject for art. Celebrated British artists Gilbert and George refused to participate and one critic asked: “Is the combination of art and football a contradiction in terms?”3 Such attitudes are hardly uncommon as art and sport are often considered separate forms of leisure, with athletic competition appealing to the masses through physicality and spectacle, and art positioned within the intellectual culture of the elite. Despite skepticism from the art establishment, Offside continued a long tradition of football-themed cultural events in the city of Manchester. Paintings depicting soccer matches entered the permanent collection of the Manchester Art Gallery as early as 1924, while the city hosted the exhibition Football and the Fine Arts during its 1953–54 national tour. The Manchester Art Gallery presented Football in the Picture when England staged the 1966 FIFA men’s World Cup, and similar events followed in the two decades after Offside debuted: the Manchester Art Gallery exhibited the Professional Footballers Association’s collection of soccer artworks in 2008, the People’s History Museum opened Moving the Goalposts: The History of Women’s Football in Britain (1881–2011) in 2011, and the National Football Museum produced Moving into Space: Football and Art in West Africa in 2012. Outside of Manchester, exhibitions of sport-related art have appeared regularly since World War II , including a show at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum that coincided with the 1948 Summer Olympics. In fact, art competitions associated with the Olympics date to 1912, and representations of sport run throughout the history of art, from Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy to ancient China and Mesoamerica. 1

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

Major museums and commercial galleries regularly organize art exhibitions in conjunction with sporting events, and soccer remains the most common avenue for uniting art and sport. This trend can be explained by two factors. First, soccer is the world’s most popular sport in terms of participation and attendance. Well over one billion people, nearly 15 percent of Earth’s population, watched the 2014 men’s World Cup Final between Germany and Argentina. With access to football expanded through satellite television and Internet broadcasts, soccer has become an international industry and global cultural phenomenon. As such, artists across the planet watch and play the game, and consequently many represent football in a range of media and formats. In addition, soccer is an inherently visual sport, one that has been called “the beautiful game” for its artistry and aesthetic appeal.4 Indeed, statistics often fail to capture the movement of players on the pitch or skill required to control the ball without hands. Where box scores can summarize a contest of baseball or basketball by connecting performance to batting averages or points per game, soccer remains less quantifiable. Possession percentages do not necessarily gauge the quality of scoring chances, and data beyond goals scored and surrendered are often subjective and debatable.5 The idiosyncrasies of football privilege visual appreciation and consumption, particularly with the wealth of imagery that extends beyond the pitch: fan banners and tifos, posters advertising competitions, media representations, public monuments to footballing heroes, and artworks utilizing the game as a shared, cultural referent. With these attributes in mind, this collection of essays considers the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms.

Studying the Beautiful Game Soccer has recently become a popular subject for academic study. In the past 5 years, international conferences on the subject have been staged by the University of Basel, Harvard University, Schwabenakademie Irsee, Hofstra University, University of Limerick, Manchester Metropolitan University, and National Football Museum. The European Union funded a multi-year research consortium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe (FREE ), while several British universities developed programs dedicated to the academic study of soccer and sport.6 Even in the United States, where soccer historically struggled to gain acceptance, many universities offer courses on the game.7 In fact, football has become the most popular subject in sports writing,8 with publications ranging from scholarly exegesis and formal poetry to popular history and athlete biography. Most studies of soccer approach the game from a historical or sociological perspective, and within English-language literature sportswriter Simon Kuper called Brian Glanville, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Wilson the “triumvirate of great British football historians.”9 Their output includes broad cultural histories of the game, including Goldblatt’s definitive The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, or studies of evolving football tactics, such as Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid.10 Recent

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academic collections have located major themes within, and established historiographic canons of, soccer, discussing broad topics within the game including nationhood, class, gender, media, and politics among others.11 Other academic collections investigate fan violence and footballing rivalries,12 while some explore stadiums as civic icons and sites for identity construction, whether local, national, or gendered.13 International tournaments, such as the World Cup, afford the opportunity to localize studies of soccer, and new literature frequently stems from the identity of the host nation. For example, several publications explored the significance of the 1998 men’s World Cup held in France, particularly the ramifications of the French national team for debates about immigration.14 Likewise, the staging of the 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa allowed scholars to consider the place of sport in postcolonial nationbuilding.15 A number of academics employ soccer to access the formulation of diverse identities. Some, like David Winner, link the style of football in England and the Netherlands to each nation’s culture and character,16 while others map regional differences through the game in places like Latin America.17 Scholarship has addressed the United States’ sporadic interest in soccer,18 as well as the interconnectedness of football and globalization.19 Jean Williams, Carrie Dunn, and Jennifer Doyle, who each contribute to this book, render the field inclusive by recognizing the rich history of women’s soccer while destabilizing the biases of sex and gender which mar the sport and its scholarship.20 Prejudice in football includes race, and personal observations and directed case studies focus on the racism that continues to plague international competition.21 This dynamic and growing body of scholarship addresses soccer from a variety of angles ranging from sociology to media studies. Football also recurs in literature, and poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes are just two of many to write about the game creatively.22 Several anthologies gather poetry and prose about soccer, and “taxonomies” of football fiction have been fashioned by scholars.23 Yet, despite these diverse means of studying and portraying the game, art and visual culture remain somewhat absent from footballing discourses, a surprising omission considering its visual nature and history in the arts. Recognizing this trend across sport studies in general, Mike Huggins encouraged historians to make the “visual turn” and research visual culture in addition to texts. In particular, he called for “more sophisticated approaches to sporting representations. We need to explore their context, content and meaning, and the play of intention, myth, silence, and power in pictures.”24 As a corrective, he collaborated with art historian Mike O’Mahony to edit a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport, which emphasized the “constructed nature” of sporting representations, including stadium architecture, paintings, athlete monuments, stamps, and museum collections.25 Following suit, two academic journals—African Arts and Soccer & Society—focused on the visual culture of the 2010 men’s World Cup, the first time the tournament was staged in Africa.26 While these efforts to make the “visual turn” provided a new engagement with the materials that color the spectatorship and consumption of football, fine art and design remain underrepresented in studies of sporting culture. Art historians in particular have been reluctant to seriously consider sport, and scholars across disciplines could

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

do more to address athletics as an artistic subject. In the rare instances when the two are combined, art is often used to illustrate sporting histories, or artistic trends are emphasized at the expense of sporting contexts.27 Individual athletics contests— boxing, tennis, and golf—and field sports—hunting, horseracing, and fishing— traditionally garner more attention from artists and scholars, perhaps due to the personal narratives and social status afforded those respective areas of competition and leisure.28 The association of soccer with the working class might further account for its relative scarcity in art historical literature, especially during the game’s struggles with hooliganism and fan unrest.29 However, as football assumes greater legitimacy as a “serious” subject in academe, scholars have begun to contextualize the game through relevant sporting and cultural frameworks. The mission of Offside, to consider the critical implications of soccer beyond the documentary, continues in this emerging corpus, much of which was written by the contributors to this book. Representations of the ballgames preceeding soccer date to 1800 bce in Mesoamerica, and artists have regularly portrayed modern football since the ratification of association rules in England in 1863.30 In an essay examining early depictions of international soccer, Alexander Leese argues that the illustrated newspapers of the Victorian era not only reported match events but negotiated issues of class, nationalism, and fan behavior.31 As such, images provided social satire while charting the evolving tactics and styles of play at the close of the nineteenth century. By World War I, soccer became a powerful agent of health, camaraderie, and leisure for soldiers, and as Iain Adams and John Hughson suggest in their study of John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed, 1919, it provided a sense of normalcy amid the horrors of war.32 Throughout the interwar years, soccer became emblematic of modernism, recurring as a subject among Futurists, Constructivists, and Social Realists. Several artworks became canonical for celebrating the athletic physicality of footballers or communal aspects of fandom—Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913 (Figure 5.1), and L. S. Lowry’s Going to the Match, 1953 (Figure  12.1)—yet other artists remained critical of the game’s influence. For example, Hughson finds C. R. W. Nevinson one such detractor, with his Any Wintry Afternoon in England (1930) representing the “destructive” place of soccer amid England’s deteriorating cultural life.33 Unlike Nevinson, the Soviet Union embraced sport and in Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture—Visual Culture (2006), Mike O’Mahony explores its physical culture and representation in art. Valuing the health and physical development of the individual, Soviet sporting programs prepared the citizenry for labor and military service. Soccer came to represent these initiatives, with the goalkeeper a popular artistic trope symbolizing national defense and heroism.34 Ultimately, as O’Mahony argues, art and sport coexisted as cultural modes in Russia, opposing Western practice that frequently established hierarchies of high and low, elite and popular. Building upon O’Mahony’s work, Przemesław Strożek traces the representation of modern ideals, including gender equality and heroic proletarianism, through soccer in Avantgarde and Social Realist Soviet art.35 While depictions of football have been used to further ideological positions, they have also been employed to celebrate national identity and commemorate popular

Introduction

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interests. Ray Physick’s study of the 1953–54 Football and the Fine Arts exhibition, staged for the 90th anniversary of the English Football Association (FA ), positions the event within postwar efforts to bridge class divides and foster patriotism.36 Where the tone of Football and the Fine Arts was largely celebratory, contemporary artists increasingly employ soccer as a critical tool for contesting national identity and complex social issues. Strożek’s recent essay on Polish art situates the sport within the politics of fandom, particularly hooligan violence and chauvinism. As he argues, the stadium became a site for projecting oppositional values, and artists employ the game to question the spheres of socialization available in contemporary Poland.37 Likewise, several of my projects explore, among other topics, artistic depictions of violence in football, the politics of postcolonialism and globalization in African diasporic representations of the game, the complexities of immigration as conveyed through images of Zinedine Zidane, and the rivalry between the United States and Mexico as portrayed through soccer-themed artworks.38 In addition to studying “football art” in the traditional gallery or museum setting, several scholars have written about site-specific artworks at stadiums or other locales. For example, Jason Wood explored the place of memory and civic pride in Neville Gabie’s The Trophy Room, a series of artworks dispersed among the housing development built at the site of Middlesbrough Football Club’s former stadium, Ayresome Park.39 Likewise, O’Mahony contextualizes memorials to legendary Russian goalkeeper Lev Yashin within the fall of the Soviet state and efforts to celebrate new heroes amid the social and political transformations of the post-Soviet era.40 The prevalence of such monuments led Christopher Stride, Ffion Thomas, and John Wilson to compile a database, the Sporting Statues Project, which launched in 2010.41 This research agenda has resulted in numerous journal and magazine articles, including a contribution to this collection, as the team investigates the motivation and reception of soccer-related statuary and public works.42 Football’s visual culture extends beyond the fine arts and several scholars have considered its representation in comics, trading cards, and sportswear. Jean Williams edited a special issue of Sport in History—Kit: Fashioning the Sporting Body—that links sports fashion to the projection of gender, class, and fan heritage.43 These items often acquire collectible status, linking them with other forms of memorabilia and visual culture. Iain Spragg compiled a history of the men’s World Cup through objects ranging from balls and posters to ticket stubs and photographs,44 while Alexander Jackson traced the evolution and manufacture of trading cards, noting the ways they promoted a “boy’s culture” of fandom, club loyalty, and commodity fetishism.45 Comic books also reached large audiences of young football fans, with millions of comics sold annually in England throughout the twentieth century. Adam Riches, with Tim Parker and Robert Frankland, produced a history of soccer comic heroes from 1910 to the 1970s, finding that the values of bravery, personal and moral resolve, and inclusion were celebrated in these illustrated stories.46 As this body of research indicates, representations of soccer in diverse forms of visual culture can hardly be considered naïve or merely celebratory. Instead, scholars unpack the sociopolitical implications of football through art and visual media.

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

Exhibiting the Beautiful Game Much of the scholarship on soccer and fine art comes in the form of catalogs, with exhibitions a primary means of exploring the topic. These shows have become a common way to offer cultural programing in conjunction with the World Cup and other major soccer tournaments. While the statistical success of overlapping sporting and artistic events has been debated, the number of such projects suggests a belief in their potential for attracting new audiences and bridging the divide between art and sport.47 As Table I.1 indicates, the soccer-themed art exhibition has become staple of the Table I.1 Selected group exhibitions of soccer and art since 199648 1996

Offside! Contemporary Artists and Football, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK England’s Glory: An Exhibition of Football, Gallery 27, London, UK

1998

80 artistes autour du Mondial, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, France Futebol-Arte, Palácio do Itamarty, Brasilia, Brazil 75 Artistas y el Futbol, Sala de Exposiciones de CajaCanarias, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain Muddied Oafs: An Exhibition of Football, Gallery 27, London, UK

1999

The Power of Soccer, Gertrude Posel Gallery, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

2000

Der Ball ist rund [“The Ball is Round”], Gasometer, Oberhausen, Germany

2002

Football through Art, Chosun Ilbo Gallery, Seoul, South Korea Dangerous Corners, JHW Fine Art, London, UK Appunti allo stadio: 90 opere sul tema del calico nell’arte italiana del XX secolo [“Soccer Sketches: 90 Works on the Theme of Football in Twentieth-century Italian Art”], Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy

2004

Em Jogo/On Side, Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, Portgual Laduma! Soccer in Durban, KwaMuhle Local History Museum, Durban, South Africa

2005

The Art of Football, Shop 2.05, The Rocks, Sydney, Australia

2006

Ballkünstler [“Ball Artist”], Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany Rundlederwelten [“Round Leather Worlds”], Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany Glamour and Globalization: Football, Media and Art, Phoenix Halle, Dortmund, Germany You’ll Never Walk Alone: Football and Fan Culture, OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich, Linz, Austria Salon des Refusés: ARTCUP, Deveron Arts, Huntly, Scotland Kick-Off, KFA Gallery, Berlin, Germany One Love: The Football Art Prize, The Lowry, Manchester, UK

2008

The Art of Football, Nike with SHOW studio, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland Bread and Soccer: In the Arena of Art, Austrian Culture Forum, New York City, USA The Beautiful Game, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK

2010

Halakasha!, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa Art of the Ball, Durban Art Gallery, Durban, South Africa The Eleven: Football and Art—South Africa 2010–Brazil 2014, Commerzbank, Johannesburg, South Africa One Shot! Football and Contemporary Art, B.P.S.22, Charleroi, Belgium Men with Balls: The Art of the 2010 World Cup, apex art, New York City, USA England’s Glory 2010, Gallery 47 and JHW Fine Art, London, UK

Introduction

7

2011

Beyond Football—Shifting Interests and Identity, Goethe-Institut, Lagos, Nigeria, and Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Germany On the Other Hand: Artistic Throw-Ins about the 2011 Women’s Football World Cup, Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany Moving the Goalposts: The History of Women’s Football in Britain (1881–2011), People’s History Museum, Manchester, UK

2012

Moving into Space: Football & Art in West Africa, National Football Museum, Manchester, UK Futbol: Arte y pasión, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico Beautiful Game, International Group Exhibition, Mestna galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia

2014

Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA One Game—Everywhere: Art + Football, ARTCO Art Gallery, Aachen, Germany The Art of Football: The Beauty, the Social, the Political, Two Levels Exhibitions with The Rocks Popup Projects, Sydney, Australia The Pride and the Passion: Contemporary Art, Football & The Derby County Collection, QUAD, Derby, UK The Beautiful Game, ArtsKC with Sporting Kansas City, Kansas City, USA Pitch Invasion: Art Joins the Game, Juventus Museum, Turin, Italy

2015

Patterns of Play, Moosey Art, Norwich, UK Pelé: Art, Life, Football, Halcyon Gallery, London, UK Fútbol, pasión de multitudes [“Football, Passion of Crowds”], Buenos Aires Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina

2016

The Art of Football, National Football Museum, Manchester, UK Football: À la limite du hors jeu [“Football: On the Edge of Offside”], Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France La Grande Galerie du Foot [“The Great Gallery of Soccer”], La Villette, Paris, France Fútbol 2016, Buenos Aires Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina Art Loves Foo(d)(tball): Football Art Exhibition, Cinetol/Tolbar, Amsterdam, Netherlands Footorama, Maison Folie Wazemmes, Lille, France Group Stage, Kingsland Road, London, UK

2017

The Football Crest Index, National Football Museum, Manchester, UK The Beautiful Frame: Animation at the National Football Museum, National Football Museum, Manchester, UK Nous sommes Foot [“We are Football”], Le Mucem, Marseille, France

2018

The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, USA Women Behind the Football Lens, National Football Museum, Manchester, UK

World Cup, and over fifty group shows have been staged in the 20 years since Offside opened in Manchester. These ranged from major museum surveys to club-sponsored gallery events. Prominent academic curators organized some while others emerged through collaboration with young designers and urban artists. Extensive scholarly catalogs accompany many exhibitions, while several make the work available for commercial sale. The artistry of the game is often stressed in these shows, and diverse critical approaches inform such offerings, ranging from social history to feminist critiques. The location of the host venue often lends geographic and conceptual specificity to these events. For example, when the men’s World Cup was hosted by South Africa in 2010, several exhibitions explored the host nation’s unique soccer history and culture.49

8

Picturing the Beautiful Game

The largest was Halakasha!, curated by Fiona Rankin-Smith for the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg. The title derived from South African goal celebrations and the show itself was, according to Rankin-Smith, “framed mainly around the theme of local and African football supporters, imaging the politics and nationalist sentiment associated with football.”50 This approach positioned makarapa (plastic helmets) and vuvuzela (plastic trumpets) alongside photo-essays and wooden sculptures, connecting the soccer tournament to Nelson Mandela’s efforts to foster social change in South Africa through sport. Two years later, the National Football Museum staged an art exhibition with an African focus, Moving into Space: Football and Art in West Africa, as part of the cultural festival planned for the 2012 Olympics in England. Curated by Martin Barlow, Moving into Space featured eleven West African artists who probe “the effects of globalization and trade, the lure of wealth and celebrity, gender relationships, war and violence, as well as what art and culture might bring to people’s lives,”51 Barlow explained being “interested in work in which football was used to address other issues in some way,” thereby highlighting soccer’s capacity to transcend leisure and visually articulate society at large.52 Where some exhibitions privilege politicized representations of football, others commemorate significant events. To celebrate the centenary of the German football association in 2000, the Gasometer, an industrial landmark in Oberhausen now used as an art and exhibition space, staged the show, Der Ball ist rund (“The Ball is Round”). The massive Gasometer, with 75,000 square feet of floor space, was filled with 2,500 art works, photographs, posters, historical mementoes, and equipment, offering an encyclopedic history of soccer and Germany’s relationship to the game. This blockbuster attracted 216,000 visitors over six months, included a 400-page catalog,53 and served as the impetus for a permanent German Football Museum, which opened in Dortmund in October of 2015.54 A similar scholarly approach characterized the cultural programing for the 2006 men’s World Cup in Germany. The government invested over €30 million on an extensive series of concerts, films, theatrical productions, and art exhibitions throughout the country.55 Over a half-dozen museum shows appeared in the cities of Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and Nuremberg, all of which hosted tournament matches. The focus of these shows varied, including global icons, referees and information systems, and two in particular concentrated on art: Ballkünstler (“Ball Artist”) and Rundlederwelten (“Round Leather Worlds”). Featuring an international assortment of artists, both exhibitions approached the game critically, exploring the fetishism of the game and its stars, clash of cultures that occur via football, and politics of identity within sport.56 While the 2006 men’s World Cup surpassed previous tournaments in terms of exhibitions and scholarship, women remain underrepresented as both artist and subject. Marijke van Warmerdam was the lone female artist among the twenty-four featured in Ballkünstler while only sixteen of the seventy-four artists in Rundlederwelten, approximately 22 percent, were women. Depictions of women’s football proved even more scarce, with Till Velten and Maria Lassnig the only artists to directly represent female athletes. Several exhibitions attempted to correct this and other biases during the 2011 Women’s World Cup, which was also hosted by Germany. Emeka Udemba

Introduction

9

organized Beyond Football—Shifting Interests and Identity for the Goethe-Institut Nigeria and Savvy Contemporary Berlin, exploring the shifting gender paradigms offered by sport. Also in Berlin, the Schwules Museum produced On the Other Hand: Artistic Throw-Ins about the 2011 Women’s Football World Cup, under the direction of Birgit Bosold. Aligned with the museum’s mission to celebrate LGBT history and culture, this show presented twenty-one artists who “explore the interesting interplay of gender, (homo)sexuality, and football.”57 Finally, Colin Yates curated Moving the Goalposts: The History of Women’s Football in Britain (1881–2011), which opened at the People’s History Museum in Manchester before touring to other venues. Yates commissioned thirteen artists to create work inspired by the history of women’s football in Britain, and didactic panels and other texts illuminated the development of the women’s game. Although exhibitions of “football art” have been staged for decades, only recently have museums dedicated to the history of soccer appeared.58 As Table  I.2 indicates, national and international football museums are a recent phenomenon with most of the major institutions opening in the past few years. Some have relocated—England’s National Football Museum moved from Preston to Manchester, while the United States Soccer Hall of Fame will reopen in Texas after originally operating in upstate New York—and others, including a proposed Football Heritage Complex in Durban, South Africa, failed to secure financial and/or institutional support.59 Memorabilia and artifacts constitute major components of these museum’s holdings, yet artworks play crucial roles in chronicling the game and its history. For example, the National Football Museum acquired several private collections with the most notable being the FIFA-Langton collection of soccer artworks, equipment, toys, and ephemera. Harry Langton (1929–2000), a sports journalist, amassed these objects throughout his life, eventually selling them to FIFA who, in turn, sold them to the National Football Museum. In addition to forming the spine of the museum’s permanent collection, Langton’s holdings inspired two histories of soccer published through FIFA . These surveys stressed the global nature of football as well as England’s role in the development

Table I.2 Selected National Museums of Soccer (dates indicate when physical museum space operated) 1999–2010

United States Soccer Hall of Fame, Oneonta, NY, USA

2000-

Soccer Hall of Fame and Museum, Vaughan, Ontario, Canada

2001–2010

National Football Museum, Preston, UK

2001-

Scottish Football Museum, Glasgow, Scotland

2012-

National Football Museum, Manchester, UK

2014-

Nationaal Voetbalmuseum, Roosendaal, Netherlands

2015-

German Football Museum, Dortmund, Germany

2016-

FIFA World Football Museum, Zurich, Switzerland

2018-

United States Soccer Hall of Fame, Frisco, TX , USA

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

of the modern game.60 Bearing witness to the latter is the Homes of Football, Stuart Roy Clarke’s twenty-five-year photo-essay of soccer in the UK and another resource within the National Football Museum. Selections from the Langton and Clarke collections are integrated into museum displays, which also feature interactive touchscreens, videos, trophies, sportswear, and other materials. In this way, artworks allow the curators to illustrate specific topics, such as the stadium experience, fan behavior or early days of soccer. Yet art often plays a more interpretive role in museological narratives, with curators utilizing temporary shows to generate critical studies related to soccer. As previously noted, the 2011 Women’s World Cup provided an opportunity for addressing the gendered and heteronormative systems governing the game, while the 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa granted an occasion for exploring African football. More recently, the National Football Museum exhibited John Early’s photographic series that chronicles the experiences of LGBT footballers in England. Personal statements accompanied portraits of each player, while the social media hashtag, #FVH 2016, encouraged museumgoers to participate in the “Football versus Homophobia” campaign.61 In this way, Early’s photoessay provided the means for engaging this issue while mementoes from the “Justin Campaign” appeared elsewhere in the museum to reinforce the antidiscrimination platform.62

Picturing the Beautiful Game As this summary suggests, efforts to study and exhibit soccer have increased throughout the past decade; yet the format of journal essays and catalogs somewhat prohibits extended, in-depth investigations of the game, its symbolism and visual rhetoric. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art brings together a team of twelve scholars from across the globe to reconsider the place of football in the collective imagination. Some are major figures in the fields of art history, sport history, and sociology, while others recently completed dissertations on the subject, providing a balance of seasoned veterans and aspiring newcomers like any good soccer team. The essays gathered here fuse art historical methodologies with critical perspectives grounded in feminism, globalization, Marxism, and social history. In addition to works of fine art, our scholars consider television programs and web-based GIF highlights, advertising posters and newspaper illustrations, public monuments, and unconventional ways of playing soccer. As such, Picturing the Beautiful Game represents the field of visual culture, an expansive approach to visual analysis that studies the various images encountered in contemporary life, ranging from artworks and advertisements to fashion and commercial design. Grounded in the multiculturalism of postmodernism and globalization, visual culture integrates high and low, elite and popular, within shared cultural practices and modes of consumption, mapping the conditions that shape our “investment” in images.63 Accordingly, the contributors to Picturing the Beautiful Game locate powerful metaphors within diverse representations of soccer, and by appraising the values

Introduction

11

projected onto and through the sport, this book addresses the potential and limitations of the “beautiful game.” This collection is organized into six thematic sections, and while these categories remain fluid—many essays could fit into multiple topics—we eschewed a linear, chronological format to highlight the transdisciplinary nature of the book and its relevance to diverse fields of study. Part One, Soccer and Mass Media, focuses on the visual consumption of the game through highlights presented in the popular press and Internet, two of our primary vehicles for accessing soccer. Alexander Leese explores some of the earliest media representations of football, Victorian illustrated newspapers, to show how prints established the style and character of competition in the nineteenth century by emphasizing the game’s physicality, drama, and decisive moments. Conversely, Luke Healey considers contemporary web-based GIF highlights, utilizing theories of punctuality and scopophilia to explore the affective power of the GIF, a video format that privileges contemplation and fetishizes the performance of the footballer. Where illustrated or GIF highlights present footballing performance for visual consumption, the game remains embedded in historical associations and collective memory. Part Two of the collection, Soccer and Memory, considers soccer in the context of memory, ranging from nostalgia to commemoration. Mike O’Mahony reconsiders the landmark Football and the Fine Arts exhibition that toured Britain in 1953–54, noting the prevalence of artworks depicting crowds and the stadium atmosphere rather than the match itself. As such, representations of fans’ perspectives framed the value of football in cultural terms during a time of postwar social transition, revealing a collective desire to capture those experiences through art. The collaborative team of Chris Stride, Ffion Thomas, and Nick Catley explore memory and nostalgia through public monuments, studying three statues erected in honor of legendary football manager Brian Clough. They connect patronage and site location to the iconography and design of these effigies while analyzing the numerous factors contributing to Clough’s representation. This case study elucidates the objectives and reception of such monuments, particularly the competing narratives that exist between history and its visualization. Part Three of the book, Soccer and Modernism, examines Modern and Postmodern depictions of athletes themselves. In his study of the Italian and Russian Avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, Przemysław Strożek focuses on the footballer as an emblem of modernity. In a range of artistic media, soccer represented the dynamism of the “New Man” in Futurism, Suprematism, and Constructivism, where tropes of ascension characterized the “flying” footballer and the promise of physical culture for broader social programs framed the sportsman as hero. As these utopian visions of modernity collapsed under Fascism, the image of the athlete changed accordingly. Tracing narratives of captivity and subaltern voices throughout the Postmodern era, Chris McAuliffe locates complex power structures in the way contemporary artists represent, and contest, the game of the soccer. Televisual, economic, and globalized systems frame the sport within limited terms, producing forms of social containment at odds with Modernism’s idealized vision of the soaring footballer. Ultimately, Strożek

12

Picturing the Beautiful Game

and McAuliffe demonstrate how artists viewed society through soccer, mapping agency and status onto the frame of the athlete. Despite the growing interest in women’s soccer, biases of gender and sexuality plague the sport, the topic of Part Four, Soccer and Gender. Here, Jennifer Doyle chronicles a history of exclusion in representations of soccer, offering a critical feminist perspective that challenges the male sporting hegemony. As she argues, the suppression of women’s athletic narratives stems from broader cultural assumptions about the sport spectacle, which has largely excluded women and valued only the male physique. Consequently, artworks of female footballers disrupt these heteronormative structures, often depicting an alternative space beyond the gendered field. Rather than artworks, Carrie Dunn examines our visual consumption of athletes in televisual media, allowing us to reconsider preconceptions grafted onto visual culture, particularly where bodies are displayed for admiration. In particular, she interrogates the objectification of women within the game and dispels the erroneous notion that women derive sexual pleasure from watching men’s soccer. Through a sociological study of female fans and critique of the English television program, Soccer AM, Dunn concludes that female fans operate within an inherently sexist media framework, one that forces a conflicted negotiation of their identity as fans and women. This critical discourse continues in Part Five, Soccer and Global Politics, an engagement with the politics of globalized soccer. Critiques of football’s sociopolitical power run throughout the art of the African diaspora, and Daniel Haxall focuses on three contemporary Ghanaian artists—Godfried Donkor, George Afedzi Hughes, and Owusu-Ankomah—who offer competing narratives about the sport and its position in society. From celebrations of nationalism and the unity brokered by football to critiques of its corruption and divisive agency, soccer serves as a loaded metaphor for these artists, allowing them to engage immigration, global capitalism, fan behavior, and other issues bound within the politics of Ghana’s most popular sport. Christopher Collier, on the other hand, traces the history of three-sided soccer to consider its deconstructive potential and relationship to contemporary forms of political “activity.” First proposed by Danish artist Asger Jorn, three-sided soccer reemerged in the past 20 years as an alternative to the binaries coloring competition, and as such, the staging of these matches offers a Situationist political intervention at a time when the game has never been more popular. As Collier argues, this triadic space operates between spectacle and participation, and art and politics, affording a relational openness to the closed systems that football often represent. The mass appeal and subsequent commercialization of soccer comprise the book’s sixth and final part, Soccer and Commercialization. First, Jean Williams studies the origins of the game’s visual commodification in her history of World Cup posters. As she notes, the memorabilia’s design elements and references shaped the visual identity of the host nation, simultaneously advertising a form of destination tourism while promoting nationalistic sentiment at home. Williams argues that the 1966 men’s World Cup in England heralded an unprecedented degree of commercialization in the form of mascots and merchandise, particularly the abundance of posters printed to capitalize on the event. As this marketing approach entered club football, the commercial windfall

Introduction

13

of globalized soccer drove many to question its impact on local fan cultures and regional identities. Ray Physick considers several British contemporaries who contest the commercial capitalism rampant in football. These artists often eschew the community and idealism depicted in earlier representations of soccer, expressing the disconnect between branding and allegiance. Physick concludes this discussion with a case study of Liverpool FC , a club expanding their venerated Anfield stadium and wooing overseas fans while potentially alienating fans and artists alike. While this book is not exhaustive, the twelve essays gathered here address many of the major topics and issues surrounding the sport of soccer. Picturing the Beautiful Game appears on the eve of the 2018 men’s World Cup, controversially hosted by Russia yet a tournament that will inevitably command the world’s attention. As football increases its global footprint and extends its influence and marketability, debates linger surrounding the game’s financial viability, governance structure, and commitment to equality. As these scholars demonstrate by scrutinizing the ways we visually access soccer, acts of spectatorship and consumption remain loaded whether they occur through television broadcasts and web-based highlights, monuments and art exhibitions, or posters and alternative modes of play. The beauty of the game, then, remains contested off the pitch, a field of inquiry marked beyond goals and nets, touchlines and corner flags.

Notes 1 Gray and Tawadros, “Foreword” to Offside, 4. 2 Offside exhibition prospectus, on file at the Manchester Art Gallery. 3 Gilbert and George, letter to Howard Smith [coordinator of the exhibition] (October 31, 1995), Manchester Art Gallery; Andrew Cross, “Offside: Contemporary Artist and Football,” Art Monthly 198 (July–August, 1996): 198. 4 The first person to describe soccer as “the beautiful game” has been much debated. Journalist Jimmy Catton employed the phrase as early as 1913, while in 1952, English writer H. E. Bates declared soccer “the most beautiful game in the world,” noting how, “we sometimes forget, or take for granted, the unique beauty of this game,” H. E. Bates, “Brains in the Feet,” Sunday Times (November 16, 1952), 4. While Catton and Bates might be among the earliest to use the phrase in print, former Brazilian players Pelé and Didi, as well as BBC commentator Stuart Hall, popularized the expression from the 1950s into the 1970s. Paul Brown, “Coining a Phrase,” When Saturday Comes 366 (August 2017): 37. 5 Analytics have increasingly entered soccer, see: Anderson and Sally, The Numbers Game. 6 Such programs include Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for the Study of Football and its Communities, the International Football Institute at the University of Central Lancashire, DeMontfort University’s MA in Sports History and Culture, and Southampton Solent University’s BA (Hons) in Football Studies. 7 Courses on soccer have been offered at American schools including Harvard University, Duke University, George Mason University, Arizona State University, and New York University. 8 Charles Morris, “Book Club,” When Saturday Comes 347 (January, 2016): 28–9.

14

Picturing the Beautiful Game

9 Simon Kuper, “World Cup Winners,” Financial Times (May 29, 2010): http://www. ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/dfdc8278-69e4-11df-a978-00144feab49a.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 10 Goldblatt, The Ball is Round; Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid. 11 Koller and Brändle, Goal!; Steen, Novick, and Richards, The Cambridge Companion to Football; Hughson, Moore, Spaaij, and Maquire, Routledge Handbook of Football Studies; Elsey and Pugliese, Football and the Boundaries of History. 12 Kuper, Football against the Enemy; Armstrong and Giulianotti, Fear and Loathing in World Football; Dunning, Murphy, and Williams, Fighting Fans. 13 Frank and Steets, Stadium Worlds; Sheard, The Stadium. 14 Dauncey and Hare, France and the 1998 World Cup; Dubois, Soccer Empire; Hare, Football in France. 15 Ricci, Elephants, Lions & Eagles; Hawkey, Feet of the Chameleon; Bloomfield, Africa United; Alegi, African Soccerscapes; Alegi and Bolsmann, Africa’s World Cup. While predating the 2010 FIFA World Cup, another significant book on soccer in Africa is Armstrong and Giulianotti, Football in Africa. 16 Winner, Brilliant Orange; Winner, Those Feet. 17 Campomar, Golazo!; Nadel, Fútbol. 18 Markovits and Hellerman, Offside; Szymanski and Zimbalist, National Pastime; Wangerin, Soccer in a Football World; Wangerin, Distant Corners; Hopkins, StarSpangled Soccer. 19 Foer, How Soccer Explains the World; Giulianotti and Robertson, Globalization and Football. 20 Williams, A Game for Rough Girls; Williams, Globalising Women’s Football; Williams, A Beautiful Game; Dunn, Female Football Fans; Dunn and Welford, Football and the FA Women’s Super League; Dunn, Football and the Women’s World Cup; Dunn, Roar of the Lionesses. Stacey Pope has published widely on female soccer fans in numerous journals and academic collections, while Jennifer Doyle’s blogs, “From a Left Wing” and “The Sport Spectacle,” feature queer and feminist readings of art, sports, and performance. 21 Moran, “Racism in Football”; Doidge, “If you Jump Up and Down, Balotelli Dies”; Burdsey, Race, Ethnicity and Football; Crabbe, Solomos, and Back, The Changing Face of Football. 22 Heaney, “Marking,” in Seeing Things; Hughes, “Football at Slack,” in Remains of Elmet; Hughes, Football. 23 Anthologies, compendia, and reviews of soccer literature include Turnbull, Satterlee, and Raab, The Global Game; Langton, Saved; Stein and Campisi, Idols and Underdogs; Seddon, A Football Compendium; McGowan, “Marking out the Pitch”; Peter Stead, “Brought to Book: Football and Literature,” in Steen, Novick, and Richards, The Cambridge Companion to Football, 240–53; Usher, “A Rough Guide to Football in Print.” 24 Huggins, “The Sporting Gaze,” 318. 25 Sport and the Visual, special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport 28 (8–9) (May–June 2011): 1087–374. 26 South Africa after the Ball: Art and the World Cup 2010, special issue of African Arts 44 (2) (Summer 2011): 1–79; Visualizing the Game: Global Perspectives on Football in Africa, special issue of Soccer and Society 13 (2) (March 2012): 139–326.

Introduction

15

27 For example, Mary Ann Wingfield’s survey of sports in art, Sport and the Artist, focuses primarily on the history and evolution of ball games rather than analyzing its representation in art. Similarly, Peter Kühnst compiled a broad art history of sport that includes various forms of leisure and exercise while dismissing soccer as aggressively masculine, tribal, and reactionary; Kühnst, Sports, 362–5. 28 For example, Mari Womack emphasized drama and heroism through field and fighting sports rather than team games like soccer; Womack, Sport as Symbol. 29 Walker, British Sporting Art in the Twentieth Century, 187. 30 Whittington, The Sport of Life and Death; Scarborough and Wilcox, The Mesoamerican Ballgame. 31 Leese, “Illustrating the Auld Enemies.” 32 Adams and Hughson, “The First Ever Anti-Football Painting.” 33 Hughson, “Not just Any Wintry Afternoon in England.” 34 O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR. 35 Strożek, “Footballers in Avant-garde Art.” 36 Physick, “Football and the Fine Arts.” 37 Strożek, “Off-field Spectacle.” 38 Haxall, “Pitch Invasion”; Haxall, “The Ugly Side”; Haxall, “From Galáctico to Head Butt”; Haxall, “Picturing a Rivalry”; Haxall, “England ’Till I Die.” 39 Wood and Gabie, “The Football Ground and Visual Culture.” 40 O’Mahony, “The Art of Goalkeeping.” 41 http://www.offbeat.group.shef.ac.uk/statues/ [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 42 Thomas and Stride, “The Thierry Henry Statue”; Stride, Wilson, and Thomas, “From Pitch to Plinth”; Stride, Wilson, and Thomas, “Honouring Heroes by Branding in Bronze”; Stride, Wilson, and Thomas, “Modeling Stadium Statue Subject Choice.” 43 Kit: Fashioning the Sporting Body, special issue of Sport in History 35 (1) (2015): 1–194. 44 Spragg, The World Cup in 100 Objects. 45 Jackson, “The Baines Card.” 46 Riches, Parker, and Frankland, Football’s Comic Book Heroes. 47 Snowball, “Are Art Events a Good Way of Augmenting the Economic Impact of Sport?” 48 This list includes primarily group exhibitions at museums and galleries where art featured prominently in the show. Exhibitions by solo artists, such as Paul Pfeiffer’s The Saints, London, UK : Artangel (2007), or Julia Bornefeld’s FC Supernova, Köln, Germany: Galerie Klaus Benden (2010), were not included. In addition, only organizing institutions appear rather than venues that hosted traveling exhibitions, for example the Halcyon Gallery first staged Pelé: Art, Life, Football in 2015, while the National Football Museum hosted the show in 2017–18. 49 For a critical summary of exhibitions staged during the 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa, see: Lamprecht, “Cape Town 2010”; Rankin-Smith, “Halakasha! The Time Has Come!” 50 Rankin-Smith, Halakasha!, 1. 51 Barlow, Moving into Space, unpaged. 52 Martin Barlow, e-mail message to author, August 25, 2015. 53 Brüggemeier, Borsdorf, and Steiner, Der Ball ist rund. 54 “The Ball is Round: The Football Exhibition in the Gasometer, Oberhausen,” Gasometer Oberhausen: http://www.gasometer.de/en/exhibitions/the-ball-is-round [accessed: April 11, 2018]; “The Origins of the German Football Museum,” Deutsches Fussball

16

55

56 57

58 59 60 61

62

63

Picturing the Beautiful Game Museum: https://www.fussballmuseum.de/en/museum/german-football-museum/ the-origins-of-the-german-football-museum.htm [accessed: March 19, 2018]. “A Time to Make Friends: 5th Progress Report of the 2006 World Cup Office in Preparation for the 2006 FIFA World Cup” (2005), Bundesministerium des Innern: http://www.bmi.bund.de/cae/servlet/contentblob/130528/publicationFile/15399 [accessed: October 23, 2017; no longer accessible]. Schmidt, Ballkünstler; Strauss and Doswald, “Runderlederwelten.” http://www.schwulesmuseum.de/en/exhibitions/archives/2011/view/on-the-otherhand-artistic-throw-ins-about-the-2011-womens-football-world-cup/ [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Moore, “Football and Museums.” Rassool and Slade, “Fields of Play”; Alegi, “The Football Heritage Complex.” Federation Internationale de Football Association, 1,000 Years of Football; Lanfanchi, Eisenberg, Mason, and Wahl, 100 Years of Football. John Early, Kicker Conspiracy (February 4 to May 4, 2016), National Football Museum, Manchester: http://www.nationalfootballmuseum.com/whatson/kicker-conspiracy [accessed: March 19, 2018]. This initiative was created in honor of Justin Fashanu, England’s first openly gay footballer who committed suicide in 1998. The “Justin Campaign” attempts to end homophobia in football through education, art, and sport: http://www. thejustincampaign.com/index.htm [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Tavin, “Wrestling with Angels,” 208. For more on the field of visual culture, see: Bryson, Holly, and Moxey, Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations; Evans and Hall, Visual Culture: The Reader; Heywood and Sandywell, The Handbook of Visual Culture; Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader; Walker and Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction.

Part One

Soccer and Mass Media

17

18

1

From the Oval to the Crystal Palace: The FA Cup Final and its Depiction in the Victorian Illustrated Press Alexander Leese

The first mass-produced image of an FA Cup Final appeared in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (ISDN) on April 1, 1882 (Figure 1.1). The wood engraving by Stephen Dadd (fl. 1879–1914) depicts Old Etonians’ 1–0 victory over Blackburn Rovers at the Oval, home of Surrey County Cricket Club, played in front of a crowd of 6,000.1 Many sport historians regard this match as a major turning point in football’s development from an exclusive pastime for southern gentlemen into a popular national sport.2 Since the establishment of the FA Cup in the 1871/72 season, the competition had been dominated by a small group of elite southern clubs whose players were part of the “Old Boy” network of former public school pupils. As football’s popularity grew in the industrial heartlands of Lancashire and the Midlands, the competition expanded to accommodate more regional clubs and by the early-1880s the FA Cup had become a contest “of genuinely national scope.”3 Blackburn Rovers became the first provincial team to reach the final in 1882 and, although they left the Oval empty-handed, their strong performance against the Old Etonians demonstrated that the Cup was well within the reach of the best northern teams. It was Rovers’ local rivals, Blackburn Olympic, who became the first northern workingclass team to win the FA Cup in 1883. Rovers won it themselves for three consecutive years from 1884 to 1886, and again in 1890 and 1891. Dadd maintained his interest in sport illustration and by the late-1880s he was producing regular representations of the FA Cup Final for periodicals. His illustration of Rovers’ 3-1 win against Notts County in the final of 1891 was published in the ISDN the following Saturday (Figure 1.3). Another illustration of the match was produced by William Douglas Almond (1866–1916) and this alternative view appeared in the Illustrated London News (ILN) on the same day (Figure  1.2). Rovers had now won the cup for the fifth time in 8 years, signaling that English football’s center of gravity had shifted decisively northwards. In 1895, the final moved to the pleasure gardens of the Crystal Palace and this spectacular venue hosted what became the definitive highlight of the football calendar until the outbreak of World War I. It was at the Crystal Palace that the Cup Final gained a strong association with the working-class North of England, “never better illustrated than in the Southerner’s image of the Northerner in London ‘Oop for the Coop.’ ”4 Cup 19

20

Picturing the Beautiful Game

Final day essentially became a holiday for the tens of thousands of spectators who descended upon London to cheer on their team and see the sights, part of the “leisure revolution” that took place in late-Victorian England.5 In the first Crystal Palace final, Aston Villa defeated West Bromwich Albion 1–0 in front of a crowd of at least 42,000. Henry Marriott Paget’s (1856–1936) illustration of the match, depicting a clash of heads in front of a large crowd gathered beneath the tracks of a roller coaster, was printed in halftone on the front page of The Graphic on April 27 (Figure 1.4). This chapter will analyze representations of the three FA Cup Finals outlined above: 1882, 1891, and 1895. These games marked important milestones in the competition’s early history but their events also inspired a range of visual responses: single-scene wood engravings, montage arrangements of episodic action and dramatic front-page compositions of eye-catching sporting drama. Such prints were often the only visual record of specific fixtures and the means by which the public could consume images of football at this time. Certain aesthetic conventions were established in this medium, including an emphasis on the game’s physical demands rather than the scoring of goals, as many artists aligned their work with the ethos of amateurism despite the rapid growth of the professional game. Match photography appeared in the illustrated press by the mid-1890s, but these images tended to be distant panoramas of players standing in their positions at kick-off rather than the action-packed compositions that artists could achieve. The illustrations presented in this chapter provide an insight into which particular incidents, along with more general aspects of how the game was played, watched, and officiated, were considered important elements for depicting football in illustrated periodicals towards the end of the nineteenth century. The artists’ careers and their experience of illustrating football (or lack thereof) also provide a useful starting point for considering to what extent the compositions accurately reflect the fixtures. In addition to producing whimsical domestic and animal subjects, Dadd became a prolific sporting artist and illustrated a range of sports throughout the 1880s and 1890s.6 Almond and Paget, on the other hand, were relatively inexperienced with sporting subject matter, having built their careers around Social Realist depictions of London’s workhouses,7 and illustrations of adventure stories and historical narratives respectively.8 This period also saw significant developments in printing technologies employed by the illustrated periodicals and the prevalence of wood engraving gave way to photomechanical processes that could recreate the tonal qualities of painting and photography. Most narratives of the FA Cup are constructed from match results and the statistical records of teams, players and attendances. Although this approach tends to satisfy the demands of traditional sports history, which has perhaps suffered from “a nearobsession with list-making,”9 analysis of visual representations of early FA Cup Finals offers a richer interpretation than those based on textual or statistical sources alone.

1882: Old Etonians 1 Blackburn Rovers 0 The main focal point of Dadd’s illustration of the 1882 FA Cup Final is a Blackburn Rovers player, wearing the team’s away shirt of thin black and white hoops, charging

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Figure 1.1 Stephen T. Dadd, “The Final Tie of the Challenge Cup Contests at Kennington Oval,” from the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, April 1, 1882. into the body of an Old Etonian. The Old Boy has managed to relinquish possession of the ball by hoofing it into the air just before his opponent barges into him with his shoulder. The clash of players is balanced by the anticipatory movements of the other figures towards the edges of the composition and the ball that hangs in the air. The ball appears to be at the apex of its arc and the viewer is invited to imagine the next phase of play as it descends towards the waiting players. Apartment buildings behind the Oval can be seen in the distance along with the suggestion of a thin line of spectators gathered along the edge of the pitch. A goalpost can also be made out in the background and its position indicates that the scene is viewed looking from one end of the pitch to the other, with one team—possibly the Old Etonians due to the direction the central figures are facing—attacking away from the viewer while their opponents aim for somewhere closer to the picture plane. The accompanying match report recalled only that “the struggle on Saturday was a very close one” and made no reference to the winning goal.10 The Manchester Guardian was more forthcoming, describing how Arthur Dunn crossed the ball to William Anderson who “kicked a goal for Eton amid the greatest enthusiasm.”11 The Times had expected Rovers to equalize in the second half with the wind now in their favor but John Rawlinson distinguished himself in goal for the Old Etonians to secure victory for his team.12 The Blackburn Standard also praised Rawlinson, but only because he was made to work so hard by the Rovers forwards.13 The paper also observed how the Old Etonians played a different style of football to Rovers, “one which would be found sadly wanting on a soft ground,” and concluded that the firm pitch contributed to their victory.14 This suggests they favored a dribbling game and kept the ball on the ground as much as possible rather than passing it over long distances as Rovers had done for some time.15

22

Picturing the Beautiful Game

As the illustration indicates, Dadd considered the application of brute force, rather than the exhibition of technical skill or the Old Etonians’ winning goal, to be the defining theme of the match. In addition to providing the dramatic focus of the composition, the thrust and parry arrangement of the two central figures also offers a glimpse of the physical demands of playing football at the time. In their history of early football, Gibson and Pickford note that northern clubs often employed “vigorous methods” in challenging for the ball,16 but Mason argues that southerners were just as likely to use forceful tactics and football remained a rough, tough, and physically demanding sport.17 Northern teams traditionally passed the ball more than southerners.18 Although the “combination” game was becoming more popular in the south by the early 1880s, southern gentlemen still tended to regard passing as a tactic of last resort rather than using it as the basis of their offensive play. Many endeavored to remain in possession for as long as possible, and when they did pass, it was often done so grudgingly to avoid conceding the ball in a vulnerable position.19 Might there be evidence of an over reliance on dribbling by the Old Etonians in Dadd’s illustration, with the central player having kept hold of the ball for as long as possible when a quick one-two with a teammate could have been more effective? Blackburn Rovers certainly appear the more lithe and aggressive of the two teams, and it is their southern opponents who are forced to react. Dadd’s scene, therefore, implies that the Old Etonians were both literally and metaphorically on the back foot, making hasty and uncontrolled passes in order to maintain possession. Furthermore, by seeing only the back of the player on the receiving end of the challenge, the audience is invited to place themselves in the boots of the Old Etonian and consider events from his point of view. It could be assumed that Dadd was sympathetic towards the Old Boys and regarded the visitors from Lancashire as aggressive upstarts challenging for football’s most prestigious trophy. However, the shoulder charge was a perfectly legitimate method of challenging for the ball at the time and so such a bold interpretation may be wide of the mark. Nevertheless, its inclusion as the focal point of the illustration certainly indicates that Dadd considered the test of physical strength to be a defining characteristic of football at this time. Upon their arrival in London, Rovers visited a textile merchant to acquire a new set of shirts to replace their usual colors of blue and white that clashed with their opponents’ green and white quarters.20 Dadd has faithfully captured Blackburn’s new close-fitting, crew-neck tops with thin black and white hoops being worn with full sleeves that accentuate their sinewy physiques. Old Etonians’ collared shirts, in contrast, seem generally looser with some players wearing full sleeves and others rolling them to the elbow. The Blackburn players cut a sleek, unified, athletic appearance compared to the rather baggy and rumpled attire worn by their opponents. Their co-ordinated look is further extended to a lack of headwear and facial hair limited to the occasional well-groomed moustache. The Old Etonians, in contrast, sport a range of mismatched accoutrements including caps, full-length trousers, beards as well as moustaches, plus a range of individual socks. As Jean Williams points out, very few players of this era would have “dressed themselves in a habitual and unconscious way to play a game of organized football.”21 Given the importance of this fixture,

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both sides would have been aware of how the playing ethos and character of their clubs could be articulated through their appearance on the pitch. Dadd has identified an important distinction between the cohesion of Blackburn Rovers and the individualism of the Old Etonians, one which might also allude to their different tactical approaches. Another important visual distinction can be seen in Rovers’ use of shin pads whereas the Old Etonians are portrayed without any leg protection. The player on the receiving end of the shoulder charge appears to have aimed a swipe at the legs of his opponent with his follow-through, the heavy ankle boot thrusting towards his opponent’s legs certainly draws attention to the risk of injury to this part of the body. Dadd has made a point of including shin pads on every Blackburn player, with their ribbed construction and leather straps clearly visible and worn on the outside of their socks, as was customary at the time.22 After initially being derided for their un-manly qualities, by the early 1880s shin pads became increasingly popular as players sought to protect their most important assets.23 In 1881 the wearing of shin pads was officially approved by the FA , although as Dadd’s illustration clearly shows, some teams preferred to take to the field without them. The deliberate kicking of an opponent’s shins, known as hacking, had been a contentious issue for the custodians of the early game. It contributed to Blackheath withdrawing from the FA in 1863 when the majority of the founding clubs elected to ban the practice in a move to eliminate the most violent aspects of football.24 However, players could still be at risk from painful kicks to their shins and ankles, especially if their opponents made the appearance of playing the ball rather than deliberately targeting the man. The Old Etonian in Dadd’s illustration could very well be “leaving the boot in” on his opponent, perhaps making a point of his decision to wear shin pads by testing out their effectiveness. The ability to endure physical hardship and project a healthy and resilient bodily image was a central tenet of the muscular Christianity that conditioned the young elite to govern Britain and her burgeoning empire during the second half of the nineteenth century.25 It is perhaps this ethos that contributed to the Old Etonians’ decision not to wear shin pads against their socially inferior opponents in the final of 1882. Their captain that day was Arthur Kinnaird (1847–1923), a charismatic individual who perfectly embodied the muscular Christian ideal.26 In addition to appearing in a record nine FA Cup Finals and captaining the Scottish national side, he was also a brilliant cricketer, swimmer and all-round athlete, as well as an evangelical Christian and philanthropist.27 His bushy beard and preference for wearing trousers instead of shorts made him an easily recognisable figure on the pitch.28 Dadd has accurately captured Kinnaird’s likeness and depicted the Old Etonian captain in a commanding position towards the right hand side of the illustration as he moves to gain control of the ball. Dadd’s detailed observation of Rovers’ shin pads indicates they anticipated injuries to their legs and sought to minimize this risk. Furthermore, the central Blackburn player’s lunging shoulder charge, paired in opposition to the Old Etonian’s flailing kicking action, suggests that a more muscular and “top-heavy” method of challenging

24

Picturing the Beautiful Game

for possession was employed by the Lancastrians to counter any swipes, deliberate or not, from their opponents’ boots. Rovers’ practical measures taken to protect their legs, combined with a focus on fitness and upper-body strength, was part of a concerted effort of maintaining their bodies for the demands of regular matches. Along with their smart kit and unified appearance, these details offer a glimpse of the increasingly “professional” manner in which teams from Lancashire approached the game during the early 1880s before professionalism was legalized by the FA in 1885. Physically fit, well-trained players filled the ranks of many northern clubs as they sought the sporting glory, local prestige, and a boost to their finances that a good FA Cup run could bring. The southern elite, in contrast, valued the exhibition of effortless skill and believed in playing the game for its own sake—amateur ideals they sought to uphold against the sweeping tide of professionalism.

1891: Blackburn Rovers 3 Notts County 1 Two images of Blackburn Rovers’ 3–1 victory over Notts County in the 1891 final appeared in the following Saturday’s periodicals: William Douglas Almond’s singlescene wood engraving in the ILN (Figure  1.2) and Stephen Dadd’s montage of individual match incidents in the ISDN (Figure  1.3). The existence of two works depicting a single fixture offers a richer exploration of how 90 minutes of footballing action could be articulated on the printed page. Their contrasting compositional arrangements and the methods with which the artists conveyed sporting narratives to their audiences provide interesting counterpoints. By the early 1890s Dadd had established himself as a prolific sporting artist working primarily for the ISDN.29 His illustrations of several FA Cup Finals played during the 1880s and 1890s are the only coherent visual records of these fixtures due to the limitations of match photography at this time. Almond, in contrast, was relatively inexperienced with sporting subject matter. He had recently been appointed Special Artist for Character Subjects at the ILN and also specialized in depictions of the city’s poor and destitute with work inspired by Luke Fildes in The Graphic.30 Almond’s illustration depicts Blackburn’s William Townley heading the ball past the Notts County goalkeeper James Thraves from close range. Townley’s goal made the score 3–0 and came late in the first half after a shot hit the crossbar and rebounded favorably for the Blackburn forward.31 A match official bends forward to scrutinize the action from a position close to the goal, while in the background spectators appear as a dark mass packed onto the terraces. A slight lunge forward and a thrust of the head is all that’s required for Townley to connect with the ball, into which he transferred a considerable amount of energy. The Birmingham Daily Post observed that it “went through the Notts goal with a velocity altogether too great for the keeper to have any chance of contending with.”32 Lloyds Weekly Newspaper also noted that Townley ended up colliding with Thraves and “upsetting” the goalkeeper.33 Only Townley and Thraves are depicted with any real sense of dynamism, in contrast to the static bearing of the match official and the remaining players who

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Figure 1.2 William Douglas Almond, “Football Association Challenge Cup Match at Kennington Oval—Blackburn Rovers v. Notts County,” from the Illustrated London News, March 28, 1891.

appear rather awkward and hesitant. At first glance, the arrangement of figures appears rather unconvincing as most of the players seem to be standing about or traveling at walking pace rather than exerting themselves. Almond’s lack of experience of capturing football players in motion could explain the rather hesitant poses. However, if consideration is made to the fact that the goal was scored immediately following a shot rebounding off the crossbar, then the players’ apparent lethargy could be interpreted as flat-footed confusion as they attempt to anticipate the path of the ball. Almond has placed particular emphasis on the bespectacled match official. Games were officiated by two free-roaming umpires at this time, plus a referee who was called on to resolve any disputes.34 Umpires were abolished a few months after this final and replaced with the more limited role of linesman; referees became sole arbitrators and could now award free-kicks at their own discretion.35 This illustration, therefore, depicts the last time an umpire officiated an FA Cup Final, but rather than simply documenting his presence Almond has included the figure to impart a sense of order and authority on an otherwise crowded and chaotic scene. The flag he carries to alert the referee of an infringement remains tucked under his arm, indicating that he saw nothing wrong with the lead up to Townley’s goal. For any readers of the ILN who were uncertain whether heading was permitted or not, the legitimizing presence of the umpire assured them that not only was it allowed but was considered a noteworthy example of fine skill.

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

Almond’s work is one of the first representations of football in the illustrated press to depict a goal net. The image suggests that the nets at the Oval were not actually attached to the frame of the goal in any way, with a clear gap between the two. The goal net as it is known today, with the goal frame fully encapsulated by netting at the rear, was not introduced until September 1891. Civil engineer John Alexander Brodie patented the new design after witnessing a referee refuse to award a perfectly legitimate goal when he failed to spot the ball had passed through the posts in a match between Everton and Accrington in 1889.36 Almond’s illustration, however, indicates that Brodie’s design had not yet been adopted everywhere, with the nets at the Oval offering a rather rudimentary solution. The ground staff, perhaps more accustomed to maintaining the Oval primarily as a cricket venue and unaware of developments in goal technology, seem to have strung a net between two poles a few feet behind the goal line. Nevertheless, the net’s primary function of causing a rapid deceleration of the ball seems to have appealed to Almond when working on this scene as he has placed particular emphasis on its lattice structure. As Townley’s taut neck and shoulder muscles direct the ball past Thraves, its trajectory seeks a satisfying culmination with the net that towers over the scene. The contrast between the force with which the ball has left the forward’s head and the anticipated deceleration as it finds its mark gives the arrangement a dramatic sense of tension, one which finds a release in the minds of the viewer as they imagine the ball billowing in the net.

Figure 1.3 Stephen T. Dadd, “The Final for the Association Cup at Kennington Oval,” from the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, March 28, 1891.

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Dadd’s illustration presents a series of incidental vignettes rather than a single decisive moment of footballing drama. The main scene depicts a Blackburn player delivering a mighty kick upfield where players from both sides jostle under its path. The caption A High Kick suggests Dadd was suitably impressed by the power, flexibility, and range of movement exhibited by the player for it to form the main scene of his illustration. Additionally, Dadd appears to have produced several studies of technical skill and a glimpse of the jubilant Blackburn fans rather than depicting any of the four goals scored in the final. However, there is a possibility that the illustration does indeed allude to some of the goals without explicitly depicting the ball crossing the line. Several accounts of the match describe how Blackburn’s first goal was scored by Geordie Dewar with a speculative long-range effort that took the goalkeeper totally by surprise.37 Although it remains unclear whether the high kick depicted in the illustration refers to this particular goal, it certainly suggests that Dadd considered this incident to be of particular significance. With this in mind, a closer look at another of Dadd’s sketches might also yield further insight into which moments he ascribed particular importance. The Rovers player heading the ball with the caption A Useful Skull could very well be Townley directing the ball goalwards. There does seem to be a sense that the figure is purposefully aiming at an unseen target directly in front of him, with a slight twist and drop of the shoulder rather than clearing the ball away with a high defensive header. He exhibits a lithe and agile airborne technique that contrasts with Almond’s more grounded player and this seems to be an altogether more convincing representation of the range of movement required to score a powerful headed goal from close range. The ambiguity and wordplay present in Dadd’s work suggests the artist was primarily motivated by capturing “snapshots” of action to produce a broader representation of the match than one focused solely on goals. Mason notes that heading was used more frequently by northern professionals during the 1880s as part of the “combination” style of play, whereas teams that still favored the dribbling game found less use for the technique.38 Heading became more widespread in the 1890s as the benefits of incorporating the skill into a tactical approach that emphasized the quick exploitation of open space became apparent.39 It appears that the ability to head the ball well was regarded by artists as a significant barometer of individual footballing talent, whether or not it actually resulted in a goal. The chances of witnessing a headed goal would have been a relatively rare occurrence in 1891,40 especially for an artist such as Almond whose career had hitherto been unconcerned with sporting themes. Townley’s thundering header made for an unusual and arresting image for the readers of the general-interest ILN, some of whom may have been unaware that not only was the act of propeling the ball with the head a legitimate technique, but also an effective means of scoring. It is this moment, rather than the other three goals in the match that were scored with the more familiar method of kicking, which Almond selected to represent the FA Cup Final and Rovers’ ultimate victory. Dadd, in contrast, produced a more subtle and nuanced narrative of the match, downplaying the actual act of scoring and providing visual clues to how the game unfolded.

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

1895: Aston Villa 1 West Bromwich Albion 0 “The most conspicuous feature of the final ties for the Association Cup,” noted The Graphic in its account of the 1895 final between Aston Villa and West Bromwich Albion at the Crystal Palace, “is not the excellence of the play, but the electric excitement of the game.”41 Henry Marriott Paget’s (1856–1936) illustration of the match that appeared on the front page of the same edition also appears to echo this sentiment (Figure  1.4). Although the image represents a moment of high sporting drama, it focuses on the pain and disorientation of two players alongside an ungainly kick high into the air rather than any decisive goalmouth action or fine skill. The incongruous juxtaposition of a roller coaster towering over the spectators along the far touchline also lends the image an almost carnivalesque appearance, suggesting the crowd were watching a

Figure 1.4 Henry Marriott Paget, “The Football Association Cup: The Final Tie in the Crystal Palace Grounds,” from The Graphic, April 27, 1895.

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melodramatic performance in a space devoted to the frivolous consumption of leisure, rather than a stern test of football prowess. Before analyzing Paget’s image in more detail, it will be useful to examine the circumstances that led to the FA Cup Final being held within the pleasure gardens of the Crystal Palace and how the games related to the wider framework of leisure and entertainment at the site. Following Surrey’s refusal in 1892 to allow further FA Cup Finals to be held at the Oval, for two years the fixture took place in the northwest of England at Manchester’s Fallowfield Stadium and Goodison Park in Liverpool. These venues, especially Fallowfield, struggled to cope with the huge crowds,42 and in 1895 the final returned to London in the grounds of the Crystal Palace. To modern sensibilities a pleasure garden may seem like an odd choice of venue for the FA Cup Final, but the Crystal Palace had over 40 years’ experience of hosting spectacular entertainment on a grand scale and also had the space and transport infrastructure to accommodate large crowds. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton to house the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace was dismantled and rebuilt three years later in the south London suburb of Sydenham. The site included 200 acres of parkland that was transformed into pleasure gardens with lakes and islands, a maze, grotto, architectural follies, and lawns with stunning views towards Kent and Surrey.43 Two water towers, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, were constructed at either end of the palace to supply fountains that were said to rival those of Versailles.44 Railway lines were also built to transport visitors directly to the palace as the site became “a microcosm” of Victorian leisure.45 Two large fountains towards the lower end of the park proved too costly to run and were only turned on for special occasions. They were demolished in 1894 and the basins were drained and grassed over to create two sporting arenas within the hollows that remained.46 One was converted into a cycling track and the other became the ground that staged twenty FA Cup Finals between 1895 and 1914, attracting huge crowds that peaked at over 120,000. A switchback railway, an early type of roller coaster, was also built in this area of the park in 1888.47 The switchback survived the relandscaping of the fountains and ended up overlooking the eastern side of the football pitch where most of the spectators stood on earthen banks to watch the finals. Paget’s view indicates he had a seat in the grandstand facing the ride while the palace building itself was behind the artist. Football was by no means the only attraction at the Crystal Palace on Cup Final day. The regular Saturday entertainment schedule was maintained for visitors who were not interested in the match. The Grand Concert Orchestra, for example, performed excerpts from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Schubert’s Grand Symphony No. 9 in C as the game got underway.48 There was also plenty of postmatch entertainment to keep visitors amused long into the night. “The prospect of combining a day at Sydenham with the match,” proclaimed the Penny Illustrated Paper, “should prove most alluring to our country cousins.”49 Indeed, with a Great Variety Show in the palace featuring acts such as Señorita Carola’s Miniature Circus, a family troupe of acrobats and Mademoiselle Katharina’s performing dogs,50 there was certainly much for the Villa and Albion supporters to enjoy until the park closed at 11:00 p.m.

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Aston Villa won the match 1–0 with a goal scored very soon after kick-off. There was confusion surrounding the circumstances of the goal as most of the Press were still taking their seats as the ball found the back of the net. The goal appears to have been a scrappy affair and reports disagree whether Bob Chatt or John Devey got the final touch.51 The FA settled the matter by awarding the goal to Chatt and timing it at just 30 seconds, a Cup Final record that would stand for 114 years.52 Perhaps Paget was one of the many spectators who missed the early action; his work certainly avoids addressing the circumstances of Villa’s goal. Instead, the image captures a dramatic sporting narrative in which courage and strength of character, rather than fleeting moments of cup glory, form the central theme. Paget has captured West Brom’s Tom Higgins and Villa’s John Devey clutching their heads after coming “violently into collision” towards the end of the first half.53 Higgins came off worse and collapsed onto the pitch where he began “drumming his heels on the turf.”54 His teammates rushed to his assistance followed by the Albion trainer, soldiers from the ambulance corps, and two doctors.55 After receiving further treatment at half-time, Higgins reappeared in the second half with his head bandaged prompting “a cheer from 40,000 throats as it falls to the lot of few popular heroes to receive” and managed to play until the final whistle.56 The awkward manner of Villa’s goal was unlikely to have appealed to an artist who was more accustomed to producing dramatic interpretations of historical narratives. The resilience and courage displayed by Higgins, combined with the tradition of bodies coming together in violent collision in football illustration, offered Paget a clear choice of subject matter. He was oldest of three academically trained brothers who all pursued careers in painting and illustration. His early career included tours of Italy, Greece, and Canada and his illustrations captured the spirit of discovery and adventure.57 His popular style led to further work illustrating adventure stories with similar dashing and daring themes.58 He also produced several works for Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, such as General Colley’s last stand at the Battle of Majuba Hill and the cavalry’s forlorn charge during the Battle of Kabul. Much of his work depicted heroic but tragic narratives in which the central figures suffered the consequences of fate or misadventure. Higgins and Devey also appear to be the unfortunate victims of fate as they collapse onto the Crystal Palace pitch, reminiscent of heroic soldiers falling in battle as their comrades fight on. Joseph Kestner observes that the iconography of battle “assumed a particularly significant function in the construction of masculinity” toward the end of the nineteenth century, facilitated by the ease in which such images were circulated in printed media.59 Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem, Vitaï Lampada (1892), equated sport with war by drawing parallels between the physical and mental attributes required for success (and survival) on school playing fields and far-flung battlefields of the British Empire. As Colin Veitch suggests, the rallying cry of “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” is perhaps “the ultimate poetic expression of the ideological transfer” between these two locales.60 Paget’s experiences of producing historical and contemporary battle scenes at a time when associations between sport and war were becoming

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entwined in the national consciousness, undoubtedly influenced this view of the 1895 FA Cup Final. In addition to depicting this heart-stopping moment, Paget’s detailed observation of the switchback ride and the crowds gathered on the far touchline suggests the artist was also interested in capturing the essence of this unique environment where sport, leisure, and entertainment all converged on Cup Final day. In April 1895, the FA Cup Final would still have been regarded as a nomadic event without a permanent home— the decision to play at the Crystal Palace was only made a month earlier and there were no long-term plans for future games.61 There was every possibility that a new venue would need to be found if the Crystal Palace proved unsuitable or if the FA decided the fixture should continue to tour the country. Paget’s illustration not only provides a visual record of the most dramatic moment at this new venue but, by placing particular emphasis on the switchback ride, it also describes the Crystal Palace complex and its role in the late-Victorian leisure industry more generally.

Conclusion Dadd’s illustration of the 1882 FA Cup Final suggests the artist considered the range of physical movement required for challenging and maintaining possession of the ball, rather than depictions of goals, saves, or other goalmouth incidents, to be a defining characteristic of the game. His work also reveals an awareness of how the contrasting tactical systems employed by Blackburn Rovers and the Old Etonians could be articulated through the players’ appearances. His detailed depictions convey this contrast to the viewer and imply a clear difference in club character and playing style. This image records the moment the entrenched individualism of the dribbling game was challenged on the national stage by the more expansive play of Rovers. Dadd’s interpretation of the 1891 final shows that he continued to develop a style of work in which the viewer was encouraged to see not only “snapshots” of various incidents but also a sense of how these formed an overall impression of the game. His experience of constructing narratives based on play leading up to goals makes his work more nuanced than those explicitly showing the ball crossing the line. Almond’s crowded scene with a rather unconvincing arrangement of static players suggests the artist was motivated by populating his composition with as many figures as possible at the expense of an intelligible sporting narrative. The presence of an umpire and a detailed observation of the goal net, both essential elements for an organized game of football, offers the possibility that Almond was compensating for his lack of football experience by making sure to include as much as possible in his scene. Townley’s headed goal provides the artist with a notable incident to record, one which would have been a rare and unusual sight. Paget’s experience of illustrating adventure stories and scenes of historical and contemporary battles is apparent in the style and subject of his front-page depiction of the 1895 final. The conclusion to the dramatic clash of heads and Higgins’ tale of

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

courage and fortitude could be found inside the periodical and shows that artists and the illustrated periodical industry considered the FA Cup Final to be a selling point. The spectacular setting of the Crystal Palace also bore witness to the convergence of football, leisure, and entertainment.

Notes 1 “The Association Challenge Cup—Old Etonians v. Blackburn Rovers,” The Times, March 27, 1882, 99. 2 Walvin, The People’s Game, 50–1; Taylor, The Association Game, 41–4; Harvey, Football, The First Hundred Years, 232; Russell, Football and the English, 12. 3 Taylor, The Association Game, 41. 4 “Up for the Cup” spoken with an exaggerated Northern accent, i.e., enthusiasm for the Cup Final; Hill, “Rite of Spring,” 86–7. 5 Lowerson and Myerscough, Time to Spare in Victorian England, 1. 6 Engen, Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers, 61. 7 Houfe, Dictionary of British Book Engravers and Caricaturists, 212. 8 Engen, Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers, 198. 9 O’Mahony, Olympic Visions, 8. 10 “Cricket, Athletics, Aquatics Etc.,” The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, April 1, 1882. 11 “Football: The Association Challenge Cup—Final Tie,” The Manchester Guardian, March 27, 1882. 12 “The Association Challenge Cup—Old Etonians v. Blackburn Rovers,” The Times, March 27, 1882. 13 “The Final Tie for the English Challenge Cup—Blackburn Rovers v. Old Etonians,” The Blackburn Standard, April 1, 1882. 14 “The Final Tie for the English Challenge Cup—Blackburn Rovers v. Old Etonians,” The Blackburn Standard, April 1, 1882. 15 “Football—Notes by ‘Free Kick,’ ” The Blackburn Standard, November 12, 1881. 16 Gibson and Pickford, Association Football and the Men Who Made It, 62. 17 Mason, “Football, Sport of the North?” 48. 18 Taylor, The Association Game, 88. 19 Mason, “Football, Sport of the North?” 48. 20 Catton, The Story of Association Football, 82. 21 Williams, “Given the Boot,” 85. 22 Mason, Association Football and English Society, 211. 23 Brown, The Victorian Football Miscellany, 100–1. 24 Taylor, The Association Game, 29–30. 25 Holt, Sport and the British, 92–4. 26 Mitchell, Arthur Kinnaird. 27 Mitchell, Arthur Kinnaird. 28 Mitchell, Arthur Kinnaird, 1–4. 29 In addition to the 1891 FA Cup Final, Dadd also illustrated the 1889 and 1892 finals for this periodical. 30 Houfe, Dictionary of British Book Engravers and Caricaturists, 219.

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31 “The Association Challenge Cup: Blackburn Rovers v. Notts County,” The Times, March 23, 1891. 32 “Notes on Sport,” The Birmingham Daily Post, March 23, 1891. 33 “Yesterday’s Football—The Association Challenge Cup,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, March 22, 1891. 34 Shearman, Athletics and Football, 356–7. 35 “Minutes of the Annual General Meeting,” International Football Association Board, 1891. 36 Brown, The Victorian Football Miscellany, 149. 37 “Sports and Pastimes,” The Blackburn Standard, March 28, 1891; “Final Tie of the Association Challenge Cup,” The Manchester Guardian, March 22, 1891; “Yesterday’s Football—The Association Challenge Cup,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, March 22, 1891; “The Association Challenge Cup: Blackburn Rovers v. Notts County,” The Times, March 23, 1891; “Notes on Sport,” The Birmingham Daily Post, March 23, 1891. 38 Mason, “Football, Sport of the North?” 48. 39 Mason, Association Football and English Society. 40 Sanders, Beastly Fury, 159. 41 “The Final of the Association Cup,” The Graphic, April 27, 1895. 42 “The Association Cup—The Final Tie,” The Times, March 27, 1893. 43 Beaver, The Crystal Palace, 79–99. 44 Beaver, The Crystal Palace, 92. 45 Beaver, The Crystal Palace, 99. 46 Harrison, “The Rebuilding at Sydenham.” 47 “Entertainments Etc.,” The Times, June 5, 1888. 48 “Crystal Palace—Football Association Challenge Cup,” The Times, April 20, 1895. 49 “World of Pastime,” The Penny Illustrated Paper, April 20, 1895. 50 “Crystal Palace—Football Association Challenge Cup,” The Times, April 20, 1895. 51 “The Final of the Association Cup,” The Graphic, April 27, 1895; “The World of Pastime,” The Penny Illustrated Paper, April 27, 1895; “The Football Association Challenge Cup—The Final Tie,” The Times, April 27, 1895; “Football Association Cup—Final Tie,” The Manchester Guardian, April 22, 1895. 52 Chatt’s record stood until 2009 when Louis Saha scored after 25 seconds for Everton in their 2–1 defeat to Chelsea. 53 “The Final of the Association Cup,” The Graphic, April 27, 1895. 54 “The Final of the Association Cup,” The Graphic, April 27, 1895. 55 “The Final of the Association Cup,” The Graphic, April 27, 1895. 56 “The Final of the Association Cup,” The Graphic, April 27, 1895. 57 Engen, Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers, 198. 58 For example, George Alfred Hentyn’s The Bravest of the Brave in 1887, and Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman in 1893. 59 Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting, 190. 60 Veitch, “Play Up! Play up! And Win the War!,” 366. 61 Football—Association Rules,” The Times, April 18, 1895.

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2

“Hours and Hours of Mundane Moments and Then You Get This”: Motion and Punctuality in the Soccer GIF Luke Healey

Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports. Gilles Deleuze1 The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) belongs to a constellation of visual modes and conventions that together represent a crucial early twenty-first-century juncture in football’s media culture. It is part of a representative ecology, centered around social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and incorporating other such artifacts as the analytical “heat map,” the wittily-captioned “meme,” and YouTube compilations recording individual players’ “Goals, Skills, Assists.”2 In a rapid rise and fall typical of the accelerated rhythms of adoption and obsolescence proper to what has been widely labeled “Web 2.0,” however, the GIF may have, at time of writing, already outlived its usefulness. Whereas in January 2014 the prolific American GIF producer Timothy Burke could state (in a personal interview) that GIF s were at present “the main way people are sharing sports highlights in comment sections,”3 by August that year the Daily Telegraph blogger Adam Hurrey (who also runs the highly active and influential Twitter account @footballcliches) could assert with equal confidence that the GIF had run its course as a device for disseminating clips. Hurrey’s article, “The awkward, unstoppable rise of the football Vine and what it means for us all,” discusses the GIF in the past tense. While GIF s “were an evidently impressive way to disseminate new football clips,” Hurrey notes, “they could be time-consuming to make, lacked sound, and often proved to be unwieldy—waiting for a 3MB beast to load in a crowded webpage would stretch Internet impatience to the limit.”4 From the perspective of 2014, Hurrey argued that the typical twenty-first-century football fan’s “unquenchable thirst for up-to-the-minute football clips” was better met by Vine, a free video-sharing service which enabled users to produce and upload 7-second video clips, complete with sound, from their smartphones. Vine was subsequently discontinued in 2017, and supplanted to this end by another audiovisual format, Streamable. Such sudden changes of fortune are evidently part of the territory when it comes to studying new media and the digital humanities. 35

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Were Hurrey’s diagnosis more rigorous, it may have been possible to place a definitive start and end point on the GIF ’s involvement in football’s media spectacle. Hurrey, however, is a journalist and one suspects that, for all his savvy with respect to new media, his unequivocal certainty regarding the GIF ’s demise is intended for the sake of flair and brevity. Neither will this essay attempt such a feat of digital archaeology; in any case one senses that the web is simply too multitudinous to permit any truly productive certainty in this kind of judgement. As of the advent of Web 2.0, great chasms of extraneous information intervene between different “user-generated” islands of activity online and the threads which connect these pockets are easily lost or erased—as will be discussed shortly in more detail, GIF files have tended to spread in ways which do not preserve the identity of their original provenance or creator. Faced with these potentially-irresolvable methodological challenges, what follows could not be mistaken as an attempt to write the history of the football GIF. Rather, this essay strives to characterize the GIF as it has been used and encountered in the context of twenty-first-century football by means of knowingly selective, one might argue highly subjective examples, and balances textual evidence against both theoretical speculation and exegeses of certain affective potentialities of the material under discussion. While leaving some questions of material development unanswered, then, the essay is intended to work heuristically, and should be viewed as an attempt to construct a framework for discussion regarding the aesthetic vicissitudes of a format which has, because it is so recent and so vernacular, received precious little academic attention.

The GIF and Barthes’ Punctum In seeking to open up questions regarding the constitution and effects of the football highlight GIF using affective encounters as a key, I am preceded by the French theorist Roland Barthes, specifically the late Barthes of Camera Lucida (1980). This text is especially pertinent for its attempt to ground an account of what defines photography in the textures of Barthes’ own affective encounters with his material. In the book’s opening passages, Barthes reports that he has lately been overcome by what he terms an “ontological desire,” and describes having “wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself,’ by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images.”5 No sooner has Barthes established his desire to account for photography’s unique ontology, however, than he admits that the task might be an impossible one: “despite its tremendous contemporary expansion, I wasn’t sure that Photography existed, that it had a ‘genius’ of its own.”6 For all that the name “photography” labels a particular technical practice and connotes an identifiable—if richly contested and varied—aesthetic, there is something about photography which triggers a reaction that Barthes considers to be “the only sure thing that was in me”; namely, “a desperate resistance to any reductive system.”7 Our relationship with photography, its mode of being in the world and impinging upon its consumers and operators is, in short, not wholly encapsulated by any overtly materialist account of its

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mechanical processes or distributive frameworks. What is required, in addition, is an acknowledgement of how it feels to be faced with photographic representations. Barthes subsequently elaborates the concept of punctum, defined as that aspect of the photograph that pierces or wounds the viewer as opposed to merely holding their interest or making sense.8 This effect is produced when the viewer registers some marginal detail which testifies to the fact that a photograph captures a now-past-lived moment in all its contingency, a fragment which outsteps what the photographer intended their given photograph to mean and powerfully communicates their beingthere at the moment that the light was registered on the chemical surface.9 Barthes’ opening lines demonstrate the effects that punctum produces: stumbling across a photograph of Jérôme-Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor Napoleon’s youngest brother, Barthes is stunned to realize that he is “looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.”10 It is significant for Barthes that photographs are produced from negatives which are actually touched by the light from the scene which they depict, in this case bringing the author into remote physical proximity with a body that itself was in physical proximity to a figure of such historical import. The shock that this realization produces, Barthes argues, is an experience that takes place not on an intellectual level but on an affective one. The author’s understanding of a photograph per se, beyond its unique technical specifications, rests in this affective encounter. Punctum is, for Barthes, that “principle of adventure” which “allows me to make Photography exist.”11 It is, Barthes argues, quite possible to leaf through a newspaper with photographs on every page and yet in no case to register any of these images as photographs. This practice produces the material, psychological, and temporal conditions in which punctum can take effect: “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it.”12 It is this sense of punctum emerging out of its opposite—the “average affect” that Barthes labels studium—that is of the greatest significance for this essay.13 However, I do not wish to suggest that GIF s possess punctum in the strict sense with which Barthes loads the term: as film theorist Laura Mulvey has noted, Barthes was adamant in his opinion that moving images could not possess punctum in the manner of still ones.14 Furthermore, a GIF, whose originary photographic material has been subjected to multiple transformations in the name of convenience and transportability, seems unlikely to produce affects which line up precisely with those induced in Barthes by the Bonaparte image. This essay is rather primarily concerned with the temporality of the GIF -viewing process and, particularly, the ways in which different species of affective engagement with GIF s emerge over time. In order to do this, I wish to build upon the temporalized binary that Barthes depicts in Camera Lucida, where punctum emerges like an arrow shot from the field of average affect.

The GIF as Image There are three crucial formal aspects to the football highlight GIF, not all of which are shared with every other genre or sub-genre of the format. These can be simply (and

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alliteratively) expressed as animation, anonymity, and appropriation. When we load a football highlight GIF on our online devices, what we are seeing is the output of a data format that was originally intended to enable the online storage and transmission of still images. As Daniel Rourke has noted, what determined the early popularity of the GIF following its invention in 1987 was its incremental loading mechanism, which enabled Internet users to see their images more rapidly by progressively loading layer after layer, starting with the most important details of the image and ending with the most dispensable.15 Jason Eppink relates that an update made to the format in 1989 enabled users to “specify the duration (in 100ths of a second) that each image should display on screen,” and this development crystallized the GIF as a moving image technology; although, at this stage, it was not coded to loop.16 Rourke attributes this latter development to “avid web hackers,” indicating the GIF ’s inescapable relationship with a democratized and decentralized conception of the Internet.17 On this note, Eppink remarks that the GIF was published from the outset as an open format, meaning it could be used for free by any programer that wished to use it on their web page.18 So too were individual GIF images often shared by large numbers of users; as a result of poor bandwidth provisions in the early days of the Internet, users wishing to reproduce a particular GIF on their own personal web page were encouraged to do so not by “linking” to the file but by saving copies of the GIF to their own servers and hosting the files themselves.19 Individual GIF s thus spread under the banner of anonymity as their sources became all but impossible to trace. As Eppink relates, authorial attribution could be embedded in GIF files, but “no web browser rendered this information and few makers took advantage of this.”20 Today, popular GIF s are occasionally watermarked with the name of the website that hosts them, but usually display no information beyond that relating to provenance. In place of a marked authorial origin, many animated GIF s can be said to possess what Giampaolo Bianconi has referred to as a “performative authorial focus.”21 A known performer—an actor, musician or sports star—usually occupies the foreground of the GIF, both literally and metaphorically, and the GIF induces us to close attentiveness regarding their gestures: as Bianconi puts it, “the GIF is not by them, it is of them.”22 GIF s, as we encounter them in 2017, often appropriate material from film or television. The family to which the football highlight GIF belongs is known as the “screengrab” GIF. These are generated by montaging stills captured from sequences of action by means of various digital image technologies, the most simple of which is the “print screen” button provided on most laptop and desktop computers. Owing to the ease with which they are created, this type of GIF has flourished on social media: anybody with an Internet connection can currently produce GIF s by running YouTube clips through the free software available on websites such as imgflip.com. Tumblr, founded in 2007 and noted as the first major social media platform to host GIF s,23 became one of the driving forces behind the phenomenon whereby screengrab GIF s began to be used in their now-customary application as “reactions, illustrations, or expressions.”24 The most readily intelligible example of this are so-called “reaction GIF s,” usually consisting of a single individual’s gesture or facial expression and used

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in response to some verbal prompt: as I open up Twitter, I find at the top of my feed a post by user @SamDiss, consisting of the line “watching the Madonna and Drake kiss like” accompanied by a GIF of the rapper Nelly grimacing in disbelief.25 The link between text and image in such posts is more or less arbitrary, but humour is often generated through a dynamic combination of fitness and disparity. Football highlight GIF s, which have typically been shared as links in posts on Reddit and Twitter and archived on websites such as 101greatgoals.com, serve a rather different function. They tend to reproduce what sports media theorist Garry Whannel has referred to as the game’s “highly fetishized peak moments of action.”26 The screengrab GIF provides a means for football fans to distil game-changing moments such as goals, saves, and last-ditch tackles out of the morass of the game as a whole. Here the playful polysemy found in reaction GIF s is not evident: where the grimacing Nelly GIF could have been used to express horror at any number of stimuli, football highlight GIF s are used in almost every instance to illustrate that a particular player has achieved something noteworthy on the pitch. Nevertheless, the football highlight GIF and its more polysemic pop-cultural variants are connected by their shared status as what artist and media theorist Hito Steyerl labels “poor images.”27 In a 2009 essay for e-flux journal written in “defense” of such images, Steyerl chacterizes the most portable digital image formats as “copies in motion”: the JPEG , AVI , or GIF is in Steyerl’s words “a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.”28 “Poor images” are palpably other to spectacular capitalism’s high-end media production apparatus, whose “cult of film gauge,” witnessed in the ongoing development and distribution of high-definition screen technologies, is seen by Steyerl as “firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version.”29 The screengrab GIF is a piratical intervention into high-budget capitalist studio production, and is, in part, “about defiance and appropriation.”30 At the same time, however, Steyerl notes that poor images are also “about conformism and exploitation,” since they represent a challenge to the apparatus of spectacular capitalism that is not predicated on radical counter-cultural formations but instead, heterodox means of consuming existing figures of hegemonic mass culture. Crucially, while constructing their own, perhaps more democratized and less alienated forms of distribution, the champions of poor images do so in obsessive reference to the material handed them by spectacular capitalism, helping already-successful commercial productions to propagate further. The screengrab GIF is a grassroots cultural expression which nevertheless repeats, albeit with a distorted appearance, what is already given from the top down. It thus offers an insight into the ways that individuals, at least web-savvy ones, are maneuvered into structuring their cultural consumption at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Steyerl writes that, as definitively popular images, poor images “express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

for transgression and simultaneous submission.”31 The picture of affective ambivalence that Steyerl paints here offers a worthwhile prelude to the next section of this essay, which confronts the football highlight GIF more directly. This confrontation will initially be constructed around an entirely typical document of twenty-first-century online culture; namely, a tweet.

The Affective Power of the GIF “I’m almost tearing up watching a gif. I need a break from football.”32 So tweeted the Canadian journalist Richard Whittall in October 2013. At the time of writing, Whittall was a staff writer for thescore.com, where he contributed at least one article per day about football, generally focusing on issues around finance and statistics. The quotidian routinization of Whittall’s engagement with this popular leisure activity is significant in addressing the affective resonances of this tweet. What initially strikes one about this short text is its disavowal of strong emotion: the GIF in question produces an intense response (“almost tearing up”) and is subsequently rejected, along with its entire context (“I need a break from football”). The remark, along with Whittall’s elucidation of it, offered up in a personal interview, provides a compelling insight into the experience of being aesthetically animated by a GIF (here applying the term as Barthes uses it; in other words, the GIF produces a non-average affect). Through these records of experience, we are able to access some of those qualities which most readily define the medium’s movements in early twenty-first-century cultural life. First though, it bears noting what the relevant GIF actually depicts. The clip in question is taken from a UEFA Champions League group stage game played between Anderlecht and Paris Saint-Germain on October 23, 2013, and depicts the latter club’s star striker, Zlatan Ibrahimović, scoring with a powerful shot from long range—his third of four goals in a 5–0 victory for the French club that evening. This GIF presents a side-on view of the goal: an attacking cross from the left wing is headed out of the penalty area by an Anderlecht defender and lands just over 20 yards from the goal he is defending, just left of the penalty arc. The ball bounces once more and is caught on the half-volley by Ibrahimović, arriving from off-screen, running across what is commonly referred to as the inside left channel. The ferocity with which Ibrahimović strikes the ball with his right foot is remarkable; so, too, is the accuracy with which he finds the top left-hand corner of the net. The Anderlecht goalkeeper is wholly beaten by the shot, diving only after the ball has already passed him. Other angles on the goal reproduced by the many available online replays demonstrate the curl which Ibrahimović was able to apply to the shot, but this GIF mainly testifies to the speed and power with which it was delivered. By football’s aesthetic standards, this is an uncommonly animating display. As Whittall relates, “the reason it brought an emotional reaction is because it was so audacious, so incredible, so rare, so ZLATAN [sic] . . . it just captured something about what makes football so great.”33 Here the journalist offers an insight into the cult value pertaining to Ibrahimović, who is often referred to in the media by his first name. The

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significance of the GIF ’s “rarity” is further elaborated by Whittall in his remark that, “I am sometimes so immersed in the sport that you almost feel like you’re going a bit crazy . . . hours and hours of mundane moments and then you get this, and it’s so beautiful but it also reminds you you’ve been watching too long because you’re so happy when a moment like this comes along.”34 There is a breakdown of leisure and labor which is palpable in this comment. The journalist is so habituated to the seemingly never-ending stream of GIF s that form a part of both his fandom and his professional practice that they come to resemble a sort of anomic, ambient backdrop against which artifacts, like the Ibrahimović goal, stand out as if embossed and gilded. At this juncture, it is pressing to acknowledge the large volumes of both scholarly and journalistic writing which have been dedicated to this process of digital habituation. In his book History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image, for instance, the art critic Sven Lütticken remarks that the radical potential for the upheaval of traditional economic relations engendered by the rise of the computer has swung decisively in favor of the status quo, introducing not “the replacement of labor by new ludic occupations,” but rather “the erosion of the distinctions between the two.”35 Whittall’s remarks certainly convey an underlying sense of factory-like drudgery inherent to online activity, which is familiar from my own point of view as a mostly self-regulating, predominately computer-based worker. The moment at which Whittall encounters the Ibrahimović GIF is thus, by his own admission, both redemptive, in that it provides a sense of uplift amid monotony, and diagnostic, in that this uplift comes to reflect back on the somewhat baleful, and partly self-inflicted, conditions which produced it. This sense of ambivalence underlies the pull–push logic of the original tweet, where a strong emotional reaction is first noted and then rejected. What is most significant to note here is that the Ibrahimović goal provides a moment in the temporal continuum experienced by the habituated GIF -viewer, one where the normal flow of time is broken to allow for the introduction of something which exists outside that flow, some point of greater perspective. In a follow-up interview, Whittall argues that a “rare” GIF such as this one possesses some qualitative distinction from the morass of other GIF s that, in his experience, surround it: “Some GIF s, certainly special ones like this, stand the test of time and become a kind of shorthand for something else. But I find, for the most part, most GIF s just go on the ‘happened two weeks ago’ pile, at least in the sporting world.”36 All highlight GIF s have the potential to captivate briefly, given their tendency to depict the apex moments of football’s drama. Each GIF however is enmeshed in a structure which keeps one moving on, and on, and on. The Ibrahimović GIF is especially powerful because, for this particular viewer, it exposes this structure. I cannot ultimately say what it is that makes this image, and not the one that was next to it on Whittall’s Twitter feed on the night of October 23, stand out in this way for the journalist. What can be proposed at this stage is that the football highlight GIF possesses a strange, somewhat paradoxical temporality: in it, a climactic moment is removed from the longueur of ordinary game-time, and comes to metonymize a player’s wider performative capacities. Although the GIF depicts movement, it also possesses a certain degree of singularity: it is movement concentrated onto the head of a pin,

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

distilled to the utmost of expressive value. Thus concentrated, however, the GIF is then deposited into a different longueur; that of web browsing. For Whittall, then, the most remarkable feature of the Ibrahimović GIF is that it explodes this temporal dialectic, revealing the boredom which underwrites each individual shock in the process of watching GIF after GIF.

The GIF as Icon If I were required to identify a personal equivalent for Whittall’s treasured and epiphanic Ibrahimović GIF, it would no doubt assume the form of Robert Lewandowski. As a fan of a team who have endured in the lower reaches of English football for as long as my and my parents’ generation can remember, my investment in the kinds of elite football most widely disseminated on social media and the whole informational nexus of twenty-first-century football coverage has more often than not been that of a “neutral.” A notable exception to this was the Borussia Dortmund team which rose to acclaim and success under the management of Jürgen Klopp in the early 2000s, culminating in a Champions League Final appearance against compatriots Bayern Munich in 2013. Brought together under the aegis of the uncommonly charismatic Klopp, Dortmund’s squad during this period of high achievement was rich with individual players worthy of emotional investment: the hard-working İlkay Gündoğan, Marco Reus, and Jakub Błaszczykowski, the unspeakably talented Mario Götze. Lewandowski was at this time Dortmund’s most reliable goalscorer, and one of the finest strikers in European football. In line with Whittall’s experience, a GIF lifted from a crucial match in Dortmund’s 2012–13 Champions League campaign metonymizes for me this player’s acumen, as well as his instrumentality in leading the line for his talented and entertaining side. The GIF records one of the four goals scored by Lewandowski in a semi-final first-leg victory over Real Madrid: Lewandowski stretches out a leg to control Marcel Schmeltzer’s pass; he rolls the ball across the turf with a deft backwards drag; he balances on his toes; he pulls his right leg back ready for the shot; he aims, fires. The process is precarious and contorted, but also bespeaks an uncommon degree of balance and finesse. The ability to watch the goal over and over again makes for a viewing experience that projects in two different directions: on the one hand, I am able to develop a better cognitive grasp of the movements it reproduces through extended contemplation, and on the other, each repeated viewing further induces in me a kind of cathexis or even hypnosis. Up to a certain point (a point which I have never yet reached), repetition does not obliterate or even dull my positive affective investment in the movement by enabling me to figure it out, but rather sharpens and enhances it. As is evident from Whittall’s remarks on Ibrahimović, part of what enables a highlight GIF to attain “rare” status is its articulation to some kind of supporting myth: while Whittall’s GIF plays off the undeniable charisma of the star at its center, this one resonates with my veneration of Lewandowski. However, building on Bianconi’s remark that, in lieu of concrete authorship, screengrab GIF s possess a performative

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authorial focus, I want to suggest that the repetition and condensed temporal focus proper to GIF s like these actually feed back into those myths, helping to further instantiate these figures as icons.

The GIF as Fetish Laura Mulvey’s 2006 book, Death 24× a Second, is predicated on the idea that digital image technologies have enabled an all-encompassing customization of the filmviewing experience: we no longer necessarily sit in a darkened theater and follow a film’s narrative directly from start to finish, but can watch any and every work of cinema in our homes on devices which enable us to pause and skip forwards and back. Mulvey argues that digital spectatorship, which she also refers to as delayed spectatorship on this basis, “affects the internal pattern of narrative: sequences can be easily skipped or repeated, overturning hierarchies of privilege, and setting up unexpected links that displace the chain of meaning invested in cause and effect.”37 The specific forms of viewing pleasure famously delineated in Mulvey’s earlier, pioneering essay on the male cinematic gaze, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), are thus disrupted by digital spectatorship, enabling different modes of desire to enter the frame. As Mulvey relates, [i]n Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema I argued that the cinema . . . coded sexual difference in relation to the look . . . The female star was, I argued, streamlined as erotic spectacle while the male star’s attributes of control and activity provided some compensation for his exposure as a potentially passive object of the spectator’s look.38

For Mulvey, who continually posits mainstream cinema as male-centered and heteronormative, such cinema usually entails a situation in which the principle male on-screen presence keeps the narrative moving in order to avoid being centered as an object of intent contemplation—this position is ordinarily reserved for the female figures on the screen.39 However, Mulvey goes on to note that when the viewer is allowed to “control the flow” of the on-screen narrative, it results in a “weakening” of the effects of linear narrative: “the aesthetic of the film begins to become ‘feminizied,’ with the shift in spectatorial power relations dwelling on pose, stillness, lighting, and the choreography of character and camera.”40 Mulvey labels this latter model “fetishistic scopophilia”: the “fetishistic” spectator in her description “becomes more fascinated by image than plot, returning compulsively to privileged moments, investing emotion and ‘visual pleasure’ in any slight gesture, a particular look or exchange taking place on the screen.”41 Although Mulvey is here describing cinephilia, this update to her theory of the male gaze also offers a provocative means of reading the compulsive viewing of football highlight GIF s. In discussing delayed cinema, Mulvey reaches out more broadly to a conception of viewing that diverts the narrative flow proper to the spectacle which is

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being reproduced. While not cinema then, the displacement and potentially-endless repetition of the GIF which seizes a moment of narratively-sequenced footage is clearly inscribed in this logic. The GIF ’s repetition works in much the same way as slow-motion, rewind or freeze-frame, opening short sequences of movement up to studied contemplation. In football highlight GIF s, a moving extract of game-time is isolated from the flow into which it is embedded, crystalizing that moment as something worthy of investment. To go further, to invest in images in this way is, for Mulvey, to do so fetishistically. The moving image subjected to processes of delay is fixated upon in a manner which lends it a kind of fantastical plenitude.42 Extrapolated from the variegated field of intersubjective actions and intentions that has brought it about, the moment of individual skill reproduced in the highlight GIF is instantiated as “privileged”—it practically overflows with meaning and allure. In this sense, the GIF could be said to be a station in a lineage of technologies of delay which have enabled for a more acute libidinal focus on individual players, from the now ubiquitous, like instant replay, to ideas which has been adopted periodically for novelty value, like “player cams.”43 Focused through the lens of such technologies, the individual player’s moment of genius carries a greater weight of football’s aesthetic potential than may be the case in less thoroughly mediated settings: note Whittall’s unguarded admission that the Ibrahimović GIF plainly demonstrated to him the essence of what makes football a desirable spectacle. Speaking from personal experience, I can say that there is a poignant grace to Lewandowski’s movements which draws out of me an epiphanic sensitivity to football’s scope for bodily beauty; I intuit a fullness in the striker’s skilled movements which appears to embody the games’ aesthetic legitimacy. It is, I want to suggest, the punctual repetitiveness of the GIF that enables it, in spite of its status as a poor image, to become such a dense vector for aesthetic or libidinal intensities.

Authorship and the GIF In Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood address the “temporal flexibility” of certain art objects, focusing in particular on the European Renaissance, an epoch which they judge to contain a shift from one dominant paradigm of artistic production to another.44 More specifically, the authors view the Renaissance as a time of communication and conflict between two competitive models of the causal origins of the artwork. In their terms, the artwork could either be represented as “a magical conduit to other times and places,” which Nagel and Wood refer to as the “substitutional model” of artistic causation, or contrarily as “an index pointing to its own efficient causes, to the immediate agencies that created it and no more,” a formation which the authors label as the “performative” model.45 As an example of the former, Nagel and Wood cite the example of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, constructed in 1061 in Norfolk, and commemorating an apparition of the Virgin Mary to the English noblewoman Richeldis de Faverches. The site remained a place of pilgrimage from its construction until the English Reformation: “for the pilgrim,” Nagel and Wood

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remark, “the shrine at Walsingham is linked, no matter how often its timbers are replaced, to a primordial, meaning-conferring past through labeling and ritual.”46 This is to say, what sanctifies the shrine as an object of special aesthetic value is not its material connection to the moment of its inauguration—the original timbers testifying to the work carried out by laborers in 1061—but its mythic or spiritual connection to a moment which is itself merely a conduit for a more significant past: the moment of the Virgin. By contrast, a token of the “performative” model of artistic causation and legitimacy is provided by the figure of Giotto, that canonical first great artist of the Italian Renaissance. The performative model trades the meaning-laden primordial past for the moment of the artwork’s actual facture. What is foregrounded here is the single author’s contemporaneous act of genius, so that instead of Giotto’s paintings amassing value because they keep alive the flame of some historic act of divine intervention, they are valuable because they encapsulate a moment wherein the great artist’s material and intellectual capacity is made manifest. Echoing the way that Barthes uses punctum to characterize the sense of a photograph’s absolute integration with the moment of its mechanical production, Nagel and Wood repeatedly refer to “punctuality” in describing how the performative model of artistic causation emphasizes the art object’s traceability to a single decisive performance: while “substitution proposes sameness across difference,” the authors remark, “the authorial performance asserts punctual difference against repetition and continuity.”47 Nagel and Wood argue that while the substitutional model of artistic causation may appear “a primitive or superstitious creed,” it is in fact “a model of production that grasps, in many ways more successfully than the authorial model, the strange and multiple temporality of the artwork.”48 The authorial model is by contrast rooted in a myth of the individual artist which overlooks such significant factors as the importance of consensually-developed iconographic programs and the persistence of studio production practices based around teams of workers developing compositions over time. The sense of difference proper to the punctual artwork is produced in combination with a theory of exceptionalism regarding the individual artist: such performances are always undertaken by a named artist. Elaborating on the idea of the name, Nagel and Wood suggest that “[t]he name is a fixed point that anchors fame. The name raises a protest against the powerful and perhaps finally irrefutable thesis that agency can never really be localized but is instead always dispersed across a field of persons and events.”49 A sense of condensed temporality and a modern conception of individualistic authorship are thus intimately linked. Returning to football, we are now in a position to suggest that Richard Whittall’s rejoinder that the Ibrahimović GIF is “so ZLATAN ” can be understood as one such protest. To be clear, Whittall is led in this direction by the temporal construction of the GIF itself: the clip is constituted with a lone author at the center of its universe; its temporal parameters are at one end the moment that a headed clearance sets the stage for Ibrahimović’s decisive performative intervention and the other the moment that this intervention is fulfilled, its impact consolidated. The same is true of the Lewandowski GIF : loading the clip again, I am struck by the extent to which the performative

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authorial focus of this image renders its protagonist’s opponents as automata, floundering around as our hero seizes the moment. Both these GIF s extract from a wider mesh of time in order to emphasize the virtuosic agency of the figures at their center, relegating to mere background noise the dispersed field of persons and events with which the agentic moment is in fact inextricably intertwined. Each of these two players is inscribed as the punctum in their respective scene: as the arrow shot from a field of equivalences, the spring gushing forth in the glum desert of ordinary gametime, and they are thereby inscribed as little Giottos of their own actions. That each and every highlight GIF is modeled more or less on this basis is what then creates the paradoxical temporality of these GIF s as we encounter them in the process of our webbrowsing: as their assumed singularity is exposed to a new form of accretion, each gushing spring calcifies and helps to form the material basis for a new glum desert, until the right GIF comes along and once again restores vibrancy and nourishment.

Conclusion I suggested earlier that GIF s are part of a continuum of technologies which, by mediating football games through devices of repetition and temporal truncation, have enabled football fans to invest more and more in the idea of the individual genius; instant replay, which allows every small gesture of the most reproducible and photogenic players to repeatedly fill television screens is only the most readilyidentifiable of these. The question thus arises as to what makes the football highlight GIF distinctive within this lineage. This essay has constituted a provisional attempt to address this question, in part by opening up the particular kinds of repetition and temporal truncation manifest in the animated GIF to theoretical scrutiny. Having established a means of understanding the allure of the highlight GIF in terms of both fetishism and authorial performativity, however, it is to the affective data provided by Whittall that I now must return, by way of conclusion. Whittall’s provocative remarks on the Ibrahimović GIF allow us to gain a worthwhile perspective on both the aesthetic power of the highlight GIF and the antagonistic force of the context in which such objects are often encountered. As with the technologies that have preceded it, the football highlight GIF establishes a new horizon of expectation with respect to its originary visual material: as football is increasingly opened up to social media, it becomes possible to follow the game entirely through short highlight clips and still to have a sense of who the most talented players and teams are. In a manner that is more aggressively deconstructive than the instant replay, the highlight GIF thus instantiates a new temporal continuum for the game in which the glorious decisive moment is perceived as commonplace, forcing real astonishment— that which slows us down and lends us a perspective onto the remainder of our viewing experience—into an ever-narrower band. That it might only be the most cultic figures that can now redeem the tedium of flitting from one sensation to the next is entirely of a piece with the central role such figures play in twenty-first-century football’s increasing global media dominance. Thus, channeling Hito Steyerl, it can be asserted

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that the GIF —although its moment may have already passed—provides an especially pertinent example of the visual culture of football in the early twenty-first century, reflecting as it does both the increasing diversification of this culture and its simultaneously increasing reification and seizure of the most commodifiable forms of visual representation.

Notes 1 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. 2 “Heat maps” are images, popularized by football data providers like Squawka, which purport to show in palimpsest form an individual players’ movements around the pitch during a given game. “Goals, Skills, Assists” is the name of a popular series of videos uploaded to YouTube by the ScoutNationHD account, which typically focus on lesser-known players who have recently been signed or are set to sign for elite-level clubs. With regards to “memes,” see: Vol. 13, No. 3 of the Journal of Visual Culture, a special issue edited by Laine Nooney and Laura Portwood-Stacer containing numerous articles on that theme. 3 Timothy Burke, e-mail message to the author, January 29, 2014. 4 Hurrey, “The Awkward, Unstoppable Rise of the Football Vine.” 5 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. 6 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. 7 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. 8 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26. 9 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 47. 10 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. 11 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 19. 12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 20. 13 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26. 14 Mulvey, Death 24× a Second, 66. 15 Rourke, “The Doctrine of the Similar,” 2. 16 Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF,” 299. 17 Rourke, “The Doctrine of the Similar,” 2. 18 Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF,” 300. 19 Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF,” 301. 20 Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF,” 301. 21 Bianconi, “GIFABILITY.” 22 Bianconi, “GIFABILITY.” 23 Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF,” 302. 24 Bianconi, “GIFABILITY.” 25 Sam Diss, Twitter Post, April 13, 2015, 1:19AM . https://twitter.com/SamDiss/ status/587530611012808704 [accessed March 19, 2018]. The tweet refers to an event which took place during the Canadian rapper Drake’s headline set at the 2015 Coachella Festival, when pop veteran Madonna took to the stage and, apparently spontaneously, kissed Drake before exiting again. “X like” is a common format for the written element which frequently accompanies reaction GIF s, alongside other such topoi as “mfw” (“my face when”) and “tfw” (“that feeling when”), see: Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF,” 302.

48 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47 48 49

Picturing the Beautiful Game Whannel, Fields in Vision, 102. Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image.” Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image.” Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image.” Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image.” Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image.” Richard Whittall, Twitter Post, October 23, 2013, 9:40 PM . https://twitter.com/ RWhittall/status/393099518277058561 [accessed March 19, 2018]. Richard Whittall, e-mail message to the author, November 29, 2013. Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image.” Lütticken, History in Motion, 195. On the same page, Lütticken draws upon the fact that user contributions to Facebook actually generate revenue for its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to argue that “[l]ooking and reading have become productive of value— often for others. This new labor is marked by the inability to distinguish between labor and leisure, between work and occupation, between working hours and free time— between performance and life.” Richard Whittall, e-mail message to the author, December 9, 2013. Mulvey, Death 24× a Second, 28. Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image,” 164–5. It is useful to bear in mind here the dictum proposed by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, that normative sexuality in relation to the image is based on the idea that men act and women appear. See: Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47. I have written elsewhere on the difference between exposing male bodies on the football field to extended contemplation and framing these bodies in terms of the narrative of an ongoing game, in relation to photographs of “diving” players, see: Healey, “Drawing the Foul.” Mulvey, Death 24× a Second, 165. Mulvey, Death 24× a Second, 165. For the classic account of the relationship between fetishism, fantasy, and plenitude, see: Sigmund Freud’s 1927 essay “Fetishism” in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 149–58. In the first decade of the twenty-first century various television channels began offering viewers access to interactive services via a red button on their remote control; Sky Sports have periodically used this technology to enable live football viewers to choose from a variety of camera angles, including one dedicated camera trained on a particular player; this is the so-called “player cam,” and it has been adopted by numerous other broadcasters. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 12. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 17. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 13. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 16. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 16. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 126.

Part Two

Soccer and Memory

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50

3

Making a Spectacle of Ourselves: Imaging the Supporter at Football and the Fine Arts Mike O’Mahony

In October 1953, M.H. Middleton, the art critic for The Spectator magazine, opened his regular column with an enigmatic statement: “Throughout the year paintings on an unusual theme have been creeping into the one-man shows and the mixed exhibitions.”1 Having whetted his reader’s curiosity, he pointed out that these “were the forerunners of ‘Football and the Fine Arts,’ the £3,000 competition with which the Football Association celebrates its ninetieth birthday on Monday next.”2 Middleton was not alone in noting how this competition had spawned a virtual football fever among contemporary artists. Thus the art critic of The Times similarly reported: “By-products of the Football Association’s competition for artists have been turning up so often in recent months that one might have been excused for believing that all the painters and sculptors of Great Britain had entered into brilliant rivalry for this glittering prize.”3 The competition had generated an impressive response, attracting over 1,700 entries from which over 150 works were selected and exhibited at the International Faculty of Arts at Park Lane House in London.4 The Football and the Fine Arts exhibition subsequently toured the nation, hosted by over a dozen regional museums, including many in the midlands and the north of England and one in Scotland. The generous awards offered for the competition, which included first prizes for painting and sculpture of £1,000 each and smaller prizes of £250 for watercolors and prints, doubtless contributed to this significant response among the artistic community, not least in the context of postwar austerity Britain. Yet what surprised Middleton most was not the scale of the response, but rather what he regarded as the unconventional nature of the subject matter demanded by the competition’s sponsors. After all, as he continued, representations of football had, to date, been “most frequently overlooked even in days when cricket not uncommonly provided a subject.”5 But now, with football experiencing what has frequently been described as its golden age, artists were finally turning their attention to the game. Although clearly a significant event, the Football and the Fine Arts project is rarely given more than a passing comment either in histories of British art or of the sport during this period.6 When it is mentioned, little consideration is given either to specific works included in the exhibition, or to the critical reactions to this show. However, Football and the Fine Arts drew considerable publicity with the majority of 51

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the daily newspapers and cultural journals reviewing the exhibition.7 But what did the contemporary art critical fraternity think about the project? The response was, at the very least, mixed. Middleton, for example, commended the exhibition as “a fine, unexpected, and imaginative effort to stimulate artists.” His review, however, conveyed more than a whiff of faint praise, describing prize-winning sculptor F. E. McWilliam’s contribution to be “not wholly successful, but among the most interesting exhibits.”8 More openly supportive of the project was John Berger, the recently installed art critic at The New Statesman. Berger, whose left wing views had been brought to the art establishment’s attention the previous year through his support for British social realism at the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Looking Forward exhibition, praised Football and the Fine Arts, claiming that it was a “sensible attempt to give artists and public a common interest.”9 For Berger, the intrinsic value of the project was to bring into dialogue two constituencies broadly seen as culturally separated—the lover of art and the lover of football. Indeed, he specifically foregrounded this need for dialogue by constructing the first half of his review as a conversation at the exhibition between himself and an unnamed football professional. Whether this conversation actually took place, or was a stylistic device deployed by Berger to emphasize the importance of such a dialogue, is unclear. What is evident, however, is that despite Berger’s positive response to the social value of the project, he was more hesitant when judging the individual submissions. Describing the exhibition as “an enjoyable one” where the visitor might encounter “more lively and fresh works than usual,” he nonetheless concluded that “it doesn’t contain anything momentous.”10 Other critics, not least Berger’s great nemesis of the period, David Sylvester, were more critical, not just of the works on show, but also of the conception of the project in the first place. Reviewing the exhibition for The Listener, Sylvester stated bluntly, “The fact is, football is not very paintable. It is not that it lacks excitement for the eye. But that which excites the eye, albeit the artist’s eye, is not invariably material for a work of art.”11 A similar view was shared by the aforementioned critic for The Times who claimed, “many of the pictures and sculptures here have the look of works done to order on a not very congenial theme.”12 Considered as a whole, the responses to Football and the Fine Arts suggest, at best, hesitation and ambivalence on the part of the critics, with many confounded by the subject matter, as well as the various artistic responses to this. On one matter, however, they were broadly in agreement. Most were particularly disdainful of the various representations of football players in action, typically comparing these unfavorably with conventional sports photojournalism. Middleton, once again, led the charge, stating: “The artist today is inhibited by the certain knowledge that he cannot hope to equal, let alone surpass, the wonderful ‘long-Tom’ action shots which are a commonplace in daily journalism.”13 Nevile Wallis of The Observer further noted, somewhat despairingly, that this did little to persuade artists away from this source material, complaining, “seldom before, one suspects, have so many agency photographs been studied of players leaping, diving, and performing other caprioles with tensest expressions.”14 Sylvester similarly invoked photojournalism, arguing, “if a game of

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football excites us, so do newspaper photographs of football.”15 Critiquing one of the works on display, he expanded, “This, of course, tempts the artist to paint from newspictures of football. The dangers of doing so are shown by Claude Rogers’ entry, which, though the most professionally competent work in the exhibition, has divested the photographic image of all its vitality and drama in the attempt to give it pictorial coherence.”16 Even Berger, ideologically the most sympathetic to the aims of the show, explicitly referenced the camera when articulating his disappointment with works representing footballing action: “But no-one has begun to achieve purified heroic form . . . because no-one has known enough to reconstruct (rather than snap-shot) the true action of a player.”17 Despite this condemnation, the critics did not dismiss all the works displayed at the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition. Indeed, most put aside space to praise one particular body of work. Wallis, for example, claimed that “the best pictures are most often those that convey the peculiar atmosphere of football stadiums and arenas,” while The Times critic concurred that “Among the most ambitious works may be noticed an animated crowd scene.”18 It was Sylvester, however, who expounded most extensively, and poetically, on his perception of the greater value of scenes representing football crowds within spectatorial spaces: But if the game of football seems an almost impossible subject for a picture, the setting in which professional football is played provides a wealth of material for the painter: the hurry of figures converging on the turnstiles, the thousands of faces stretching away on every side with a blue mist of tobacco smoke rising into the mist of the late afternoon, the surging cross-currents of a blind mass of heads pushing and swaying toward the exits, the poignant empty terraces littered with papers when all but the last stragglers have filtered away, the curious architecture of the stadium itself—the steep vertiginous terraces of the Valley, the great flat sweeping bowl of Stamford Bridge with its scattered irregular stands looking as if they had been improvized overnight, the brooding geometry of White Hart Lane where the pitch is hemmed in by stands with roofs carving great clean dark rectangles out of the sky.19

Sylvester’s paean to football stadiums and their attendant supporters certainly demonstrated first-hand knowledge of at least three London football venues. More importantly, it neatly encapsulated the critical preference of the various reviewers of Football and the Fine Arts. While images of players in action were deemed to fall short of the mark, representations of football spectators and the arenas they habitually occupied had much to commend them. This inevitably raises a number of important questions. Why, for example, given the popularity of football as a visual spectacle, did so many contributors to the Football and the Fine Arts project choose to focus on the spectator rather than the game? Moreover, what does this tell us about the social significance of football as a cultural practice and, perhaps more importantly here, its status as a subject for artistic expression? Finally, having chosen to represent the football supporter, how, precisely, was this subject addressed? These questions will be

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explored as a means to consider the broader relationship between art and football as forms of socio-cultural practice. Here it is worth pausing to consider why images of spectators may have been so abundant at the exhibition and, more specifically, why critics regarded these as superior to representations of footballing action? It can be little doubted that the lack of pictorial conventions for the latter, beyond those developed within the mass media culture of photo-journalism, left the reviewers at a bit of a loss regarding how to evaluate such works. Typically, art critics have measured the value of a work, if not exclusively then to a significant extent, on how it can be seen as a response, whether sympathetic or antagonistic, to canonical works within the history of art. This, of course, posed a particular challenge here. Sylvester, for example, explicitly foregrounded this problem when he bemoaned the fact that “neither Association football nor any other ball game has found its Degas and its Gericault, its Goya and its Manet.”20 In the absence of such acknowledged predecessors, both artists and critics tended to fall back on established genres and conventions. Thus, panoramic scenes of football stadiums viewed from on high, such as Charles Cundall’s Stamford Bridge and L. L. Toynbee’s Mid-Week at Stamford Bridge, or eerie atmospheric scenes such as Anthony Eyton’s Fog at St James’ Park, spoke to the more familiar British landscape tradition of romanticism and the sublime, recalling, if only by loose association, the works of John Constable, J. M. W. Turner or, more recently, Graham Sutherland. Similarly, low-lit or nocturnal effects were evident in several of the works at the exhibition (despite the fact that the FA was at this time still resistant to the implementation of floodlit games) such as Michael Salaman’s Miners’ Game at Sundown, William Gaunt’s Night Football in the East End, and James Palmer’s Playing on Cinders, recalling similar emphases in the works of Samuel Palmer, John Atkinson Grimshaw, or even James Abbott MacNeill Whistler. A focus on urban crowds could easily be cross-referenced to images of renaissance and eighteenth-century pageantry or, indeed, to the pulsating modernity of nineteenthcentury French Impressionist views of the city. Thus, despite the temptation to represent football in action, it is perhaps hardly surprising that both artists and critics were drawn away from this and toward a more familiar visual vocabulary that placed the spectator, more than the player, at the heart of the action. But, clearly, there was more at stake here than simply the conventions of art production and criticism. Consideration also needs to be given to the wider cultural and sporting context of the moment of conception and presentation of Football and the Fine Arts.

Football and Postwar British Culture The early postwar years in Britain were unquestionably grim for the majority of the population. Continued rationing of food, and virtually all forms of consumer goods, led to little optimism among communities already driven to exhaustion by the privations of wartime conditions. Even the promise of better things to come, following the Labour government’s nationalization of major industries, foundation of the National Health Service, and aspiration toward full employment, did little to assuage

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the mood of postwar austerity. In this climate, a strong desire for diversion from the harsh realities of the present resulted in entertainment industries, such as cinema and Music Hall, experiencing a boom throughout the early postwar years, and football would play a pivotal role here. The return of League competitions, suspended during the conflict, saw attendance figures soar, reaching an all-time high during the 1948–49 season.21 Although these figures began to fall from the early 1950s onwards, average numbers at football matches remained well above their pre-war figures throughout the decade. But it was not just attendance figures that suggested shifting attitudes toward football. Significantly, debates about the cultural value of football and its role in British society also began to be voiced at this time, not least to challenge the widespread notion that popular or mass culture was intrinsically of lesser value than the so-called “high” culture of classical music, theater, ballet, and the fine arts. For example, the late 1940s and early 1950s witnessed the publication of a spate of books celebrating football’s history and culture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authors of these volumes, including Alec Whitcher, Geoffrey Green and Percy M. Young, were all drawn from the ranks of the middle-classes.22 Nonetheless these authors set out to challenge the notion that passion for the game reflected clearly demarcated class affiliations.Young, in particular, was a key figure here. A classical composer, musicologist, former organ scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and biographer of both George Frideric Handel and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Young was also a regular attendee at football matches and an avid Wolverhampton Wanderers fan. In 1950 he published a short volume, Football Facts and Fancies: Or the Art of Spectatorship, followed in 1951 by The Appreciation of Football. As the titles of both volumes suggest, for Young it was less playing the game than watching it that constituted a vital expression of British cultural values. Football spectatorship, Young argued, had significant socio-political importance, not least in diminishing class divisions and bringing all walks of society closer together. For example, in the introduction to the latter book, Young began by introducing the group of friends with whom he regularly discussed the game. These included his old public school master, a butcher’s assistant, and a bus conductor, a group that he considered represented “that breadth in comradeship which is British football.”23 But it was not simply the enjoyment of football by all classes that was at stake here. Rather, Young was arguing that appreciation of football was comparable to other forms of cultural appreciation conventionally deemed to be more intellectually demanding. Thus, Young described his bus conductor friend’s fragmentary engagement with a match from his bus, when on duty, forthrightly declaring that “it is in such mental activity and imaginative fertility that much of the deepest pleasure of artistic appreciation lies.”24 Developing this theme further, Young constantly linked appreciation of football to the passion for more familiar “high” cultural practices, concluding that football was an intellectual match for the latter. In an attempt to weight the argument in his favor, his text is riddled with references to Classicism, even going so far as to claim that “It is insufficiently recognized that football is the only means whereby the commonality— the ‘our people,’ odious phrase of the ambitious politician—preserve the vestiges of classical education.”25 Canonical British literary figures, including John Milton, William

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Shakespeare, A. E. Housman and Charles Dickens, are similarly invoked and comparisons between their work and football permeate the pages of The Appreciation of Football. Unsurprisingly, given Young’s profession as a composer and educationalist, comparisons to classical music are much in evidence. In one of his more imaginative exegeses of the game, for example, he claimed: I have always assumed that full-backs should be bass singers and that bass singers should be full-backs. It is, I think, a fact that bass singers in the British Isles tend to sing with what might be mistaken for a full-back technique. When you next hear Elijah regard the portraiture of the prophet from this point of view, or when your choral society does Messiah notice with what exuberance the basses accomplish sliding tackles, how they engage in head-on collisions, how they shout “Hallelujah” and kick for touch.26

To further the analogy, Young argued, “Tenor singers are a different proposition. They are forwards.”27 The tone here is, of course, delivered with a degree of irony for rhetorical effect but, it could be argued, only partially so. Thus, when Young described Stanley Matthews “in sly rumination, half way up Parnassus—approached Chestertonianly via Stoke and Blackpool,” his cross-referencing of contemporary concepts of “high” and “low” was deliberately provocative, and this was certainly not intended to be at the expense of football.28 Even Young’s description of himself standing on the terraces while “digging fervent heels into its graveled surface; reading my program before the match and a few sentences of Somerset Maugham at half-time,” seems consciously contrived to contest the cultural hierarchies that elevated the arts over football.29 For Young, football was a rich and complex form of cultural activity undiminished by comparison to other practices conventionally valued more highly. More importantly, by arguing that an appreciation of football was as demanding as that of other forms, Young foregrounded the football spectator over the player, constructing this character as subtle, nuanced, and discerning. Young’s archetypal football supporter doubtless resembled the middle-class, grammar-school-educated citizen with whom he was most familiar. Yet this nonetheless problematized widely held views regarding the significance and importance of the football supporter in postwar British society. Given Young’s agenda, it is unsurprising that the relationship between football and art made an appearance, if only briefly, in his writings. In The Appreciation of Football, for example, Young presciently argued that famous footballers, rather than “whiskered councillors, burgesses, prelates, and royal dukes” should have public monuments dedicated to them and even compiled a list of those players whom he believed should be thus honored.30 While none of those included by Young constitute the individuals among the multitude of monuments erected to footballers over the past two decades, the then controversial principle proposed by Young over 60 years ago has surely now come to pass. Young did not directly address paintings representing football. Nonetheless, his second book illustrated several such works, including Cosmo Clark’s mural at the Peacock Inn in Islington, sadly no longer extant, while the dustcover featured a photomontage with a contemporary photograph of a goalkeeper set against

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a backdrop of a football crowd scene by L. S. Lowry. Yet perhaps the strongest argument for a coalition between football and the arts came in the “Foreword” to The Appreciation of Football, penned not by Young but Sir Stanley Rous, Secretary of the Football Association. Rous effectively reinforced Young’s thesis by outlining the key problem that he felt football, as a social and cultural activity, was facing. One of the penalties of this age of intensive specialization is the division between sport and culture. Cricket is better served, for its ties with the Arts are close and well understood, but Association football seems, with few exceptions, to have been shunned by the essayist, the artist and the poet. But, is the more self-consciously sensitive mind which appreciates, shall we say, Blake and Bartók, really so far removed from the man on the terraces who delights to savour the artistry of Matthews and Mortensen?31

Rous’ conclusion, that “the mature mind, the man in love with life, the humanist, needs to be nourished by both worlds” thus built on Young’s argument by advocating not simply a cultural reassessment but, more specifically, an integration of football and the arts.32 Over the next year or so, Rous would become the driving force behind the Football and the Fine Arts project.

Aligning Football and the Fine Arts As Ray Physick has pointed out, a significant catalyst for Football and the Fine Arts was the XIVth Olympiad Sport in Art Exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum to accompany the London Olympic Games of 1948.33 This featured nearly 400 works produced by artists from twenty-five nations, all of which had been entered into the official Olympic Art competition. As early as 1908, shortly before the London Games of that year, Pierre de Coubertin, founding President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC ), had argued, “The hour has come to take a new step and to restore the Olympiad to its original beauty. In the time of splendor at Olympia, the Arts and Letters combined harmoniously with sport, assuring the grandeur of the Olympic Games.”34 Thus, for Coubertin, the separation of art and sport into different cultural spheres during the modern era was an anomaly that the Olympic movement specifically set out to rebalance. His efforts resulted in the launch of an Olympic Art competition at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, after which an art competition was held at every Games up until London 1948. While this turned out to be the last official competition, art festivals have remained a part of the wider Olympic festivities up to the present day. Football, too, had played an important role in Olympic competitions, appearing at every Games except Athens 1896 and Los Angeles 1932. Even the launch of the FIFA World Cup competition in 1930 had done little to diminish the sport’s popularity at Berlin 1936 and London 1948. Yet, football was notably under-represented at the 1948 Sport in Art exhibition. Indeed, only two works uniquely representing the game were illustrated in the exhibition catalog, in contrast to four representing rugby and three

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

angling (neither of which were even considered Olympic sports).35 This oversight alone may have provoked the FA to respond by establishing its own competition and exhibition. It was notably in 1949, the year following the Sport in Art exhibition, that the FA Yearbook first included illustrations of works of art relating to football, a practice that it would pursue each year up to and beyond the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition.36 But without the backing of a major international body such as the IOC or FIFA , staging such an event would pose a logistical, as well as a financial, challenge. Here, however, the FA forged an important allegiance that was to help ensure that the project got well and truly off the ground. In 1946, in the midst of postwar austerity, the Arts Council of Great Britain was launched. Built on the foundations of the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA ), set up to support and preserve British national culture during the conflict, the specific objective of the Arts Council in peacetime was to develop “a greater knowledge, understanding, and practice of the fine arts.”37 However, as the historian of the Arts Council Andrew Sinclair has argued, the early days of the organization were marked by significant disagreements. For John Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist and founder of the Arts Council, the principal focus of activities was ensuring the highest possible standards, particularly for established cultural institutions. Accordingly, Keynes advocated the Council’s support for organizations such as the Royal Opera House and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company to protect them from commercial pressures. For Keynes’ opponents, however, especially the civil servant, educationalist, and stalwart of CEMA , Thomas Jones, making art accessible to the masses was the fundamental raison d’être of the new Council. This would involve not only bringing cultural activities out of London to the wider regions of Britain, but also specifically engaging new audiences, especially among the working classes. This dual strategy, characterized by Sinclair as “the best and the most,” shaped debates within the Arts Council during its early years though it was the latter emphasis that came to the fore in the official Royal Charter issued in 1946. This declared the Arts Council’s fundamental objective “to increase the accessibility of the fine arts to the public throughout Our Realm.”38 But perhaps the most significant event to have contributed to the Arts Council’s subsequent participation in the Football and the Fine Arts project came as a consequence of its involvement as a key player in the biggest cultural event of the early postwar period, the Festival of Britain.

Football at the Festival: Expanding Cultural Boundaries Organized to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and as a celebration of Britain’s victory in World War II , the Festival of Britain aimed, in the now famous words of its Director-General Gerald Barry, to provide “a tonic to the nation.”39 It simultaneously sought to present a blueprint for a “New Britain” shaped by the social democratic vision of the postwar Labour government. Science, technology, architecture, design, and the arts were all brought together in an attempt to demonstrate Britain’s important role in the modern world and to characterize and shape postwar British

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national identity. As the historian Becky E. Conekin has claimed, “The Festival embodied the postwar British ideal of universal, popular access to and understanding of ‘culture.’ ”40 But what role would football play in this nationwide celebration of British culture? According to the official reports of the Festival, as well as many subsequent accounts of the event, sport, and football in particular, would only play a marginal role compared with other cultural activities. For example, at the South Bank, the centerpiece of the exhibition, football was limited to a minor presence in the Sports Pavilion, celebrating its status as a British colonial achievement and the export of the game around the globe.41 In contrast, the Arts Council Chairman Sir Ernest Pooley would proudly announce in the post-Festival Annual Report that “there has been more good art and music to be seen and heard in this country than ever before. The public has shown, in its hundreds and thousands, that it has a keen and growing appetite for the serious pleasures.”42 Pooley’s specific use of the adjective “serious” here reflected the fact that the main role of the Arts Council remained the promotion of so-called “high” cultural pursuits such as classical music, opera, ballet, and the fine arts. Football, it can only be assumed, constituted for Pooley a non-serious pleasure. Yet despite the Arts Council’s explicit claim that its involvement in the Festival of Britain expanded the potential audiences for these traditional forms of “high” culture, it could not but be aware that these events drew audiences that were frequently a fraction of the size of an average football match. Moreover, as Iain Wilton has recently argued, football, and sport more generally, actually played a far bigger role at the Festival than has traditionally been acknowledged.43 During the Festival’s “football fortnight” (May 7–19, 1951), over 150 friendly matches were played. Some of these featured two teams from the United Kingdom, for example an English team playing a Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish team, while the majority pitched European teams from fifteen nations, including Austria, Denmark, Holland, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia, against British clubs. Further, several international fixtures were also staged as part of the Festival. These included victories for England over Argentina (2–1) and Portugal (5–2), Scotland defeating Denmark (3–1) and France (1–0), and Wales overcoming Portugal (2–1) and Switzerland (3–2).44 Played in the close season, the Festival of Britain special fixtures attracted huge crowds, typically in considerable excess of the more mainstream cultural events organized as part of the Festival celebrations. In this context, the centrality of football to British culture could hardly be overlooked. After all if, as Herbert Morrison famously claimed, the Festival of Britain was all about “the British showing themselves to themselves, and to the world,” then football could hardly be seen as anything other than a central plank within British culture.45 While little evidence remains regarding the explicit objectives of the Arts Council in subsequently sponsoring the Football and the Fine Arts project, it seems reasonably clear that the popularity and success of football at the Festival of Britain not only reinforced the centrality of football to British cultural identity, but also suggested the possibility of a closer collusion between art and sport. For the Arts Council, supporting an art exhibition featuring football could only enhance their objective to bring the arts to significantly wider audiences while, for the FA , alignment with the Arts Council

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

clearly added both financial and cultural capital to its aspirations to raise the profile of the sport. Notably, it was within a year of the closure of the Festival of Britain that the FA launched the Football and the Fine Arts competition with an official announcement in the 1951–52 FA Yearbook. Seeking to maximize responses, the FA kept the brief wide, calling for works that dealt with “any aspect of Association football, not only the game itself, but all its related activities.”46 While this included “views of grounds,” representations of spectators were not explicitly mentioned in the initial call. Nonetheless, as demonstrated earlier, a significant number of the submissions focused exclusively on football supporters. While the most famous of these was undoubtedly Lowry’s Going to the Match, jointly awarded first prize, countless others, including Eric N. Atkinson’s Club Fans, Susan Benson’s Spectators at Stamford Bridge, John Bailey’s The Crowd Roars, C. Chamberlain’s Chelsea Plays Arsenal, Arthur Hackney’s Spectators Returning Home After Port Vale v. Accrington Stanley, K. Lek’s Off to the Match, and Richard E. Slater’s Entering the Stands demonstrated the popularity of this theme. Even among sculptures, a medium more likely to place a greater emphasis on studies of single figures in sporting action, two works representing Spectators (by John W. Mills and Roger Young) appeared. The continuing popularity of football reflected in the growth of attendances at matches compared to the pre-war era, alongside reconstructions of the cultural significance of football, and more particularly football spectatorship, as argued by Young and others, meant that now the football consumer as much as, perhaps even more than, the player/producer, came to act as a rich signifier for the game itself.

A Brief Case Study in the Art of Spectatorship: Gerald Cains’ Saturday Taxpayers Up to this point the wider context of the sporting and art worlds have been analyzed to consider why the spectator was so prominently brought into the picture at the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition. Little attention, however, has been given to individual works. As there is insufficient space here to expand analysis to a number of these works, attention will be limited to one case study to see what this might tell us, on the one hand, about contemporary views of football supporters and, on the other, about art practices in early postwar Britain. Among the works exhibited was a painting by Gerald Cains entitled Saturday Taxpayers (Figure 3.1).47 In 1953 Cains was still a young student studying at the Southern College of Art in Portsmouth when he heard about the competition from his tutor, John Elwyn. As Cains has recently stated in an interview with John O’Shea and Sally Hawley from the National Football Museum, approximately two weeks before the deadline he dreamt about a match at his local club, Portsmouth, and made a sketch of this when he awoke.48 From this he hastily produced a work in oil on hardboard and submitted this to the competition. The provocative title, Saturday Taxpayers, references the fact that, at the time, tickets for football matches were still subject to an Entertainment Tax levy, first introduced as a wartime measure in 1916. Despite recent protests against this, calls for

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Figure 3.1 Gerald Cains, Saturday Taxpayers, 1953. Oil on board, National Football Museum, Manchester. Courtesy of the artist.

its repeal had been rejected. The work represents a scene at a football stadium shortly before kick-off on a Saturday afternoon. Notably, the composition focuses not on the playing arena but rather on the crowds entering the stadium, though a tiny section of the pitch itself is conspicuous in the lower left-hand corner. Beyond the stadium wall, against a backdrop of tall buildings, two long lines of supporters approach the ground across an area of bombed wasteland, some emerging from two buses stopped on either side of a main road in the distance. The crowd is notably bisected by what appears to be an electrical substation while to the right, the small, walled backyards of a row of terraced houses abut a narrow lane linking the domestic spaces of the working-class homes to the public space of the football stadium. To the left, a small group of supporters huddles beneath the two-tiered south stand, with its identifiable Archibald Leitch designed iron decoration, while more sporadically positioned supporters occupy the foreground of the bowled terraces of the Fratton End. Pale pinks, yellows, and blues interspersed throughout the painting add a muted note of gaiety into the scene but the heavy coats and scarves and the dull light, cast from a distant setting sun barely penetrating the smoke billowing from the background chimneys, all combine to evoke the sense of a grey, drab, late afternoon in winter. In terms of subject matter, Cains’ image is far from simply a scene of jubilant fans. A sense of anticipation is certainly evident, articulated not least by the dynamic, forward lean of the lines of supporters in the background, as well as those entering the terraces to the right of the two-tiered stand on the left of the composition. This

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

is modified to a calmer anticipation demonstrated by the three figures entering the terraces in the right foreground, their keen gazes focused toward the field of play despite the fact that the game is yet to commence. But what about the supporters already in the stadium? Here the urgency seems to give way to a more tranquil self-reflection. For example, the supporters in the center-foreground are mostly made up of individuals or pairs, spaciously separated from each other throughout the area behind the goal. The elongated forms and upright postures make these supporters seem statuesque, isolated both physically and mentally from each other. Most gaze toward the pitch, awaiting the spectacle they have come to see, while two, to the rear of the terraces, lean outwards, calmly watching the arriving crowds. The inward tilt of heads of the two most prominent figures in the foreground suggests a quiet conversation, yet other than this, the scene seems ultimately silent, as if a hush has fallen over the stadium. Thus a mood of anticipation mixed with quiet reflection permeates the work as a whole. Here it is interesting to compare Cains’ painting with a contemporary photograph of football supporters at Fratton Park (Figure 3.2). This, more typically, emphasizes the packed crowd as a unified entity, all attention and emotion focused on a single moment during play. Alternatively, Saturday Taxpayers utilizes the expanse of open ground in the terraces not only to highlight a moment before the game, but also to emphasize the separation of these supporters from each other. The unity and collectivity of the conventional photographs thus gives way to a sense of self-containment, introspection, and contemplation. There are few indicators of specific class identity here, either to differentiate the seated area in the upper tier of the Leitch stand from the standing area below, or indeed one individual from

Figure 3.2 Football supporters at Fratton Park, Portsmouth, 1948.

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63

another. Rather the supporters seem more individuated, their concentrated, absorbed gazes, emphasized by their spacious occupation of the spectatorial space, might even be construed as more reminiscent of a scene at an art gallery than at a football match. When it comes to the stylistic handling of Cains’ work, Saturday Taxpayers can also be considered in terms of wider connections to British art practices. For example, the area of wasteland made up of small green and brown hillocks and bordered by black, leafless trees, seems reminiscent of a World War I landscape by Paul Nash, while the forward lean of the orderly ranks of supporters traversing this bombed terrain evokes C. R. W. Nevinson’s Futurist inspired images of anonymous, machinelike troops marching in ranks. At the same time the emphasis on everyday life and popular entertainment, executed in a loosely defined, but still fundamentally realist, manner draws on the traditions of early twentieth-century British painters of the Camden Town School such as Walter Sickert and Spencer Gore. This was particularly significant in the early 1950s as the work of these artists was widely embraced by artists associated with the revival of the kind of social realism expressly supported by Berger.49 At the same time, however, other details invoke wider forms of postwar art attracting attention in Britain at the time, whether consciously intended by the artist or not. For example, Cains’ emphasis on gaunt attenuated figures, all occupying the same space yet barely interacting or expressing an awareness of each other’s presence, recalls both the forms and the mood of Alberto Giacometti’s early postwar sculptural works. Giacometti’s figures, described by Jean-Paul Sartre as encapsulating the mood of postwar existential angst, had attracted international attention when exhibited in the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1948. Following this, photographs of his work accompanied an article by Michel Leiris in the British cultural journal Horizon which resulted in Giacometti being widely promoted in Britain. In 1952, just one year before Football and the Fine Arts, Sylvester included Giacometti in his influential exhibition Recent Trends in Realist Painting at the ICA .50 Also notable, however, is the inclusion of the electrical substation prominently occupying the middle distance, a structure that Cains later claimed had “always interested me.”51 Here the abstract geometrical forms resemble works by young British sculptors, such as Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick, that art critic Herbert Read had designated the “geometry of fear.”52 The spiky, Constructivist-inspired machine-like forms, first exhibited at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952, attracted national and international publicity and impacted directly upon the production of one of the most controversial and widely publicized artworks of the period, Reg Butler’s maquette for a proposed Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. Butler’s work, awarded first prize in an international sculpture competition, notably became a national cause célèbre in the spring of 1953 when it was attacked while on display at the Tate Gallery in London.53 This iconoclastic act was widely publicized as an attack on modern abstract art itself and notably reflected wider resistance in the popular press, backed by none other than the Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The reach of this story was extensive, as is reflected in the reaction of one football fan on seeing

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

Stanley Matthews finally receive an FA Cup winners’ medal following the famous 1953 FA Cup Final when he stated, “I don’t know about the unknown political prisoner. They ought to put a statue of Stanley Matthews on the Cliffs of Dover. Sir Winston Churchill wouldn’t object to that.”54 Young, one suspects, would have wholeheartedly agreed. The point here is not simply to identify works that may or may not have inspired the artist. Rather it is to indicate how Saturday Taxpayers, both in terms of its subject and its formal execution, can be seen to raise issues relevant to both the footballing and the art world. By foregrounding the introspection and reflective mood of football supporters, Cains’ image foregrounds football fans as important consumers. Moreover, his emphasis on contemplative individual appreciation elevates the notion of football spectatorship as a form of cultural practice, echoing the arguments put forward by Young and others. Ultimately, Cains’ emphasis on the football supporter, typical of many of the works on display at the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition, might be read as an intriguing and evocative response to the particular conditions in which both football and the art world found itself in 1953.

Revisiting Football and the Fine Arts In 2006, The Lowry galleries in Salford commemorated the staging of Football and the Fine Arts by launching another competition, this time entitled One Love: The Football Art Prize. Although this drew fewer entries than its predecessor, once again a large number of the works selected for the accompanying exhibition prioritized spectatorship over participation. Indeed fully a quarter of the works chosen for display exclusively represented football spectators, with many more including supporters or directly addressing the spectatorial experience.55 Among these, intriguingly, was a work entitled Cup Fever, by the now septuagenarian Gerald Cains (Figure 3.3). Like Saturday Taxpayers, the work focuses on supporters outside a football stadium. Based, once more, on the artist’s visual memory, this time of an FA Cup semi-final match between Southampton and Crystal Palace at Stamford Bridge in April 1976, Cains again denies the viewer any image of football being played.56 His focus, instead, is on supporters patiently advancing toward the narrow staircase in the left foreground that forms the funnel-like entrance to the terraces. The largely expressionless, masklike faces of the all-white and, as far as is discernible, all-male crowd betray few signs of protest or complaint even as they shuffle through a passageway far too narrow for the size of the crowd. Indeed a sense of acceptance, even acquiescence, is evident, further reinforced by the absence of any representative of authority in the form of police or stewards controlling this crowd. Here, it would seem, despite being set during the dark days of the 1970s, when football supporters were frequently discussed predominantly in terms of violence, protest, and social disorder, this selfregulating crowd poses no particular danger or threat, either to itself or to others. Rather, it is the sense of endurance and muted expectation as experienced by football’s

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65

Figure 3.3 Gerald Cains, Cup Fever, 2006. Oil on board, private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

primary consumer, the long-suffering supporter that constitutes the primary focus of Cains’ work. Cup Fever, like Saturday Taxpayers produced over half-a-century earlier, demonstrates the centrality of the supporter not only to Cains but also to artists engaging with the football theme more generally. Indeed, as the One Love exhibition has demonstrated, bringing the supporter into the picture still frames many responses to football as a subject matter for artists. The roots of this, as demonstrated above, clearly lie with the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition of 1953 and the particular conditions of both football and art practices in Britain at this historical moment. At a time when football fans are increasingly distanced from the live experience of the game, whether through the accessibility of mediated technology, such as television and the Internet, or through the increasing marginalization consequent upon escalating ticket prices, the humble football fan remains a resonant signifier of the condition of the game itself. Only time will tell to what extent this will continue to shape artistic responses to the spectacle that is the world’s most loved game.

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

Middleton, The Spectator, 12. Middleton, The Spectator, 12. “Football in Art,” The Times, 10. Physick, “Football and the Fine Arts,” 45. Middleton, The Spectator, 12. Ray Physick has addressed the exhibition more widely in his unpublished PhD and in a shorter article. Physick, “Representation of Association Football.” Other newspaper reviews included Nevile Wallis, The Observer, October 25, 1953, and T. W. Earp, The Daily Telegraph, October 23, 1953. Middleton, The Spectator, 12. Berger, “Taste and Soccer,” 519. Berger, “Taste and Soccer,” 519. Sylvester, “Football and the Fine Arts,” 736. “Football in Art,” The Times, 10. Middleton, The Spectator, 12. Wallis, “Saturdays,” 13. Sylvester, “Football and the Fine Arts,” 736. Sylvester, “Football and the Fine Arts,” 736. Berger, “Taste and Soccer,” 519. Wallis, “Saturdays,” 13; “Football in Art,” The Times, 10. Sylvester, “Football and the Fine Arts,” 736. Sylvester, “Football and the Fine Arts,” 736. Russell, Football and the English, 131. Publications included: Whitcher, The Voice of Soccer and Soccer Calling; Green, The History of the Football Association and Soccer; and Young, Football Facts and Fancies and The Appreciation of Football. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 14. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 16. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 50. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 35. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 35. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 60. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 22. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 66. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 11. Young, The Appreciation of Football, 11. Physick, “Representation of Association Football,” 220. Quoted in Stanton, The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions, 17. The works were Wilhelm Kaufmann (Austria), Footballers (oil on canvas), and Jacek Zulawski, Football Match (mosaic). British artist James Bostock’s Sport on the Common (woodcut) included football, though among other sporting and leisure practices represented. See: Illustrations from the XIVth Olympiad Sport in Art Exhibition. Physick, “Representation of Association Football,” 222. Quoted in Sinclair, Arts and Cultures, 50. Quoted in Sinclair, Arts and Cultures, 50. Banham and Hillier, A Tonic to the Nation, 16.

Making a Spectacle of Ourselves 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Conekin, “The Autobiography of a Nation”, 9. Harwood and Powers, Festival of Britain, 78–9. Quoted in Sinclair, Arts and Cultures, 83. Wilton, “Sport’s Role in 1951’s Festival of Britain”. Green, Soccer in the Fifties, 94. Quoted in Jarman, “Showing Britain to Itself,” 41. The Official FA Yearbook 1951–52, 95. Cains was the youngest artist to exhibit at Football and the Fine Arts. Saturday Taxpayers was reviewed by art critic T. W. Earp, Daily Telegraph, October 23, 1953. Cains, interview by O’Shea and Hawley. Hyman, The Battle for Realism, 122. Hyman, The Battle for Realism, 152. Cains, interview by O’Shea and Hawley. See: Garlake, “Identifying the Geometry of Fear,” 4–5. Hyman, The Battle for Realism, 159. Quoted in Johnes and Mellor, “The 1953 FA Cup Final,” 274. One Love, The Lowry. Woodward, Sex, Power and the Games, 135.

67

68

4

The Boss in Bronze: Three Statues of Brian Clough Christopher Stride, Ffion E. Thomas, and Nick Catley

Monuments that immortalize athletes and their feats are an ancient custom. Contestants of the Mesoamerican ballgame are depicted in statuettes dating from 1400 bce, while the Greeks sculpted classical statues of their Olympian athletes.1 And, just as the public’s fascination with sport transcends the ages, so too the deification and sculptural representation of its sporting heroes has re-emerged, with deeply traditional, figurative bronze images of contemporary stars bristling outside modern stadia and state-of-the-art arenas, as well as gracing civic locations, cemeteries, commercial premises, and sports museums. As befits its global popularity, Association football (soccer) can claim the largest number and the widest distribution of statues among ancient or modern sports, though boxing and athletics, and the more parochial passions of baseball, American football, and cricket all boast a burgeoning figurative statuary.2 Over 250 distinct footballers and a further 150 anonymous football playing figures are now depicted by full-body sculptures, with these tributes spread across more than sixty nations.3 Historian Eelco Runia has described the desire to commemorate as “one of the prime historical phenomena of our time”—and the vast majority of sports statues have indeed been erected within the past two decades.4 Statues allow modern individuals and groups to construct, reinvent, consolidate, and project their identities by establishing links with their past. As Judith Dupré notes, the monuments and markers dotting the landscape act as political symbols, displaying values that society wishes to preserve and celebrate, and, by dint of omission, those they wish to forget or ignore.5 The recent accumulation of sports statues therefore indicates sport’s exalted place within contemporary society, particularly as a powerful medium for the manifestation of identity, where representations of shared traditions and common origins are combined with the strong feelings of affiliation aroused by the performance of individual athletes. A growing literature theorizes motivations behind, and interpretations of, statues of sportspeople. In a handful of cases, such as the statue marking the black power salute given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games, or monuments to barrier-breakers such as Arthur Wharton and Wilma Rudolph, commemoration was inspired by wider social or political contexts, and/or an associated desire for reparation and reconciliation.6 Likewise, particularly in Eastern Europe, there exist a small number of graveyard-sited statues that memorialize lives lost, often at a tragically 69

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

young age.7 However, subject choices within the soccer statuary (and within much of the wider sports statuary) most often point toward a desire, often a wider marketing strategy, to leverage the heritage of a club, organization or city to evoke nostalgia and/ or to proclaim authenticity. Nostalgic feelings related to a sports organization, be they for childhood experiences, great players, or triumphant moments, enhance fans’ commitment in the present.8 The majority of soccer players honored with a statue had their tribute erected around 30 years after their career, pointing toward the use of statues to generate nostalgia.9 Allied to this, both through their subject choice and realist figurative form, soccer statues promote authenticity and tradition, commodities valued by both current and potential fans. As sociologist Keith Dixon notes,“football fans inhabit a culture where authenticity is constantly scrutinized by themselves and others.”10 In this way statues offer a solution to a problem faced by football clubs who, in an increasingly globalized and hypercommodified sport, have sacrificed long-standing traditions in favor of commercial imperatives. Examples include shirt sponsorship, and the development of new stadia sited away from their traditional location. In response to this—and as a public relations distraction from the more commercial aspects of the modern game, such as wage inflation and rising ticket prices—clubs have increasingly exploited their heritage, using retrospective kit designs and naming stands after past players. Statues extend this strategy and, especially for clubs with homogenous new stadia, offer a distinct, clubspecific visual identity to an otherwise featureless environment. Where a club lacks the will or the finances, fan groups have often taken up the challenge of organizing and funding a statue project, simultaneously embellishing and making their mark on their match day landscape. Public art can also invigorate a civic landscape that is otherwise overwhelmingly utilitarian, and proclaim a community’s identity.11 It is unsurprising, therefore, that statues of local soccer heroes have been erected in city squares, parks, or precincts, providing meaningful landmarks in otherwise often indistinguishable urban landscapes. Civic locations boasting soccer statues tend to be those where formerly dominant industries have declined, stripping a town of its raison d’être; where commercial redevelopment has erased long-standing local landmarks; or in new towns where there is little tangible existing built heritage to draw upon. Civic monuments celebrating footballers are most often found in smaller towns or suburban settings where the local context resonates more strongly, and competing statue subjects from other walks of life may be fewer in number than would be the case in a major city.12 However, just as the inventory of footballer statues has transcended the boundaries of the stadium environment, membership of the football-related statuary extends beyond the immediate combatants. As of January 1, 2017, the 351 statues of specific football-related subjects in situ around the world included 276 player statues (79 percent), but additionally forty-seven statues of managers or head coaches (13 percent). These main groups are supplemented by smaller numbers of statues featuring chairmen, referees, or broadcasters. The world’s football manager statues, and their design, location, and subject characteristics, along with details of further planned manager statues, are listed in Table 4.1.

71

Carlos Timoteo Griguol Dionys Schönecker Telê Santana

5

11 12 13

10

Bora Milutinović* Bora Milutinović* Heinz Krügel Jack Charlton Nereo Rocco

9

08/17/2014 10/26/1994 Est’d 1990

05/15/2002

05/14/2002

João Saldanha 12/21/2009

09/09/2007

Germany Ireland Italy

China

China

Brazil

Brazil

Austria

Argentina

10/10/2016

12/14/2011

Argentina

Argentina

Argentina

Argentina

Nation

10/07/2016

12/08/2012

01/13/2009

11/27/2007

Date Unveiled

8

7

6

4

3

2

Juan José Pizzuti Reinaldo Carlos Merlo José Santos ‘Pepe’ Romero Carlos Bianchi

1

Subject(s)

Location

Estadio Juan Domingo Perón, Avellaneda, Buenos Aires Racing Club Estadio Juan Domingo Perón, Avellaneda, Buenos Aires All Boys Estadio Islas Malvinas, Buenos Aires CA Boca Juniors La Bombonera, La Boca, Buenos Aires Club Ferro Carril Club Ferro Carril Oeste HQ, Oeste Federico García Lorca 350, Caballito, Buenos Aires SK Rapid Wien Gerhard-Hanappi-Stadion, Wien Brazil National Rua João Pessoa, Itabirito, Team Minas Gerais Brazil National Estádio Jornalista Mário Team Filho (Maracana), Rio de Janeiro China National Kepu Park, Shenyang, Team Liaoning† China National Kepu Park, Shenyang, Team Liaoning†† FC Magdeburg MDCC -Arena, Magdeburg Eire National Team Cork Airport, Cork AC Milan Milanello, Cairate-CarnagoCassano Magnago, Lombardy

Racing Club

Associated Club/ Team

Sculptor

Tele Genin War

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Design Type

Zhaoyang Guo

Other

Club Stadium Sobirey Frank Other Unknown Club HQ Unknown

Unknown

Other

1957–1970

1969–1996

1912–1938

1971–2004

1985–present

1981–present

1986–present

1965–1985

Managerial Career Span

Triumph—Trophy Action—Other Posed—Standing

1951–1976 1973–1996 1947–1977

Action—Controlling 1977–2009 ball Triumph—Moment 1977–2009

Club Museum Victor Henrique Action—Coaching Woitschach

Home Town

Club Museum Thomas Rydval

Club Daniel Cardell Headquarters

Club Museum Anastasia Baranoff Club Museum Daniel Zimmermann Club Stadium Maximiliano ‘Tachi’ Schamun Club Museum Enrique Savio

Location Type

Table 4.1 The world’s football manager statuary: completed and planned statues as of January 1, 2017, by nation and chronological order of unveiling

(Continued)

No Yes No

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Alive When Unveiled?

72

23 Anton Malatinský 24 Manolo Preciado 25 Sven-Göran Eriksson

Netherlands AFC Ajax

16 Bobby Haarms 17 Nils Arne Eggen 18 Kazimierz Górski 19 Béla Guttmann 20 Sir Bobby Robson 21 Guus Hiddink* 22 Guus Hiddink

Portugal

07/14/2016

03/15/2002

06/07/2013

08/19/2016

06/21/2008

Est’d 2004

Portugal

02/28/2014

Estadio de Luz, Lisbon

Amsterdam Arena, Amsterdam Lerkendal Stadion, Trondheim Stadion Narodowy, Warsaw

KNVB HQ, Zeist

Estadio Jalisco, Guadaljara

Location

Pestana Vila Sol Golf and Resort, Vilamoura, Algarve Republic of Republic of Korea 93 Museum, Heyri ArtValley, Korea National Team Paju, Gyeonggi Russia Russian National Moskovsky Treatment and Team Recreation Complex, Malorechenskoye, Crimea Slovakia FC Spartak Trnava Štadión Antona Malatinského, Trnava Spain Real Sporting de El Molinón, Gijón Gijón TorsbyBadet, Fabriksgatan 7, Sweden IFK Göteborg, Torsby‡ Lazio, English National Team

Polish National Team SL Benfica

Poland

03/26/2015

Sporting Lisbon

Rosenborg BK

Planned 2017 Norway

07/29/2011

Netherlands Netherlands National Team

CD Guadalajara

Associated Club/ Team

15 Rinus Michels 03/10/2000

Nation

Mexico

Date Unveiled

14 Árpád Fekete 09/29/2012

Subject(s)

Table 4.1 Continued Sculptor

Design Type

Design TBC

Posed—Standing

Evgeny Yablonsky

Posed—Standing

1977–present

Yes

Gunnar Lundkvist

Home Town

No

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

—

No

1956–1984

1987–present

1987–present

1968–2004

1933–1973

1959–1985

1971–present

No

Yes

1960–1992

1967–1989

No

Alive When Unveiled?

1957–1990

Managerial Career Span

Club Stadium Vicente Santarua Triumph—Moment 1995–2012

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Unknown

Club Stadium Pavla Dubinu

National Museum Other

National Marek Maślaniec Posed—Standing Stadium Club Stadium László Szatmári Triumph—Trophy Juhos Other Unknown Posed—Sitting

Club Stadium Sculptor TBC

Club Stadium Jorge Frausto Posed—Sitting Arias Posed—Standing National Corry Football HQ Ammerlaan-van Niekerk Club Stadium Hans Jouta Action—Coaching

Location Type

73

UK UK

UK

UK

UK

UK

UK

UK

UK

12/04/1997 08/22/2000

07/16/2002

06/14/2003

07/18/2006

33 Bob Stokoe

34 Brian Clough 05/16/2007

03/22/2008§

29 Bill Shankly 30 Sir Alf Ramsey 31 Sir Bobby Robson 32 Stan Cullis

36 Brian Clough 11/06/2008

37 Brian Clough 08/28/2010 and Peter Taylor 38 Jock Stein 03/05/2011 39 Jimmy Hill 07/28/2011

42 Sir Bobby Robson

40 Herbert Chapman 41 Don Revie

UK

UK

05/05/2012

05/06/2012

UK

12/09/2011

UK UK

Turkey UK

27 Adnan Süvari* 06/28/2013 28 Sir Matt Busby 04/27/1996

35 Ted Bates

Turkey

03/19/2008

26 Şeref Bey

Hakan Ersis

Club Stadium Tom Murphy Club Stadium Sean HedgesQuinn Club Stadium Sean HedgesQuinn Club Stadium James Butler

Club Town Can Akdaş Club Stadium Philip Jackson

Home Town

Newcastle United FC

Leeds United FC

St James Park, Newcastle

Elland Road, Leeds

1966–1991 1945–1971

1911–1924

1948–1970

1968–2004

1965–1993

1965–1993 / 1962–1984

1968–2004

1961–1985

Triumph—Trophy 1955–1973 Action—Interacting 1961–1967 with fans/children Posed—Standing 1907–1934

Triumph—Trophy

Action—Interacting 1955–1973 with fans/children Triumph—Moment 1965–1993

Action—Running

Triumph—Moment 1961–1987

Action—Directing play Posed—Standing

Triumph—Moment 1949–1974 Posed—Standing 1955–1980

Posed—Standing Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

Club Stadium Graham Ibbeson Action—Directing play Club Stadium Tom Maley Posed—Standing

Glasgow Celtic FC Celtic Park, Glasgow Club Stadium John Mckenna Coventry City FC Ricoh Arena, Coventry, West Club Stadium Nicholas Midlands Dimbleby Arsenal FC Emirates Stadium, London Club Stadium MDM Ltd.

Club Stadium Sean HedgesQuinn Middlesbrough FC Albert Park, Middlesbrough, Home Town Vivien Mallock Teeside Southampton FC St Mary’s Stadium, Club Stadium Sean HedgesSouthampton, Hampshire Quinn Nottingham Forest Old Market Square, Club Town Les Johnson FC Nottingham Derby County FC Pride Park, Derby, Derbyshire Club Stadium Andy Edwards

Dünya Barış Parkı, Fulya, Istanbul Göztepe SK Güzelyalı Parkı, Izmir Manchester United Old Trafford, Greater FC Manchester Liverpool FC Anfield, Liverpool Ipswich Town FC Portman Road, Ipswich, Suffolk Ipswich Town FC Portman Road, Ipswich, Suffolk Wolverhampton Molineux, Wolverhampton, Wanderers FC West Midlands Sunderland FC Stadium of Light, Sunderland

Beşiktaş JK

(Continued)

No

No

No

No Yes

No

No

No

No

No

No

Yes

No No

No No

No

74

UK

11/01/2014

Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine

05/11/2003

Est’d 2003

08/26/2007

49 Valery Lobanovsky 50 Valery Lobanovsky 51 Evgeny Mefodyevich Kucherevsky

Dnipr Dnipropetrovsk

FC Dynamo Kyiv

FC Dynamo Kyiv

Zaporozhye Cemetery, Dnipropetrovsk

Baikove Cemetery, Kyiv

Turf Moor, Burnley, Lancashire Hrushevskoho, Kyiv

London Road, Peterborough, Club Stadium Sean HedgesCambridgeshire Quinn White Hart Lane, London Club Stadium Sculptor TBC

Cemetery

Cemetery

Unknown

Unknown

1974–2013

Managerial Career Span

Design TBC

Design TBC

Design TBC

Action—Directing play

Posed—Standing

Posed—Standing

1981–2006

1969–2001

1969–2001

1979–1989

1958–1974

1985–1992

1967–1987 / 1968–1969

Triumph—Moment 1975–1996

Posed—Standing

Design Type

Club Stadium Vladimir Filatov Posed—Sitting

Club Stadium Sculptor TBC

Club Stadium Andy Edwards

Club Stadium Tom Murphy

Peterborough United FC Tottenham Hotspur FC Burnley FC

Sculptor

Club Stadium Philip Jackson

Location Type

Old Trafford, Greater Manchester Prenton Park, Birkenhead, Merseyside Meadow Lane, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

Location

Manchester United FC Tranmere Rovers FC Notts County FC

Associated Club/ Team

Subjects: * Figure is part of statue group also containing players. Location: † From 2002–12 sited at China’s Green Island Forest Park training complex. Moved to the current location in 2012. †† From 2002–07 sited outside Wulihe Stadium, Shenyang. Re-erected in current location in June 2012. ‡ From 2002–09 sited in Torsby tourist office. Unveiling: § original statue by sculptor Ian Brennan unveiled on March 17, 2007, removed 5 days later; replacement statue by sculptor Sean Hedges-Quinn unveiled March 22, 2008.

Planned 2019 UK

48 Brian Miller

47 Bill Nicholson Planned 2019 UK

UK 45 Jimmy Sirrell 05/05/2016 and Jack Wheeler 46 Chris Turner Planned 2017 UK

UK

11/23/2012

43 Sir Alex Ferguson 44 Johnny King

Nation

Date Unveiled

Subject(s)

Table 4.1 Continued

No

No

No

No

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

Alive When Unveiled?

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Statues honoring coaches and managers are not unique to Association football, but are less common in other sports, and represent unexplored territory in terms of scholarly research. It would be a fallacy to group these monuments with those of players and extrapolate an identical set of motivations and interpretations. The rarity of the truly successful manager confers a certain mythical quality upon those who consistently triumph. Despite saturation media coverage, fans can still only guess at exactly what makes a manager successful. As historian Neil Carter notes, managers have become “public faces of their clubs that somehow possess mystical powers.”13 Whereas a player statue will preserve the memory of known, visible football skills and a particular style of play, a manager’s statue and interpretative materials play a greater role in creating and shaping fans’ perceptions of the subject. Furthermore, a manager’s scope for achieving the respect or affection that leads to a statue is limited in comparison to a player by the singular nature of his job. You can be a great player in a poor team, but it is assumed that a great manager would not construct a poor team. A player might endear himself to the fans for his rugged determination or entertainment value, regardless of team success, whereas a manager is judged primarily by results. With a very limited number of trophies and promotion slots available every season, it is hard for a manager to achieve immortality or even popularity. Likewise, the role of manager is almost always an individual one, and even given the high turnover, far fewer will be judged as successful compared to players. Players can also gain both parochial and wider respect as storied internationals while also representing their club, whereas the national team manager role usually rules out concurrent club duties—so international recognition, unless it brings a trophy, is less likely to boost a manager’s likelihood of receiving a statue than a player’s. Yet despite these apparent disadvantages, the ratio of forty-seven manager statues to 276 of players exceeds the numerical balance of one manager to a team of eleven players (let alone a squad), suggesting that managers are actually slightly more likely to be commemorated in bronze. One explanation is the unique impact a manager is perceived to have. As football historian Dave Russell stresses, “As any fan is aware, managers can literally make, re-make or break a club.”14 Thus, while the requirement of tangible success may make a manager less likely to be depicted, it could be that managers’ greater power and influence make them more likely than any one player to be credited as the architect of such success. When selecting a subject for a club’s first statue, a manager identified with a period of sustained success may be the most obvious candidate. This rationale is supported by manager statue subjects both in the UK and across the world, almost all of whom could be classed as “club builders,” not just responsible for their club’s biggest trophy hauls, but also for elevating them beyond their traditional expectations. Success is, of course, relative to a club’s previous size and stature within the game—so a statue might recognize anything from establishing a club as a European power to a lengthy spell punching above their weight in the lower divisions. While players honored with statues often featured in their club’s finest hours, there are some (e.g. Preston North End FC ’s Sir Tom Finney, or Joe Shaw of Sheffield United FC ) who won little, or represented their club in less successful eras, but gained respect and

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affection for their skills and their loyalty. For a manager, lack of team success leads to the sack, not a statue. Fifty percent of player statues are sited at their club’s stadium or museum/hall of fame. However, this percentage rises to 66 percent for managers. The manager is a distinctively club-centric figurehead, embedded in the hearts of his club’s fans, but less likely to be loved by the wider public (and hence less likely to receive a civic-sited statue). This perhaps explains why, though several footballers have multiple statues (typically both at their former club and in their hometown), this is very unusual for managers. Indeed, in all but one instance it is limited to those who have achieved success with the national team. Only one manager has both civic and stadium statues: Brian Clough has been honored by his home town of Middlesbrough, and in both Nottingham and Derby, where his greatest managerial achievements were performed. Few English managers have experienced as much success, certainly relative to their club’s resources, or projected their personality quite so forcefully, as Brian Clough. As well as their varying location types, Clough’s statues have very different funding profiles and designs, including one of Clough as a player—however, in depicting the same subject, these monuments offer a unique case study of the differing ways in which managers and players are commemorated. We compare Clough’s statues, using a detailed inspection of each monument, combined with interviews with the project organizers and sculptors, to show how a statue’s funding, design, and location profiles are interrelated and have interacted with the fact that Clough’s primary fame is as a manager. Most critically, we examine the tension between the statue as a biography of the subject as opposed to one of the society that built it, noting how the design and interpretative materials (e.g., plaque or plinth inscriptions) of each Clough statue balances these competing narratives.

Brian Clough Brian Howard Clough was born in Middlesbrough on March 21, 1935, the son of a sugar boiler at the local sweet factory. Football played a large part in the Clough household, with Brian, the fifth of eight children, later recalling that “I used to practice all the time, and soon I knew I was better than the others.”15 Clough progressed through local football into the reserves at Middlesbrough FC , making his first-team debut in 1955. He was a phenomenally successful player, a fact sometimes forgotten due to his later managerial success. Clough still holds the record for the least appearances made to score 250 English Football League goals, ending with 251 in 274 matches. However, he was not always popular in the dressing room, due to his blunt speaking and penchant for criticising team-mates, particularly hapless defenders whom he saw as squandering leads he had created. His autobiography relates a dispute over his selfish play with a fellow player and the manager. Clough’s simple explanation was that he was the better finisher—and, over 30 years on, he prints his scoring record to back up his point.16 Most of Clough’s goals were scored for Middlesbrough, then a second-tier side in the English Football League, but in 1961 he moved to Middlesbrough’s local rivals

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Sunderland FC . Clough recalled that, unsurprisingly given the deep-seated nature of local football allegiances and rivalries, “they didn’t like it in Middlesbrough. They called me a traitor.”17 Biographer Jonathan Wilson notes that Clough seems ambivalent about his time at Middlesbrough, preferring Sunderland, possibly because they had a stronger defense to back up his goals.18 Clough believed that his popularity at Sunderland “was proved in spectacular fashion when . . . more than 31,000 fans packed the ground” for his testimonial match.19 The match was necessary because he had sustained a severe knee injury on a frozen pitch on Boxing Day 1962 that effectively ended his career. After an aborted comeback, he managed Sunderland’s youth team, moving on in 1965 to take charge of Hartlepool United FC . He was assisted by Peter Taylor, a friend from his playing days. As the Board refused to pay two managers, Taylor had to be employed as physio, despite having no appropriate qualifications. Clough and Taylor dramatically enhanced the fortunes of a traditionally struggling club, but in 1968 they moved on to Second Division Derby County FC , Clough having fallen out with the Hartlepool’s chairman, Ernie Ord, the first of several such disputes in his career.20 Clough and Taylor rebuilt the Derby team, using occasionally unorthodox methods to negotiate transfers. On one occasion, Clough insisted on staying at the house of Archie Gemmill, a player he hoped to recruit, until he had received an answer.21 The positive response was secured over breakfast the next morning. Success (Second Division Champions 1969, Football League Champions for the first time in the club’s history in 1972) could not mask a deteriorating relationship with the Derby Board. Clough believed Sam Longson, the Derby chairman, resented his growing profile and popularity, which had resulted from frequent outspoken appearances as a TV pundit and on chat shows. Clough and Taylor resigned in October 1973, the result of a power struggle at the club. Clough later regretted his decision to resign, in both sacrificing an opportunity to manage what he saw as a great team, and the lack of any compensation. He later said: “Never resign. If you think of it, sleep on it. And if you are of the same mind the next morning, go back to bed.”22 The local public reaction to his resignation was enormous, with both fans and players backing Clough. Fans demanded his reinstatement, but the Board held firm.23 Clough and Taylor’s next stop was Brighton and Hove Albion FC , an appointment which essentially proved to be marking time, with disappointing results. Then, in the summer of 1974, Clough was surprisingly appointed Leeds United FC manager. Leeds had become one of the most successful clubs in the country under the aforementioned Don Revie, who grew up a short walk from Clough in Middlesbrough and had now left to manage England. Clough had criticized what he saw as Leeds’ dirty tactics and cynicism in his role as a TV pundit, making him extremely unpopular with the Leeds players, who had been part of what Revie saw as his “family.”24 Revie’s teams were renowned for their tendency to, as Wilson puts it, “harangue referees,” and play a cynical style of football when necessary, whereas Clough’s teams were always acknowledged as “almost uniquely respectful to referees,” and were renowned for a fluent, clean brand of passing football.25 Clough was effectively forced out of Leeds by dressing room rebellion after a sensationally short 44-day managerial reign. However,

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a payoff of almost £100,000 showed he had learned his lesson about resigning, and gave him financial independence—allowing him to “never fear the sack again.”26 Nottingham Forest FC appointed Clough as manager in January 1975, prompting him to say “Forest have one thing going for them right now—me!”27 Perhaps significantly, success arrived only after Clough persuaded Taylor to join him in the summer of 1976. Promotion followed in 1977, then Forest became Football League Champions in 1978. Even more remarkably, the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, considered by many the greatest prize in club football, and an almost impossible target for a historically mid-ranking provincial club such as Forest, was won in successive years—1979 and 1980. The greatest measure of this achievement is a list of all the sides who have won this competition (renamed the UEFA Champions League in 1992) more than once: Real Madrid, Milan, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Liverpool, Ajax, Internazionale, Manchester United, Juventus, Benfica, Porto, and Nottingham Forest. This is a roll-call of eleven giants, perpetual national champions or challengers, the greatest teams in European football history—alongside Forest, who, in 2017, play in the second level of English football, have won just one Football League championship (under Clough) and have not featured in the top division this century. Taylor left in 1982, and although, as Clough points out, it would be difficult to describe the years that followed as failure, Forest never reached the same heights again.28 His stylish young teams (starring son Nigel) rarely threatened more than upper-mid-table finishes and achieved just a pair of Football League Cup triumphs (1989 and 1990). Clough’s record was better with Taylor than without him. Clough credits Taylor with keeping the dressing-room atmosphere relaxed and light-hearted, and finding superb players, but complains that Taylor shied away from confrontation with authority. In 1983 Clough and Taylor fell out over a transfer between Forest and Derby, whom Taylor then managed, and afterwards spoke “just a few, brief words on the telephone” until Taylor’s death in 1990.29 Clough’s regret over this rift is shown in his dedication of his autobiography to Taylor. Clough’s public profile remained high in the 1980s, due to numerous media appearances, occasional incidents such as striking a pitch invader, and his failure to become England manager (having been interviewed but not selected in 1977, he was passed over in favor of Bobby Robson in 1982), a snub which only enhanced his reputation as an anti-establishment figure, too hot for those in authority to handle. There were also allegations of illegal payments surrounding transfer deals.30 Wilson notes that Clough had a complex relationship with money, and that “for him, what was right and what was legal were not necessarily the same thing.”31 By the early 1990s a decline in Clough’s health, caused by an ongoing battle with alcoholism, saw him become increasingly disengaged from his day-to-day managerial role, reportedly only showing up on a Friday morning and a Saturday afternoon—and his team’s performance slump. Clough resigned from a relegated Forest in 1993, and cut ties with football almost completely. His health worsened throughout the subsequent years to the point where allegations over illegal payments were not pursued, and eventually he had a liver transplant in January 2003.32 He died from stomach cancer on September 20, 2004, aged sixty-nine.33

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Wilson suggests that Clough’s enduring popularity, as shown by the widespread tributes on his death, is partly because he is seen as a man who represents an era when success could be achieved without overwhelming financial superiority, and with style, a term which could be said to represent both the attractive football of his teams and their respect for officials.34 Clough was an intriguing character in many ways. He spoke his mind in a world renowned for limiting interviews to the blandest of platitudes. His left-wing political beliefs were never hidden, although his opinion that “a woman’s job is to be there . . . if she is going to have children, she has to look after them,” and what Wilson described as his “underlying homophobia” and “characteristic suspicion of foreigners”—while unremarkable at the time—would undoubtedly be frowned upon today by much of society, let alone within socialist circles.35 He was asked to stand as a Labour candidate for Richmond in 1964, stood on the picket lines with miners during the strike of 1984–85, and refused to give interviews to a local paper that had sacked striking journalists.36 Along with his straight talking, these beliefs and actions cemented his popularity with the general populace. Clough’s death triggered what historian David Russell describes as the “absolutely clear grammar of football grieving,” a repertoire of commemorative practices for which Russell identifies clear roots in the death of Bill Shankly in 1981—and a transition to maturity through the Hillsborough disaster (1989) and the death of former England and West Ham captain Bobby Moore (1993)—while acknowledging that it represents “part of a much wider shift in the nation’s emotional ecology.”37 These practices include the wearing of black armbands by players, minute’s silences (and, increasingly, applauses), fans spontaneously building shrines composed of flowers, club scarves and shirts at stadiums, public memorial services, chants at matches, and the establishment of permanent memorials, both via existing objects (e.g., stadium, stand, or roadnaming) and the erection of monuments or statues.38 Three Brian Clough statues were erected within 6 years of his death.

Albert Park, Middlesbrough, unveiled May 16, 2007 Middlesbrough’s Clough monument typifies the hometown hero football statue, with political involvement and public money smoothing the project’s progress, and a civic as opposed to stadium location being chosen. Planning began just days after Clough’s death, with local Labour Party Councillor John McPartland, a self-proclaimed fan of Clough, gathering together a statue organizing committee consisting of other local politicians, representatives from Middlesbrough FC and the local media.39 McPartland feels that, despite his departure to Sunderland, Clough “had never lost the affection of the Middlesbrough people”: when Clough died, erecting a statue was McPartland’s immediate thought.40 Though part-funded by Heritage Lottery fund money, half of the statue’s £65,000 cost was met through fund-raising activities, including a sponsored bungee jump from, and walk across, the top of the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge, as well as the sale of limited edition statue maquettes.41 As a result of the project’s public funding and local authority involvement, the sculptor was chosen via an open competition as opposed to direct commission. The

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

Figure 4.1 Brian Clough statue, Albert Park, Middlesbrough. Photo by John Wilson ©.

winner was Vivien Mallock, a nationally renowned sculptor with previous royal and military memorial commissions. Her design, which has Clough jogging with football boots slung over his shoulder (Figure  4.1), was based upon a committee brief that Clough should be captured not in his managerial pomp but in his youth, as a Middlesbrough player, making his daily stroll to training across Albert Park, a public open space chosen to host the statue.42 Brian Clough’s widow Barbara unveiled the statue in May 2007. Plaque inscriptions reference Clough as a Middlesbrough footballer, but say nothing of his greater fame as a manager: Brian Clough 1935–2004 Middlesbrough footballer / This statue was unveiled on 16 May 2007 by Mrs. Barbara Clough. Sculptor—Vivien Mallock. / This statue was funded by a public appeal. Supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

McPartland was keen that the statue was not just publicly located but also accessible and interactive, “a statue that people could go up to, a bit like the one of Eusebio at

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Benfica,” hence the statue was placed upon a low rectangular plinth.43 An unintended consequence was subsequent wear and tear to the bronze of Clough’s right leg— ironically the same skeletal position as the cruciate injury that curtailed his playing career—caused by children hanging from it as their parents posed alongside Clough. This was remedied in 2009 by reworking the plinth shape to support the back leg.44 Alongside the statue project, the Council promoted Clough’s links with his hometown in a heritage tourism drive, developing a Clough Trail for visitors.45

Old Market Square, Nottingham, unveiled November 6, 2008 As with the Middlesbrough statue project, Nottingham’s Clough statue arose from a coalition of civic authorities and the public. However, whereas local authority connections and official funding were the driving force in Middlesbrough, Nottingham’s statue was predominantly a fan campaign. The project began in 2005, led by a small group of Nottingham Forest fans, including the instigators of the brianclough.com tribute website (established in 2000), and members of the Forest Supporters Club. Campaign chairman Paul Ellis recounts that, while the football club were supportive, “Forest weren’t wanting to do anything at the ground due to planned ground redevelopments.” Likewise, Nottingham City Council were cooperative, offering organizational support and help with financial administration, but were happy for supporters to take the lead.46 They also provided a city center site, which was critical for Ellis, given his determination that Clough’s legacy to the city as opposed to just the football club should be celebrated: It’s got to be clear, we always said it wasn’t about his exploits at Forest, but what he did for Nottingham. Remember he raised the profile of Nottingham hugely, by generating the interest in the football club worldwide. So that’s why it’s not at the ground . . . it wasn’t about Forest, it was about Brian Clough and Nottingham. The city council embraced that, obviously they would, it’s a place for people when they visit to look at.47

A combination of appeals, events and merchandise raised £69,000 in just eighteen months, with the council and the football club donating £5,000 each as the target was approached. This was both a very successful fundraising mission—statue projects independent of a football club’s largesse typically have a far lengthier gestation period— and an imaginative one, featuring events such as a Clough Aid concert, alongside sales of replicas of Clough’s trademark green sweaters, badges, and banners bearing famous Clough quotes.48 Sculptor Les Johnson, chosen through an open competition, was given a clear design brief, based on a flashbulb memory of Clough, alongside an emphasis on capturing the relationship between Clough and the people. Johnson recalls that: The supporters who came up with an idea of how they wanted the pose to be, they were the ones who suggested that. There are images of him after one of the

82

Picturing the Beautiful Game important games coming up to the crowd of supporters in the stands and doing that gesture, hands clasped above his head saluting the fans for their support. It was a two-way thing, now in the context where we put him in Nottingham, because he was such a well-known and liked figure in Nottingham he’s saluting Nottingham, that gesture is appropriate for his public position in Nottingham as well as being relevant to the actual game of football. He was saluting the fans and he was also saluting Nottingham itself.49

Clough’s statue (Figure 4.2), unveiled to great fanfare in November 2008, is set on a low, broad plinth that allows easy access for passers-by and provides a place to sit.50 Around the base of the statue, inlaid strips of bronze are inscribed with three of Clough’s most famous quips—“one-liners” that, while recognizable to any of his fans, the Nottingham public, or indeed anyone with a passing interest in English football in the 1970s and 1980s, would probably mystify visitors given the lack of supporting interpretive material: If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there. / We talk about it for 20 minutes and then we decide I was right. / I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.

Figure 4.2 Brian Clough statue, Old Market Square, Nottingham. Photo by Sarah Gardner ©.

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The plinth inscription is limited to “Brian Clough OBE ,” eschewing any supporting information about his career successes. The only other plaque, placed in the pavement ten yards from the statue, notes that this corner of the Market Square is Nottingham’s “Speaker’s Corner,” an appropriate home for the outspoken master manager. In February 2017, a single Forest fan launched an online petition to campaign for the statue to be moved to Forest’s stadium, on the basis that it might suffer damage during public gatherings in the square, and from inebriated revellers, but this attracted very little support.51

Pride Park, Derby County FC, unveiled August 28, 2010 Clough’s third statue shares the plinth with his long-time co-manager Peter Taylor. In 2010 Derby County honored the pair who brought them their first League Championship with a large bronze sculpture sited outside their Pride Park stadium.52 The genesis of this monument was very different from that of the Clough statues in Middlesbrough and Nottingham. Though it also has roots in fan activism, it can best be described as a football-club-organized and commercially-funded artwork. Derby supporters group The Rams Trust had been campaigning for a statue of Steve Bloomer, Derby’s greatest goal scorer, and had engaged prolific sports sculptor Andy Edwards.53 However they were well short of the required funding, with Bloomer’s status as a sepia-tinged figure from the dawn of the professional game, as opposed to a hero from living memory, probably reducing fan donations. Likewise, successive owners had shown little interest in the project as a club-funded venture until Derby County was bought by an American consortium in January 2008.54 Whether due to the new CEO Tom Glick’s experience in sports franchise ownership in the United States, which included 14 years in the baseball industry where monuments to storied players are common, or to court popularity with fans suspicious of new foreign owners, the Bloomer project was soon progressed via commercial and club funding, with a Clough and Taylor statue also promised.55 After a fans’ petition reminded them of this pledge, the club raised funds, largely through commercial sponsorship, to pay for a statue. Set on a tall cylindrical plinth (Figure 4.3), it was unveiled in August 2010 in a small plaza at the main approach to Pride Park stadium.56 Pride Park, now the iPro Stadium, is a typical modern arena built in 1997 on derelict industrial land, surrounded by a new-build retail park, office developments and vacant plots: very different to the cramped and homely Baseball Ground where Clough and Taylor worked their magic. Andy Edwards, hired on the basis of his work on the Bloomer project, sculpted the Clough and Taylor of 1972, triumphantly holding the League Championship trophy. Edwards found the experience of working with Derby County’s owners and the statue committee “refreshing,” in that, unlike a competitive tender scenario, he was able to gradually develop and reshape the design.57 He opines that: They enabled me to do things the right way . . . Derby commissioned a period of research where I made, I think it was seven different maquettes, both families and committees were involved in developing those. They hired the artist first, and then looked at the design. It changed and evolved and because of that I think the

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Picturing the Beautiful Game

Figure 4.3 Brian Clough and Peter Taylor statue, Pride Park, Derby. Photo by Christopher Stride ©.

monument is richer because it’s not one person’s version or anything, it’s a proper team effort.58

Edwards recalls that the design was originally going to have Clough and Taylor sat on a bench so that people could sit with them, a suggestion of son Nigel, and that the eventual design was meant as a sly nod to both classicism and 1970s pop culture: “by putting them on as high a pedestal as possible, they would look like Roman emperors, but they’ve got their arms around each other like Morecambe and Wise when you go round the back!”59 A statue plinth inscription references the plaza in which it is set and the link that Derby sought to make between the statue, Clough and Taylor’s partnership, and

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wider societal themes: “* UNITY PLAZA * HARMONY INTEGRITY UNITY SOLIDARITY VICTORY *”. A descriptive plaque also references these ideas, but offers a greater description of Clough’s (and Taylor’s) careers than the Nottingham or Middlesbrough statues’ interpretative materials: Brian Howard Clough OBE (21 March 1935–20 September 2004) & Peter Thomas Taylor (2 July 1928–4 October 1990). Clough and Taylor formed one of the most charismatic and successful partnerships in English football history. While they both experienced management of football clubs as individuals, it was as a partnership they enjoyed their greatest successes in winning two English Championships as well as back-to-back European Cups. By immortalising them in this bronze monument it is intended not only to recognize their many achievements in football, but also to act as a symbol within the community to inspire others. Created by fans, friends and family from inside and outside football in recognition of the difference these men made to our lives, our game and our communities and to celebrate the love and gratitude we will always have for them. 28 August 2010.

Further plaques carry names and messages from sponsors, including several that have adapted famous Clough quotes as marketing slogans: for instance, “Not the best in the business but in the top one: Hytrac Lifts Ltd.” A plinth base inscription adds the nostalgic epithet “for the good times.” Completing the plethora of interpretative and supporting material are a series of circular bronze plates set into paving around the base of the statue, listing the mileage from Pride Park to a variety of national and world stadia. Some of these stadia have links to Clough’s career, such as Hartlepool’s Victoria Park, Middlesbrough’s former ground Ayresome Park, and Nottingham’s City Ground, the latter plaque unsurprisingly having suffered repeated vandalism. Others, though, are simply famous stadia with no obvious link to Clough or Taylor, such as Milan’s San Siro, and Manchester United’s Old Trafford.

The Bronze Brian Clough: Man of the People or the King of Clubs? Brian Clough’s Nottingham- and Derby-sited statues both incorporate an element of “triumph” design, the Derby statue also linking this to a specific club success, and projecting Clough as an imperial leader via a high plinth. The Nottingham statue is surrounded by Clough quotes that project his brand of brashness, humor, and footballing principles, reinforcing a popular perception of his character resulting from his TV punditry. Its design resembles Liverpool FC ’s statue of Bill Shankly, in depicting a manager sharing a celebratory moment with fans. Conversely the Middlesbrough statue portrays Clough the player. The inscription says nothing about his management career. Whether this statue should be considered a manager statue at all is arguable. We included it in this study given that it is highly

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unlikely it would have been constructed if Clough was not a revered manager. Though an exceptional goal scorer for his hometown club, Middlesbrough FC were mired in the second tier of English football at that time. Neither did he display the loyalty that statue subjects typically possess. Prior to the commission of Clough’s civic statue, Middlesbrough FC had unveiled monuments depicting two of their greatest players, Wilf Mannion and George Hardwick, at their Riverside Stadium—but not Clough. Hence, given Clough’s playing record did not inspire a club statue, it is unlikely to have been the driving force behind the subsequent civic honor—Clough’s Middlesbrough statue is effectively a home town honoring the managerial achievements of one of their own, and hence should be considered a manager statue. Furthermore, while depicting him in his playing days, it doesn’t portray him in action or in Middlesbrough kit. The statue is more a reminder of Clough’s young self as opposed to representing his time as a Middlesbrough player. However, when considering the tension between statues as a biography of the subject as opposed to the society that built them, Clough’s Derby statue stands as the exception. All three statues can be read as an attempt to claim Clough as “belonging” to the host community; however, each community is trying to claim a different Clough. By assessing the creation of each statue, its placement, and what is both revealed and ignored in the design and presentation, it becomes apparent that the Nottingham and Middlesbrough statues share the most obvious commonality, that of Clough as a man of the people, and a nostalgic totem for a bygone era of charismatic, located, local heroes and socialist civic virtues. On the other hand, the Derby statue reflects a modern corporate era, where branding is achieved through proclaiming success and platitudes. Moreover, in the designed projection of these divergent aims, all three statues sidestep awkward truths about the subject. The placement choices can be considered in terms of locational and designed accessibility. The Nottingham and Middlesbrough statues are sited in popular civic spaces that are frequented by the general public—on public rather than private land. Clough has been placed into the city, and hence positioned as an accessible city hero. The lack of fan or wider public enthusiasm to later move the Nottingham statue to Forest’s stadium reflects a symbiotic relationship between Clough and the city, and a sense that his personality and achievements elevated his stock and the city’s above mere sporting legend. Clough is someone for the city to boast about, not just the football club. Both the Nottingham and Middlesbrough Clough statues’ low plinths invite public interaction. In Nottingham, this is enhanced by the plinth edge providing seating for weary shoppers. Personal encounters with the Nottingham or Middlesbrough statues will mostly be informal and unplanned, and Clough stands physically among the local populace, rather than towering over them. In not being raised above the people, but capturing the public’s attention at their level, he fits the description given to him by cultural historian and sociologist David Goldblatt, who wrote: “Clough was closer to the foreman than the boss, [he was] a working class patriarch whose rule rested on a mixture of charisma and coercion.”60 Furthermore, the Nottingham and Middlesbrough statues’ placement among the people reflects Clough’s committed socialism—and the

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political beliefs of those behind the statues. Though Clough may have held opinions that do not fit within a modern left-wing consciousness, a statue is not subject to either the same demands for a “warts-and-all” portrayal, or the critical appraisal of content that a written biography receives.61 The Middlesbrough and Nottingham statues were both aided by local Labour Party-dominated councils no doubt keen to celebrate a leftleaning populist hero in a non-contentious way, and also willing to pass off Clough’s occasional contentious comments as “of his time,” or trade them against his active support for left-wing causes. In comparison, the Derby statue’s construction was in part driven by a desire to improve a commercial environment through a striking and relevant piece of public art: this statue contributes to its previously nondescript location as much as the location contributes to the interpretation of the statue. An observer at the opening ceremony, while noting that the new Derby directors “know probably a lot more than most supporters about the history of the football club,” also recalled that, “one of the directors said to me ‘let’s not forget amid all this that this doubles the real estate value of the land around it’.” And, while it does feature adjacent seating, the statue itself is on a very high plinth. With the stadium being in an out-of-town business district, there is little non-matchday footfall. The statue is part of the stadium, not part of the city; Clough and Taylor are conquering leaders, standing above, not among the fans. This contrast is also found in the statue designs and inscriptions. In Middlesbrough, Clough is sculpted as a footballer of his era. This is apparent in his dress, with boots casually slung over his shoulder, and in the statue’s placement. The local player jogging to training through a public park, carrying his own boots, is a direct contrast to the stereotypical modern footballer, culturally and economically dislocated from the community he represents and driving to training from a gated suburb in an expensive car. Hence this design has both nostalgic and political connotations by suggesting a preference not so much for Clough as a player, nor the Middlesbrough team of the 1950s, but more for an era when footballers were local, rooted, working-class heroes, and football was a working-class sport—or even a time when working-class identity itself, the bedrock of the Labour movement, was stronger, and society more cohesive. In Nottingham, Clough is sculpted celebrating among the fans in an informal manner, but with a gesture that longstanding fans will recognize as typical of the subject. This design is multivalent, i.e. it offers multiple interpretations dependent on the viewer and their experiences. To the supporters who witnessed the successes of Clough’s era at Forest, feelings of triumphalism, nostalgic reminiscence, and their sense of worth as a loyal fan are all evoked, and their ability to decode the statue also enhances their claim in sharing Clough’s success. However, the statue abstracts this moment of postmatch celebration from its historical and locational contexts. To other passers-by without this deep knowledge of Clough, the image is simply of a warm, open figure, greeting fans. And to those who are not devoted Forest fans but who remember Clough’s support for striking miners and journalists as well as his immense local popularity, Clough’s gesture represents a man of the people celebrating with the people; a civic leader as much as a football manager. As with the Middlesbrough statue, this

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design says nothing of Clough’s managerial achievements, instead placing personality and interaction at the forefront. Conversely, the Derby statue offers a more formal portrayal of triumph. Clough and Taylor are posed with the trophy in a style appropriate for a photocall or civic reception, rather than displaying great emotion or sharing the moment with fans. The presence of the large Football League Championship trophy provides an alternative focus. To the occasional fan and even the Derby County loyalist this image says as much about Derby’s achievement in capturing the league title as the managers who led the campaign. Finally, the focus of each statue’s interpretative materials correlates with the themes foregrounded by their design and placement. When interpreting the Middlesbrough and Nottingham inscriptions, what is omitted is as notable as what is included: paradoxically while you can physically interact with both statues, the viewer is distanced from the reason for the subject’s commemoration, with neither inscription making specific reference to Clough’s managerial success. Full understanding therefore requires subsequent research or prior knowledge. The Middlesbrough plaque simply identifies Clough as a Middlesbrough footballer. This could be read as an attempt to claim Clough’s legacy for his hometown, yet it says nothing of his achievements as a Middlesbrough footballer either. Of course, given that Clough left Middlesbrough of his own volition, there is an inherent tension in any narrative detailing this connection. In Nottingham, the principal inscriptions are famous Clough quotes, supplemented only by his name and a national honor (OBE ). The effect of this is twofold. First, it projects Clough’s charismatic personality ahead of his football-related achievements, hinting at how it was Clough’s personality that raised his popularity and renown beyond that of a mere football manager. Second, the lack of interpretative material positions Clough as needing no introduction in Nottingham. Like the design, it makes statue interpretation dependent on prior knowledge, boosting a sense of attachment to the statue and subject for those who remember Clough’s most famous sayings and deeds, or who have been brought up on tales of them. The Derby statue is also a deeply parochial monument, yet promotes its environment through less subtle devices. As well as the trophy-hefting statue design, the inscription highlights Clough and Taylor’s successes, but fails to mention that one of the pair’s Football League triumphs and both European Cup wins occurred at local rivals Nottingham Forest. A casual fan or passer-by might attribute these later triumphs to Derby, though paradoxically this statue is the least likely to be visited by non-fans. The plaques around the base of the statue are also designed to boost Derby’s prestige by association, namechecking stadia of world famous clubs that Derby have rarely competed with, alongside those connected to Clough and Taylor’s story. The large “UNITY ” engraving on the plinth is accompanied by comments on the principal inscription linking the Clough and Taylor partnership to this wider theme. However, the Clough and Taylor story was not just one of unity, indeed they eventually split and never reconciled. The qualities and attributes promoted on the plinth are inarguably positive, but carry little personal meaning. To a viewer who

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knows this broader history of the Clough–Taylor relationship, they might feel more like platitudinous branding. Given the broader “unity” theme it is ironic that the statue itself also offers ammunition for the Forest–Derby rivalry. The website promoting the Nottingham statue, in a section relating to the Derby monument, attempts to claim a moral victory for Forest fans by detailing the comparative statue funding sources, and stating that the Nottingham monument was erected first, their links to Clough’s family, and that Derby have installed a plaque mentioning their rival’s stadium: The eventual unveiling came nearly 2 years after Nottingham’s bronze statue was unveiled by Barbara Clough, accompanied by members of her family . . . The £125,000 scheme was funded through business sponsorship, unlike the previous statue projects in Middlesbrough and Nottingham, where fans were inspired to launch successful fund-raising campaigns involving a range of special events, including a gala dinner in Nottingham attended by Mrs Clough and her family . . . Placed around the base of the statue are a number of compass points with special connections to Cloughie. One of them is Nottingham Forest’s City Ground.62

The obvious extrapolation from this is that Forest fans are more loyal, generous, proactive, and have closer links to Clough. The Derby statue is essentially an attempt to brand a stadium precinct and a football club. Through its development and funding process, its placement in a modern landscaped plaza within a featureless business district, corporate sponsorship plaques (especially those that recycle Clough quotes for the purposes of advertising), and onmessage epithets, it attempts to relocate Clough and Taylor in a celebration of the new, the modern, the commercial, and the PR-savvy. In this way, it is typical of many stadium statues. On the other hand, the Nottingham and Middlesbrough statues portray Clough through his personality, politics, and civic links, and make less of an overt claim on Clough’s successes.

Football Manager Statues: A Passing Phenomenon or a Growing Trend? Brian Clough’s statues commemorate an English manager from the 1970s and 1980s, an era that Carter suggests as the zenith of the English club football manager’s powers.63 Since the early 1990s, English football’s increased income and commercialism has dramatically changed almost every element of the game, with the manager’s role no exception. With the disparity between top-tier and lower-tier incomes ever increasing, the need for clubs to succeed and to stay successful has likewise increased, and ever greater resources are poured into achieving success. A top-level manager can now call upon a greater range of specialist coaches and assistants than ever before, and his role in transfer dealings has largely been surrendered or transferred to a coterie of analysts and a director of football. His role now more closely resembles the European model of a head coach, who picks the team, coordinates his coaching staff, and attempts to

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motivate the players.64 Since Clough’s era the typical profile and perceived behavior of managers has changed, with the majority of English Premier League managers now from overseas, and coaching qualifications mandatory at all levels. Sensitivity has replaced rage as the default setting for motivating players.65 We might expect the manager’s decreasing influence to mitigate their future immortality. However, it is perceived influence that determines whether a manager is honored, and there is no suggestion that either fans or club directors feel the manager’s importance is diminished, even if the scope of their day-to-day role has. The frequent calls for a manager’s head, and the resultant perennial “hiring and firing” that occurs, often at the cost of paying up a substantial contract, indicates that having the right manager is still considered a critical ingredient for success: while managers carry the can for failure, they also take the plaudits when their team succeeds. Furthermore, today’s manager is ever more visible, with their decisions monitored and debated by rolling sports news coverage, and their utterances in pre- and postmatch press conferences pored over and dissected. Managers play a central role in modern football’s “soap opera” and fans are exposed to their manager’s strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits. All of these factors enhance the prospects of manager statues, but possibly reduce the extent to which a statue will shape a contemporary fan’s opinion of a manager. However, with the predilection for football statues generally showing no sign of abating (twenty-one were erected around the world in 2016), the likelihood is that there will be many more bosses in bronze erected outside stadia in the future.

Notes 1 Ekholm, “Ceramic Figurines and the Mesoamerican Ballgame.” 2 Figurative statues portray a lifelike representation of a human subject. They are at least close to life-size and depict the body; as opposed to statuettes or figurines, which are small enough to be easily lifted, or busts, which depict just head and shoulders. 3 Starting in January 2011, the first and second authors constructed a database of existing and planned statues of football players, managers, and administrators around the world. The database is regularly updated, accurate to the best of our knowledge, and publicly available at: http://www.sportingstatues.com [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 4 Runia, “Burying the Dead, Creating the Past,” 313. 5 Dupre, Monuments, 7. 6 Smith, “Frozen Fists in Speed City”; Smith, “Mapping America’s Sporting Landscape”; Stride, Thomas, and Smith, “Ballplayer or Barrier Breaker?”; Jamie Reid, “Pioneer Arthur Wharton honoured at St. George’s Park,” The FA, October 16, 2014: http:// www.thefa.com/news/2014/oct/arthur-wharton-statue-unveiled-at-st-georgespark#L4kIxtPeLAc9OZIB.99 [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 7 Examples include Dragan Mance, the Partizan Belgrade striker killed in a car crash in 1985, whose statue stands by his grave at Novo Groblje, Belgrade. 8 Funk and James, “Consumer Loyalty.” 9 Stride, Wilson, and Thomas, “Modeling Stadium Statue Subject Choice in US Baseball and English Soccer.”

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10 Dixon, Consuming Football in Late Modern Life, 59. 11 Manthorpe, “Public Art.” 12 For instance, in the UK , there are no civic (as opposed to stadium-sited) figurative monuments to specific footballers, or indeed any sportsmen or women, in central London, Manchester, or Birmingham; whereas Barrow-in-Furness, Dudley, Hawick, and Merthyr Tydfil all boast multiple sports statues. 13 Carter, The Football Manager, 1. 14 Russell, Football and the English, 171. 15 Clough, Clough, 15. 16 Clough, Clough, 15. 17 Wilson, Brian Clough, 79. 18 Wilson, Brian Clough, 79–80. 19 Clough, Clough, 61. 20 Clough, Clough, 147; Clough, Walking on Water. 21 Clough, Clough, 87. 22 Clough, Clough, 114. 23 Gerald Mortimer, “Gerald Mortimer recalls resignation of Brian Clough, Peter Taylor,” Derby Telegraph, October 19, 2013: http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/GeraldMortimer-recalls-resignation-Brian-Clough/story-19941510-detail/story.html [accessed: March 7, 2007; no longer accessible]. 24 Clough, Clough, 137. 25 Wilson, Brian Clough, 297, 524. 26 Clough, Clough, 154. 27 Clough, Clough, 155. 28 Clough, Clough, 224. 29 Clough, Clough, 265. 30 Henry Winter, “Clough wanted cash ‘bung,’ Sugar claims,” The Independent, June 11, 1993: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/clough-wanted-cash-bung-sugar-claims1490823.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 31 Wilson, Brian Clough, 10. 32 Graham Tibbetts, “Brian Clough has 10-hour liver swap operation,” The Daily Telegraph Online, January 20, 2003: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1419424/BrianClough-has-10-hour-liver-swap-operation.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]; Mihir Bose, “Parry puzzled by Clough ‘bungs,’” The Daily Telegraph Online, September 23, 2004: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/2387218/Parry-puzzled-by-Clough-bungs. html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 33 “Football legend Clough dies,” BBC, September 20, 2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/ hi/football/3673568.stm [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 34 Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 563. 35 Clough, Clough, 13; Wilson, Brian Clough, 182, 455. 36 “Evening Post Strikers Reunite 30 Years On,” Left Lion, March 11, 2009: http://www. leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/evening-post-strikers-reunite-30-years-on/id/2466 [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 37 Russell, “We all Agree, Name the Stand after Shankly,” 7–10. 38 For example, Brian Clough’s death was marked by flowers laid and scarves tied outside both Derby County’s and Nottingham Forest’s stadiums, a memorial service held at Derby’s Pride Park, the naming of the main road between Derby and Nottingham (the A52) as “Brian Clough Way,” a Nottingham tram named after Clough, and the

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Picturing the Beautiful Game inauguration of the Brian Clough Trophy, which Derby County and Nottingham Forest compete for when they meet in competitive action. “Fans plan memorial fund meeting,” Evening Gazette, September 24, 2004: http://www. thefreelibrary.com/Fans+plan+memorial+fund+meeting.-a0122457118 [accessed: March 19, 2018]. John McPartland, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. John McPartland, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011; “BORO MEMORIAL FUND,” brianclough.com: http://www.brianclough.com/boro.htm [accessed: March 7, 2017; no longer accessible]; “Clough statue gets £50,000 boost,” BBC, November 22, 2006: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/6173450.stm [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Vivien Mallock, conversation with Christopher Stride, November 2011. John McPartland, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. “Repairs needed to Clough statue,” BBC, March 3, 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ england/tees/7920514.stm [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Middlesbrough Council, “The Brian Clough Trail: In the Footsteps of a Local Hero,” 2007: http://www.walk4life.info/sites/default/files/walkdocs/walkdoc-6905.pdf [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Paul Ellis, conversation with Christopher Stride, June 2011. Paul Ellis, conversation with Christopher Stride, June 2011. “NOTTINGHAM ’s CLOUGHIE STATUE ,” brianclough.com: http://www. brianclough.com/statue.htm [accessed: March 7, 2017; no longer accessible]. Les Johnson, conversation with Christopher Stride, April 2012. “Crowds see Clough statue unveiled,” BBC, November 6, 2008: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/england/derbyshire/7711616.stm [accessed: March 19, 2018]; “NOTTINGHAM ’s CLOUGHIE STATUE ,” brianclough.com:, http://www.brianclough.com/statue.htm [accessed: March 7, 2017; no longer accessible]. Bal Cheema, “Move the Brian Clough Statue to the City Ground,” Petitions24.com: https://www.petitions24.com/move_the_brian_clough_statue_to_the_city_ground [accessed: March 19, 2018]; Jemma Page, “Should Nottingham’s Brian Clough statue be moved to the City Ground?” Nottingham Post, February 24, 207: http://www. nottinghampost.com/should-nottingham-s-brian-clough-statue-be-moved-to-thecity-ground/story-30159540-detail/story.html [accessed: March 7, 2017; no longer accessible]. “Derby unveil Brian Clough and Peter Taylor statue,” BBC, August 27, 2010: http:// www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-11107388 [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Paul Mortimer, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. Paul Mortimer, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011; Andy Edwards, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. Paul Mortimer, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. For example, there are over 250 baseball player statues in situ across North America. Ashley Wilkinson, “Brian Clough & Peter Taylor Statue Outside Pride Park Stadium, Derby,” gopetition.com, January 24, 2008: https://www.gopetition.com/petitions/ brian-clough-peter-taylor-statue-outside-pride-park-stadium-derby.html [accessed: April 11, 2018]; “Rams agree talks on Clough/Taylor statue,” Derby Telegraph, April 16, 2009: http://www.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/news/Rams-agree-talks-Clough-Taylor-statue/ article-905278-detail/article.html [accessed: March 7, 2017; no longer accessible];

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“Statue in honour of legendary football duo shown to families on ‘special day,’ ” Derby Telegraph, July 3, 2010: http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Statue-honour-legendaryfootball-duo-shown-families-special-day/story-11569005-detail/story.html [accessed: March 7, 2017; no longer accessible]; “Rams to honour Clough and Taylor,” BBC, April 30, 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/derbyshire/8026480.stm [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Andy Edwards, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. Andy Edwards, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. Andy Edwards, conversation with Christopher Stride, July 2011. Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 563. Wilson, Brian Clough. “DERBY ’s TRIBUTE TO CLOUGHIE ,” brianclough.com: http://www.brianclough. com/derby_statue.htm [accessed: March 7, 2017; no longer accessible]. Carter, The Football Manager, 91. Carter, The Football Manager, 167. Richards, “Being the Boss,” 40.

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Soccer and Modernism

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The Footballer as the Figure of the New Man in Italian and Russian Avant-garde, 1910s–1930s Przemysław Strożek

Introduction Football, at the time the most popular team sport in Europe, constituted a truly significant phenomenon in cultural life from the 1910s to 1930s. During this period, national leagues were formed in Europe and a number of important football tournaments were held: the Olympics in Stockholm (1912), Antwerp (1920), Paris (1924), Amsterdam (1928), and Berlin (1936); the first World Cup in Uruguay (1930), and subsequently in Italy (1934) and France (1938). It was far from accidental that visual references to football found a prominent position in the Avant-garde art of the time, as popular culture and political ideologies transformed approaches to artistic practice. Football became an important theme among artists, sculptors, photographers, and filmmakers who popularized and glamorized physical culture in revolutionary visual modes. These diverse representations extended beyond a mere affiliation with a sporting game. Instead, a new kind of a man and a new healthy hero emerged—the footballer, a celebrity icon beloved by cheering crowds, whose depictions connected issues of modernity with new political agendas and Avant-garde experiments. Taking into account the importance of visualizing physical culture in the programs of the 1910s–1930s Avant-garde, this chapter examines the depictions of footballers in Italian (Futurism) and Russian (Suprematism, Constructivism) modern art within the context of the newly formed political ideologies of Fascism and Communism. These countries witnessed important manifestations of the Avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s, yet by the 1930s artists were forced to use more traditional modes of expression to represent new ideological content within the radical agendas of Mussolini and Stalin. In Italy, the image of a footballer became a reflection of the Futurist New Man, embodying dynamism, health, and virility; his sporting victories were a matter of national pride, while the construction of modern stadiums fell in line with the Futurist ideals of modernizing the country. In Russia, the artistic left of the 1920s connected Avant-garde attitudes with the working-class movement (including workers’ sport organizations such as Red Sport International) under the emergence of Constructivism. The theme of fizkultura became uniquely associated with the experimental wing of Constructivist cultural production and the figure of the 97

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footballer served as an embodiment of the New Soviet Man, a healthy hero fit to build Socialism. To illustrate the importance of football and footballers in Italian and Russian Avantgarde visual art, I first introduce the pre-Fascist and pre-Soviet painterly ideas on the dynamism of human form, beginning with Umberto Boccioni’s idea of Futurist plastic dynamism and the theory of Suprematism developed by Kazimir Malevich. Both Boccioni and Malevich are regarded as pioneers of Avant-garde painting and their ideas serve as the point of departure for further consideration of the concepts of the New Man in Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. In this chapter, I intend to show how images of footballers operated as signifiers of modernity and artistic transformation from the 1910s to 1930s. By comparing depictions of footballers in Italian Futurist and Russian Avant-garde art, I demonstrate how Avant-garde artists applied a variety of visual means—including painting, photography, film, and graphic design—to immortalize the sporting hero. This case study elucidates how different political circumstances contributed to depictions of the sportsman and, by extension, modern ideals within the emergence of popular culture.

Footballers—the Futurist Angels of Earth The history of modern football in Italy dates back to the early 1890s when the first football clubs were created: Genoa Cricket and Football Club and Internazionale Football Club Torino. The Italian Football Federation was appointed in 1898 and became a FIFA member a few years later. In 1909–10, while Marinetti proclaimed the Futurist manifesto and carried out his serate and a series of semi-artistic interventions in Milan, the local team, Inter, won the first Italian Championship; subsequently, Pro Vercelli won the title and defended it until 1913. In that very year, Umberto Boccioni painted Dynamism of a Soccer Player (Figure 5.1), most probably the first Futurist and Avant-garde painting in which the topic of football appeared.1 In 1913, Boccioni explored the issues of human-body dynamics with such paintings as Dynamism of a Human Body and Dynamism of a Cyclist. Dynamism of a Soccer Player and the two other paintings formed a kind of triptych on the topic of sport, meant to validate Boccioni’s proclamation from “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (1910), that “movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.”2 The figure of the footballer, caught in the ceaseless simultaneity of the action of kicking a football, would undergo a total dematerialization in the paintings’ dynamical and luminous surroundings. The silhouette of the moving footballer anticipated the theory of plastic dynamism, according to which “dynamic form is a species of fourth dimension, both in painting and sculpture.”3 Boccioni expressed the need to introduce a vibrant element in painting so that the subject would seem to be in constant motion. The truth of the modern, quickly changing world was to be expressed by omnipresent dynamism. The introduction of elements connected to sports in his paintings allowed Boccioni to try and depict dynamic continuity as a single form.

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Figure 5.1 Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913. Oil on canvas, 6 ft 41/8 in × 6 ft 71/8 in (193.2 × 201 cm), Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY. Dynamism of a Soccer Player did not convey the atmosphere of the stadium, the field, the goalposts, the spectator stands, or the competing footballers. Were it not for the title, it would have been difficult to guess that football was its subject at all. Boccioni depicted a footballer, shaping his body to maximize his physical force, expressing health and virility. Painted in such a way that he rises above the ground; the footballer seems to be making movements similar to those of airplane propelers. Boccioni thus explored the mechanical aspects of movement—muscles built to resemble those of a machine. The footballer overcomes gravity and seems to have the ability to fly. It appears that Dynamism of a Soccer Player not only referenced the theory of plastic dynamism, but was also an allegory of the new man, if not a superhero. It is no accident that Boccioni’s painting was one of Marinetti’s favorites and hung in a central position in his Rome apartment. Dynamism of a Soccer Player constituted one of the greatest achievements of Futurist painting, where all that was dynamic, mechanical, and modern merged with the vision of the Futurist superhuman. When it comes to the painterly “dynamization” of the human form, the motive of “a footballer in movement” resurfaced in the years to follow in the works of successive generations of Italian Futurists. At the beginning of the 1920s, impressions of football matches appeared in Iras Baldessari’s Football Players (1920); Emilio Notte’s Football

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Match (1920); Enrico Castello’s Football Players (1920); and The Goalkeeper (1922). These works showed footballers caught in the moment of field rivalry. Notte and Castello explored above all the dynamics of a football game—the competition, the struggle of muscular bodies. Baldessari, in turn, presented the footballers’ silhouettes as a composition of more geometric than dynamic forms, placing them not so much within the Futurist aesthetic as somewhere between Cubism and Constructivism. By 1922, after the March on Rome, Fascism consolidated power in Italy. The movement transformed sporting institutions into organs of the Fascist Party and used them to restructure the organization of sport. Sport became a key component of their ideas on patriotism and it soon appeared that the “fascist nation” in many ways was also the “sporting nation.”4 The year 1926 proved a breakthrough in the history of Italian football: the Fascist government seized control of calcio, issued the Carta di Viareggio, reorganized, rationalized, and nationalized the game, providing facilities worthy of the new order and the Italian national passion.5 Carta di Viareggio regularized the status of clubs and players, and paved the way for the Carta dello Sport (1928) and the first national league, launched in 1929. As Robert Gordon and John London noted in their essay on football and fascism, sporting heroes started to be regarded as “embodiments of a core Fascist myth, that of the ‘New Man,’ the perfected Fascist individual wholly imbued, in body and in spirit, with a near-mystical devotion to the state.”6 From 1926 until the late 1930s, the subject matter of football would return in the art of the Futurists with additional force. During this time, when the moment of the Futurist reconciliation with Mussolini’s regime started to be more recognizable, football became a subject explored by artists in more diverse ways, reflecting the most important artistic concepts and ideological postulates. One of the main representatives of Secondo Futurismo, Gerardo Dottori, created at the time a series of sketches, Appunti allo stadio (“Sketches from the Stadium”) (1927), depicting a number of particular football situations. These had little to do with the Futurist aesthetic, but indicated the painter’s particular interest in the subject. In 1928, Dottori created one of his best-known paintings, Football Match (Figure  5.2), in which the football players were surrounded by a landscape simultaneously rendered dynamic by circular forms, diverse perspectives, dimensions, and scales. The players were inscribed in rays of refracted light, which resembled Boccioni’s solutions from Dynamism of a Soccer Player. Yet in Dottori’s work, the silhouettes of the footballers’ moving bodies did not dematerialize quite as radically. The competing players soared toward the sky as if being drawn in by the sunlight, evoking the use of refracted rays frequently present in religious and aerial paintings by Italian Futurists. This ascension of footballers seemed to take place among the forests of Umbria—the landscape of a region of historic and modern central Italy repeatedly present in Dottori’s works. In the entire scene, one distinguishes players sporting blue shirts and white shorts. The national colors of Gli Azzurri (“The Blues”) suggest that the game depicted in Football Match is taking place at an international level.7 In the 1928 Summer Olympics football tournament in Amsterdam, which is described as the precursor to the first FIFA World Cup held in 1930 in Uruguay, Italy won the bronze medal. Football Match might thus have been a painterly variation on one of the games,

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Figure 5.2 Gerardo Dottori, Football Match, 1928. Oil on canvas, 71 × 92.5 cm, Arte Centro–Lattuada Studio, Milan.

but set in the local landscape of Umbria. It might also have been an idealization of the first international successes of Italy’s national team. After 1928, many Futurist painters turned to motifs connected to football. Among them were Pippo Rizzo, Vittorio Corona, Tato, Thayaht, Ivanhoe Gambini, Mario Guido dal Monte, Cesare Tarrini, Bruno Munari, Marisa Mori, and Giulio d’Anna. A sketch by d’Anna entitled Football Player, 1930, bore a striking resemblance to the silhouette of the new twentieth-century hero from Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, which sought to exemplify Marinetti’s dream of a man/ machine hybrid.8 d’Anna’s footballer resembled a muscular soldier marching in the war, but here his intention was to catch the ball, and his duty to shoot and score a goal. Three years later, Giulio d’Anna revisited football as a subject matter, once again referring to Boccioni’s oeuvre. In a 1933 painting called Football, he created the illusion of a running footballer, caught in the simultaneous action of taking aim and kicking the ball. d’Anna displayed the stages of movement, and as a consequence the footballer becomes two persons—two heads, four arms, four legs. Such a way of expressing the dynamics of a sportsman perfectly matched the passage from the technical manifesto of Futurist painting of 1910 that read: “On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.”9 d’Anna’s painting, like many others, served as proof to the vitality of Boccioni’s ideas among the younger generations of Futurist painters. Well into the 1930s, Dynamism of a Soccer Player functioned as a model of Futurist imaging of the dynamics of a footballer’s silhouette.

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Sidestepping Boccioni’s legacy in painting, and setting off in an entirely unique direction, was Aeropittura (“Aeropainting”), a current promptly codified into staunch nationalist aesthetics under the Fascist regime. Aeropainting was based on painterly sensations, intoxicating flights in the skies and the experience of the vastness of the heavens. The sky became an unlimited realm of cosmic fantasies toward spiritualism. In the world seen from a plane’s perspective, football—the new religion of the Italian masses and a tool of Fascist propaganda—was also present. Football Match by Dottori discussed above could be seen not only as a predecessor of Aeropainting defined in 1929, but also of Arte sacra futurista (“Futurist sacred art”), defined in 1931, by Marinetti, who declared that the Futurists and their ideas on simultaneity could successfully visualize the mystic dogmas of the Church.10 In the 1930s, it was Enrico Prampolini who, like Dottori, was much involved in Aeropainting and Futurist Sacred Art, and wanted to explore “the total equilibrium of the infinite, thereby giving life to images latent in a new world of cosmic reality.”11 His desire was to express the new aerial visual perspective connected with cosmic dimensions and sacred art, and the football motif was also used to that end. After 1926, in the Fascist state football was becoming the masses’ new religion, and its magic was meant to reach the heavens. It is by no means accidental that Prampolini’s painting Angels of the Earth, 1936 (Figure 5.3), took the football phenomenon into a heavenly expanse. His surrealistic vision of a football game brought together a 1930s Futurist aesthetic and the ideology of Fascist propaganda. All that is national, masculine, modern, victorious, and dynamic had been related to the aspects of new spiritualism and cosmic reality in the form of the football match. White and blue silhouettes painted on

Figure 5.3 Enrico Prampolini, Angels of the Earth, 1936. Oil on canvas, 90 × 177 cm, Arte Centro–Lattuada Studio, Milan.

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geometrical figures evocative of football players suggest open wings. They carry the sportsmen upwards and toward the ball, which glides almost as high as the sun and follows a trajectory of a dotted line toward its target. This target is an outline of a goalpost, guarded by yet another angelic goalkeeper. The geometric figures, which emulate the bodies of footballers, are filled with blue, which undoubtedly suggests the national outfits of Gli Azzurri. The painting was most probably a reminiscence of the Italian team’s victory in the 1934 World Cup, which had been held in Italy. This is further confirmed by the outline of the Apennine Peninsula placed in the central part of the painting. The angel footballers are hovering above the map of their home country, where the victorious tournament took place and such players as Giuseppe Meazza, Gianpiero Combi, and Raimundo Orsi became the idols of cheering Italian crowds. The 1930s were the crowning point for Italian football and affirmed its international supremacy: Bologna FC won the Mitropa Cup in both 1932 and 1934, Italy hosted and won the 1934 World Cup, and then won the football tournament in Berlin during the 1936 Olympics while defending the World Cup trophy in France in 1938. Football, elevated to the status of a new religion and in this atmosphere of sports fever, was becoming not only a source of inspiration for Futurist artists, but also one of the supreme tools of Fascist propaganda. At the time Prampolini created two paintings under the title of Angels of the Earth and one of them was part of a series called Myths of Action, prepared in order to represent Italy at the Art Competitions of the Olympics in Berlin in 1936. The second and lesser known version was shown at the First National Exhibition of Sporting Art, which was organized by CONI (Italian National Olympic Committee) at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome to select the best artworks for this art competition. Angels of the Earth then reached the Final Phase during Berlin’s artistic tournament. This testifies to the fact that not every example of Avant-garde art was completely condemned by Nazi cultural officials who, a year later in 1937, staged the Degenerate Art Exhibition to ridicule German and International modern art. The inclusion of Prampolini’s Futurist work in a show organized by Nazis probably occurred through the rapprochement of these two countries, who signed a treaty to form the Rome–Berlin axis just a few months after the Olympics in October of 1936. The popularity of football as a modern mass spectacle, sporting victories as a matter of national pride, and the construction of modern stadiums as an emblem of the modernization of the country suited the Italian Futurists’ ideas well. Umberto Boccioni, Gerardo Dottori, and Enrico Prampolini gave soccer a prominent place in Futurist painting. However, they employed different Futurist styles in different decades, ranging from “plastic dynamism” to “Futurist sacred art,” aeropainting and “cosmic idealism.” Their similar approach to calcio connected the Italian national game with heavenly dimensions and the idea of a footballer as a Futurist superman. Boccioni’s soccer player from the 1910s simply overcomes gravity, while Dottori’s players, from the end of 1928, ascend to heaven. By mid-1930s, in the context of the World Cup victory, Prampolini shows Gli Azurri visibly as angels. By tackling the subject, Futurist painters from across the Italian peninsula—from Lombardy (Boccioni) and

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Umbria (Dottori) to Lazio (Prampolini)—showed how soccer became the most important phenomenon of national culture in Italy. Not only did it confirm the fact that interest in football was visible in Futurist activity, but it also indicated a nationalist fever, unifying different areas of the country by glorifying the victories of the national team.

Footballer—the Soviet Icarus The first football games in Russia were reported around 1892, while a league with regularly scheduled matches formed in 1909. In 1913, the All-Russian Football Union launched, joining together more than 150 clubs in thirty-three cities.12 Football started to operate as an important cultural phenomenon and even the outbreak of war did not stop the growth of the game13. Accordingly, and perhaps inevitably, the imagery of football entered artistic fields. At the time, when the Italian Futurist Boccioni sought to render the fourth dimension by presenting the dynamic form of a football player— Kasimir Malevich approached a similar idea: a painting of a soccer player in Suprematist reality. In around 1913–15, Kazimir Malevich proposed a theory of non-representational art that dismissed figurative painting in favor of the exploration of a pure, non-objective world, composed only of basic plastic elements, such as color and shape. Malevich called his artistic concept Suprematism—“the new pictorial realism,” by means of which he attempted to integrate the fourth dimension of time into a spatial representation. Around 1915, he executed a work entitled Painterly Realism of a Football Player—Color Masses in the 4th Dimension (Figure 5.4). It was no accident that Malevich referred to the image of a footballer. An athlete combined all that was dynamic and modern with the expression of the new century’s health and virility, the heroic man of the future appealing to the masses. Using the word “footballer” in the title, Malevich also wanted to show the link between the natural world and non-objective art, expressing the supremacy of a new painterly realism over the forms of nature. The sensation of bodily dynamism was thus rendered in compositions of purely geometric forms. The issues of dynamic movement in painting became a theme in many Suprematist works, one of which was called Airplane Flying, 1915. Here, Malevich seems to apply an aerial view, and again, just like in the representation of a moving footballer, the forms push and pull without relying on any reference to the physical world. In both cases the organization of the dynamics of floating geometric shapes overturned conventional relationships and the force of gravity. The combination of a footballer’s skills with the capacity to fly, which would become an indicator of later experiments in Constructivist art, was already apparent in Malevich’s work. A similar approach to the image of a footballer can be found in an artwork executed by Malevich’s student El Lissitzky. Lissitzky—the main propagator of Constructivism— wanted to further develop the ideas of the visual experiments began by Suprematism.14 He proposed new formal discoveries that he called Prouns (an acronym for “Project for

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Figure 5.4 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player—Color Masses in the 4th Dimension, summer/fall 1915. Oil on canvas, 27 × 171/2 in. (71 × 44.5 cm) (original); 275/8 × 175/16 in. (70.2 × 44.1 cm) (present), Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY.

the Affirmation of the New”—abstract representations of form relations in space. The Prouns flew into a void and signified an infinite horizon, relating their movement to the fourth dimension. Lissitzky claimed that they were a method for constructing the new world and signs of a social utopia that the Revolution would bring about: “The Proun begins with surface arrangements, then moves to spatially modeled constructions, before reaching the stage of constructing all forms of life.”15 In 1922, one of Lissitzky’s Proun-like works incorporated a documentary photograph of a football player into geometrical forms. The photograph helped Lissitzky to invest his severe formal scheme with real-life content, which was represented here by a footballer captured while kicking a ball. The figurative player,

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as well as the unexpected spatial relationships and distorted regularity of the shapes of abstract figures, were meant to render a feeling of movement and enhance dynamic tensions. The issues of gravity, which were overcome in the Proun world, tackle floating geometrical elements and feature a photographed footballer who seems to be floating over the whole dynamic composition. Just as Malevich did in his Suprematist painting, the image of a footballer, combined with geometric and spatial forms, was meant as a way of rendering its revolutionary and infinite force. The black circle resembles a ball to be kicked by the footballer and he is seen rising toward it, just like Icarus toward the sun.16 In contrast to the mythological protagonist, however, he has no need to fear the forces of nature, because thanks to the victorious Revolution he has become a steadfast anonymous superman who crosses time and space with his ability to fly. The footballer who breaks the law of gravity and floats just like pure Proun compositions bears similarities with Lissitzky’s New Man from the 1923 portfolio Victory over the Sun (Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.5 El Lissitzky, “The New Man,” from Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun,” 1920–21, published 1923. Lithograph, composition: 121/8 × 125/8 in (30.8 × 32.1 cm); sheet: 21 × 177/8 in (53.3 × 45.4 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York/Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY. © Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York.

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The portfolio was based on the Futurist opera written by Aleksiej Kruczenykh with libretto by Mikhail Matiushin and set designs by Malevich, first staged in 1913, where the sun was replaced by a black circle. The embodiment of the eternal values and forces of nature was captured by the Futurist “strongmen” who, together with sportsmen and the aviator, were all agents of change. They represented the New Order to be brought about by the great Revolution. Lissitzky’s New Man was depicted as a proud, Communist protagonist, fearless to conquer the universe. Just like the photographed footballer, he is sketched in a movement taking a step toward the future, toward the conquest of the sun and the forces of nature, which will enable him to destroy the old cosmic energy. This was to lead to a release of the new energy which Lissitzky spoke of, the new energy brought about by the Communist revolution and its aim to establish a new proletarian culture. Defeating the sun was related to establishing a new natural order in the universe and implied the dawn of the new era of human immortality. Lissitzky used an image of a footballer overcoming gravity to link Suprematist cosmic infinity and dynamic Proun constructions to the utopian Communist vision. In 1926, Lissitzky created two photographic murals entitled (Record) Runner in the City and Footballers to design the project of the International Red Stadium prepared by Mikhail Korzhev, a member of the ASNOVA group of Russian Constructivist architects. However, the International Red Stadium was never realized according to Korzhev’s plans, the project of the stadium featured in Lissitzky’s book Russland (1929), where he underlined: The unity of both body and soul education links the sports buildings to the activity of the clubs. The new society wants a strong generation, because that strength equals optimism and joy of life. This is why physical culture is such an important part of social culture as a whole. We emphasize physical culture, the culture of the body, instead of [breaking] sporting records.17

In this way, Lissitzky brought attention to the importance of physical education for the formation of a new society and the New Man—a strong worker able to take up the fight for socialism. And on the other hand, he clearly expressed his opposition to the ideas put forward by the Olympic movement, the ideas of using sports to achieve “sporting records.” Russian Constructivists strictly opposed the activity of the International Olympic Committee and were, on the contrary, involved in worker sport propaganda. They collaborated with the organization Red Sport International (RSI ), established in 1921, that organized the so-called Spartakiads—the Worker Olympics—the multisport events directed explicitly against all chauvinism, racism, sexism, and social exclusivity. Thus, they were not based on achieving sport records, but for the enjoyment of the working class and Communist propaganda through sport. Spartakiad was an international sporting event dedicated to the inception of the First Five Year Plan and the tenth anniversary of the Soviet sports movement, largely dominated by Soviet athletes. The organizing Committee of the 1st Moscow Spartakiad suggested:

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Our Spartakiad is sharply distinct from the bourgeois Olympics, now taking place in Amsterdam. At those games there is an attempt to achieve victories at any cost and establish new records. Defending “national honor” with specially prepared athletes is an end in itself. The Spartakiad has the task of demonstrating physical culture and sport as one form of preparing workers in the struggle for socialism.18

The RSI commissioned Gustav Klutsis for the visual propaganda of this event (Figure 5.6), to compose a series of nine postcards, in which he pasted together female and male sportsmen in the form of sporting heroes who remain anonymous. They were the heroes of the proletarian masses, equaling Lenin, whose effigy was also visible on the postcards. “Soviet physical culture is one of the components of the cultural revolution in the USSR ,” indicated Gustav Klutsis on one of them.19 They presented various sport disciplines: javelin throw, discus throw, diving, cycling, horse riding, pole vault, relay, football, shot put, tennis, and shooting. Among other sports disciplines, we can observe a footballer floating above a background composed of stills from football matches, cut and pasted in various arrangements. The letter “S” for Spartakiada is set at a dynamic angle across the perfect athletic body. The footballer is captured at the moment of shooting a goal, with his right leg raised after the kick. Here, just like in Lissitzky’s Prouns, gravity has been overcome by the new sporting superman. The photomontage technique applied by Klutsis was regarded by Russian Avantgarde artists as a component of the new common language and an ideal medium for visual propaganda. It appeared not only in postcards but also in the illustrated press. One of the most famous photomontages was Political Football by Aleksandr Rodchenko, which served as an illustration for the magazine Za Rubezhom (“Abroad”), No. 5 of 1930. The magazine was founded by Maxim Gorky and supported by Joseph Stalin. It was aimed at informing people of the events in Western Europe and the world. Rodchenko collaborated with the magazine as its designer, executing for it some political designs with anti-war statements on what was going on outside of the Soviet state. The year 1930 held the first World Cup in Uruguay, and football became more popular than ever before. Rodchenko’s photomontage, however, does not show the beauty of the game, but features instead British policemen juxtaposed with football players. The characteristic hats pasted on photographic stills of footballers suggest a riot between the footballers and the police. The whole situation is witnessed by football fans and controlled by one policeman who resembles a referee. Rodchenko seems to show how a football game between the two teams could be compared to a fight between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. He focuses on England, the birthplace of football and a country governed by a monarchy that suppresses its proletarian masses, therefore serving and reinforcing Communist propaganda. He also shows the status of equality among the people and how the bourgeois authorities are suppressors, represented through the use of appropriate uniforms. The sporting uniform again refers here to equality. If the police uniforms were removed, the photomontage would not convey such a strong political message. Rodchenko, just like other Constructivists, gradually rejected traditional plastic art and from the late 1920s focused almost entirely on new media. In 1928, in a text

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Figure 5.6 Gustav Klutsis, Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event, 1928. Offset lithograph, 53/4 × 41/8 in. (14.1 × 10.5 cm), Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY. entitled The Paths of Modern Photography, he suggested that photography should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people’s capacity to see from all sides.20 He later joined one of the most famous groups of photographers called October. They experimented with cropping and used diagonal compositions, extreme close-ups, and bird’s and worm’s eye views, applying all this to the expression of Socialist ideas. Rodchenko suggested that the photographer should find the most expressive viewpoint to alert the viewer to the potential of the medium. As part of the October group, it was Olga Ignatovich who took a shot of a football game

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from a new perspective, capturing an attack from behind the goal in her work called Ça alors, 1930. New ways of capturing images of a football game were also introduced in the sphere of Constructivist film. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) presented scenes from a football game as an intrinsic part of his portrayal of “a day in the life of the Soviet Union.” In one of the scenes, the hand-held camera focuses directly on the ball floating in the air. The cameraman constantly changes the camera’s position, angle and speed of movement through space. In so doing, the camera’s point of view and motion are identified with those of the footballers and contribute to the viewer’s motor-sensory experience of the event. The screen directions and comparative velocities from one shot to the next are such that their movements seem to blend or fuse, one into another.21 As Vlada Petrić observed: “overlapping (. . .) slows down the actual movement of the football players and creates the illusion that they are dancing or that the ball is ‘flying’ in the air.’ ”22 We can observe the presence of footballers in accordance with the dynamic transformations of Russian Avant-garde art: from Malevich’s pre-revolutionary Suprematist painting to Lissitzky’s Prouns, Klutsis’ and Rodchenko’s photomontage practices, the October group’s ideas of photography, and Vertov’s new language of the cinema. The artists approached football through different means of expression and, in time, gradually focused more on new media as opposed to traditional painting and sculpture, which in the Constructivists’ view were useless forms for the new proletarian culture. The deployment of new media, such as photography and photomontage, exemplified the possibilities for mass-reproduction, which were intended to play an important role as a component of popular and not elitist culture. Photography and film proved to be the ideal means for transmitting propaganda messages to the masses. It was precisely in Avant-garde art that an anonymous footballer was first of all created to be a people’s hero and signifier of modernity. Unlike Italian football teams, Soviet teams were almost non-existent on the international arena either in the 1920s or 1930s. The first major international wins of a Soviet team were that of Spartak Moscow against Basel in 1934 and the Basque national team in 1937. The Soviet Union national team played very rarely in 1930s and did not participate in big international contests until the 1952 Summer Olympics. Before World War II , their most frequent opponent was Turkey and one of these games was depicted by Nicolai Dormidontov in 1935 in the style according to Socialist Realism. From the mid-1930s, when the new Socialist Realist style became the officially sanctioned form of artistic creation, images of footballers remained present in Soviet art but in this more traditional mode of painting, as exemplified by the work by Aleksandr Deineka. While his more painterly style differed from Constructivist approaches, his painting entitled Footballer (1932, Figure 5.7), which foreshadowed his later Socialist Realist works, similarly refers to propagandistic constructions of the New Soviet Man and the nation’s ideal of a footballer-aviator. In this example, he flies not above the football field, but against an important national building—Novodedichy Convent—the monastery, which had been transformed in 1926 into a history and art museum.23 This testifies to the fact that, even in 1930s, the

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Figure 5.7 Aleksandr Deineka, Footballer, 1932. Oil on canvas, 116.5 × 91.5 cm. Courtesy of the Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery. Photo: AGE Fotostock America Inc.

figure of a footballer floating above the ground seemed to be an important artistic motif. But in the case of new ideological content under Stalinism, it aligned much more clearly with the national historical emblems and realization of the Socialist dream of conquering space. The football painted in the top right-hand corner resembles the sun, while the player himself is confidently approaching the ball in a manner reminiscent of the Icarus myth. Just like in Constructivist art he is perceived as an embodiment of the New Soviet Man, devoid of the sense of gravity, capable of rising into the air, and resembling the important image of the young confident Soviet Icarus.24

Conclusion Comparing Avant-garde works from the 1910s–1930s in Italy and Russia reveals some similar approaches to the depictions of footballers. Pre-Fascist and pre-Soviet period

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in Avant-garde art is marked here by Boccioni and Malevich’s explorations of the fourth dimension and bodily dynamism in painting through the visual representation of a moving footballer. Since their understanding of these ideas was very different, both Boccioni and Malevich came to different painterly results. The Italian Futurist caught the footballer in the ceaseless simultaneity of kicking the ball so that it would undergo a total dematerialization in the painting’s dynamical and luminous surroundings. Malevich, on the other hand, while depicting the moving footballer, did not focus on capturing the movements of the human body in a dynamic action, but rendered a sensation of bodily dynamism in the composition of geometric forms. It was not by accident that both Boccioni and Malevich used the same image, the footballer, which could function as an allegory of a modern hero for the new sporting era. The Footballer was regarded by both Italian Futurists and Malevich as an icon of modernity, the New Man, the heroic man of the future, powerful, and in perfect control of mind and body, equal to the image of an aviator. Later on, the embodiment of New Man in Futurist/Fascist and Constructivist/ Soviet art of the 1920s and 1930s showed a similar combination of a footballer’s skills with the capacity to fly. The Footballer, as the New Fascist and the New Soviet Man, was a superman with a healthy body, defying the rules of gravity and floating above the ground. While the Futurist/Fascist iconography of footballers by Dottori and Prampolini relates to religious and Christian dogmas of the Church, the Russian Avant-garde artists—as could be seen in work by El Lissitzky and Klutsis—deploy the myth of the Soviet Icarus. These Constructivist images highlight just one footballer, floating toward the ball, as if toward the sun. This concept was also visible in a more realist Deineka’s painting, which was shown in Italy at the Venice Biennale in 1932 in the Russian Pavilion. The use of football motifs in art allowed for an exploration of new dimensions and new ways of seeing. Together with football’s function as a modern mass spectacle and a new form of modern entertainment, it perfectly served Futurist/Fascist and Constructivist/Soviet purposes. However, we can also trace the different means by which artists referred to the beautiful game. In Futurist visual art, images of footballers appeared most of all in painting, and Constructivist modes of expression can be found in the spheres of new media: photography, photomontage, and film. In that sense, Futurist art, which used painterly modes, began to look more out-dated and historical. After all, Futurists exhibited their football-themed paintings at the Olympic Art Competitions. Italian Avant-garde artists were therefore involved in sporting propaganda, not only for the Fascist State but also for the International Olympic Committee. On the contrary, the Russian Constructivists propagated workers’ sport and created propaganda for the RSI organization that strictly opposed the IOC . Placing Italian and Russian Avant-garde artworks in the context of sport history in the 1920s and 1930s, we can observe that Futurists glorified national victories on the international arena, while Constructivists seemed to regard footballers as general participants of fizkultura, expressing the importance of football in the fizkultura propaganda of the RSI . Sporting culture, together with the fulfilment of a dream to fly,

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created the ideal of post-revolutionary Russian society. Avant-garde artists from Italy and Soviet Russia constantly created and modified the idea of New Man who, thanks to the social transformation under the Fascist and Soviet rule, was capable of rising into the air to overcome the laws of nature. This remained a utopian dream of Avant-garde artists, as well as totalitarian dictatorships, that glorified football as an intrinsic part of a cultural revolution connected to the ideas of sport and a healthy nation within the physical culture propaganda.

Notes 1 Up until that time, French modern painters Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, and André Lhote painted fragments of games, often entitling them “football” but, in reality, they depicted rugby games. This indicates that in Europe the names of both games were not yet fully precise. Rugby was historically a form of football and the main association is still called Rugby Football Union, or RFU. 2 Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 1910,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 30. 3 Umberto Boccioni, “Plastic Dynamism 1913,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 93. 4 Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism, 81; see also: Gori, “Model of Masculinity.” 5 Martin, “Football and Fascism,” 80. 6 Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 45. 7 Gli Azzurri (“The Blues”) refers to a nickname for Italian national team. Since 1911 Italian soccer players wore blue kits as blue was the color of the Kingdom of Italy. 8 Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 170. 9 Boccioni et al., “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 1910,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 28. 10 See: Adams, Hare, Cremoncini, and Miracco, Piety and Pragmatism. 11 Catalogue statement by Enrico Prampolini in Mostra futurista di aeropittura e di scenografia, 1931, as quoted in Fearn, Italian Opera since 1945, 4. 12 McReynolds, Russia at Play, 102–5. For more on the history of Soviet sport, see: James, Sport in Soviet Society. 13 Edelman, Spartak Moscow, 22. 14 It is worth mentioning that Constructivism was an offshoot of Suprematism, and later some Russian Constructivists opposed Malevich because of a fundamental difference between the concept of reality, which for Suprematism had spiritual meaning, versus the materialist understanding of Constructivism. The example of El Lissitzky’s artworks was much more in line with varied notions of the term Constructivism. This is best illustrated in Perloff and Reed, Situating El Lissitzky. 15 As quoted in Shastkikh, Vitebsk, 166. 16 A Constructivist vision of Icarus can be also observed in Vladimir Tatlin’s work, who would in 1932 construct the flying machine Letatlin as a monument to the New Soviet Man. 17 El Lissitzky, Russland, 28. 18 As quoted in Edelman, Serious Fun, 38. 19 On the First Workers’ Spartakiad, see: O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR, 30–7.

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20 Rodchenko, “The Paths of Modern Photography.” 21 O’Mahony connected Vertov’s experiments with Klutsis’ photomontages and highlighted that sporting themes in his films followed on from the success of the first Spartakiad: “Rapid editing technique deployed within Verov’s movie act as a cinematic analogy to Klutsis’s Spartakiad postcards,” O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR, 33. 22 Petrić, Constructivism in Film—A Cinematic Analysis, 115. 23 For more on Footballers and Socialist Realist art, see: Strożek, “Footballers in Avantgarde Art and Socialist Realism before World War II .” 24 For more on the Soviet Icarus, see: Tsantsanoglou, “The Soviet Icarus,” 43–56.

6

From Free Agency to Captivity: Football and Spectacle in Contemporary Art Chris McAuliffe

Modernism’s Football: The Body in Freedom Sporting activity, especially masculine athletic competition, is a familiar motif in modern European art. Whether keeping pace with their own times or projecting a utopian future, Avant-garde artists found figures of social, historical, and political progress in sport. They gave voice to Modernism in diverse ways but all took their cue from Charles Baudelaire, who urged artists to pursue the “heroism of modern life.” For the French Impressionists, horse-racing, boating and even roller-skating offered opportunities to explore new social spaces shaped by recreation and consumption. By the early twentieth century, adherents of the many branches of the Avant-garde used sport as the foundation for visual essays in dynamic modernity. In Modernist art, athletes took to the field as the embodiment of vitality, aspiration and transcendence. In Robert Delaunay’s L’Equipe de Cardiff (“The Cardiff Team”) (1913), rugby footballers leap skyward, against a backdrop of modern engineering marvels, including Farman’s biplane, Ferris’s wheel, and Eiffel’s tower. Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913) is a swirl of abstracted muscle and tendon, a Modernist hymn to the powerful work of the athletic body. And in Gustav Klutsis’ photomontage, Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event (1928), a squadron of swan-diving swimmers swoops over robust Soviet citizenathletes. As Przemysław Strożek argues earlier in this book, Avant-garde artists’ representations of the leaping footballer embodied the vitalist ideals and progressive capacities of modernity. In his poem Ode au Sport, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, had affirmed that sport was characterized by audacity and progress.1 Earlier nineteenth-century philosophy had declared the equivalence of sport with human integrity and freedom. Stephen Mumford points to Schiller in the case of the former: “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.”2 Illustrating the latter, William Morgan, in his study of the moral necessity of sport, cites Hegel’s proposition that, “In this exercise of physical powers, man shows his freedom, he shows that he has transformed 115

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his body into an organ of spirit.”3 Morgan goes on to argue that this concept of free self-assertion through games underpinned twentieth-century progressive theories of sport. Freedom, agency and capacity for transformation were united by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Being and Nothingness (1955), when he proposed, through the analogy of a skier on a snowy slope, that “sport is a free transformation of the worldly environment into the supporting element of the action. This fact makes it creative like art.”4 Artists of the early-twentieth-century Avant-gardes celebrated human agency in the athlete’s robust action, vigorous mobility and, typically, masculine resolve. These were paralleled in the visual cultures of advertising and the popular media which frequently melded sport, fashion, and bodily vigor in images of the good life, well-lived. After World War I, however, Modernism’s vitalist sportsmen and women were challenged by the rise of reactionary and totalitarian aesthetics. The neo-classicism of the rappel à l’ordre (return to order) and the athletic Ubermensch (overman) of totalitarianism replaced Modernism’s individualism with statuesque sobriety, the gravity-defying vortices of Modernism were succeeded by stolid totemism.

Postmodernism’s Football: Spectacles of Conflict and Constraint The utopian fusion of sport, agency, and spectacle no longer holds sway among contemporary artists. Sport is now a global, multi-billion-dollar economy, with a new league table—the Forbes SportsMoney Index—registering not only the value but the corporate interconnection of individual athletes, teams, athletic wear manufacturers, sponsors, management agencies, and media channels. It is as if Hegel’s assertion, “sport itself is opposed to serious business, to dependence and need,”5 has been reversed. Sport is no longer opposed to serious business; it is serious business. Football features in four of the top ten businesses on the Forbes ranking, and in seventy of the overall top 400 entries.6 Artists also now associate football with the politics of conflict, social control, and spectacle. The stadium, traditionally characterized primarily in architectural terms as a kind of communal theater, is now seen as a microcosm of new forms of social containment sustained by surveillance and the regulation of public space. With the entrenchment of leisure within global systems of consumption and communication, the scene of football is now more televisual than architectural; the stadium is a platform for the generation of multimedia spectacle, fueling the globally-franchized dissemination of football brands. The passions of the fans are incorporated into a global market in branded merchandise. In a further reversal of Hegel’s formulation, artists see football as enmeshed with dependence and need.

Serious Business, Mimicry, and Subaltern Voices Witnessing the shift of football’s focus from the local to the global, from materiality to spectacle, from freedom to containment, artists have, since the 1980s, become

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increasingly attentive to football’s role in the representation of social relations. Artists approach football as a kind of “social inquiry,” as Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan put it,7 often mimicking football’s commodification of tribalism, its fetishizing of territory and conflict, and, increasingly, its association with sectarianism and xenophobia. Contemporary artists theatricalize the rhetoric of empowerment and resistance, using deceptively casual engagements with football to challenge hierarchical and exclusive structures within the art world. British artist Lucy Gunning’s video, Playing Football (1994–96), shows two women improvizing a football game within the confines of an empty building. Their activity is a kind of infiltration: women taking up a maledominated sport, football intruding into an art gallery, and popular culture invading high culture’s pitch. Gunning seeded the video with contradiction and ambiguity. An outdoor game is relocated indoors and a regulation pitch is replaced by an irregular architecture. The two women appear to be playing by a set of rules but these are of their own making and unintelligible to the viewer. They wear a curious strip; the pure white coat of a doctor on hospital rounds rather than the logo-strewn athletic wear of the professional footballer. The effect is strangely ambiguous; both shambolic and formal, amateurish, and yet technocratic. Critic Paula Smithard saw Gunning’s tactics as disruptive—an attempt to “de-stabilize and highlight binaries which have ensnared concepts of gender”—and self-affirming: “a utopian move to find a space outside masculine and feminine polarizations.”8 But Gunning probably commenced with the simpler proposition that England’s art world was a difficult place to be a girl. In the mid-1990s, the prominent voices of the emerging Young British Artist (YBA ) grouping were male, the most notorious among these being Damien Hirst. Many commentators saw parallels between YBA s and the rise of so-called “lad culture”; both of which reveled in “gestures of proletarian and philistine disaffirmation.”9 Playing Football speaks more of an entrenchment of masculine and feminine polarizations in a booming art market than of a space beyond them. Gunning’s two white-coated players may make their own rules but they do so in a restricted and challenging space. There is an evident aspiration toward a larger field of play, just as there was in Gunning’s earlier video Climbing Around my Room (1994), in which the artist undertook a kind of domestic free climbing that revealed her constricted field of maneuver. In both cases, however, mobility is restricted to what might be declared in the face of an obdurate physical or institutional limit. Nevertheless, Playing Football encapsulated tactics typical of contemporary artists’ engagement with football in the 1990s. The first of these was the pitting of play, and playful art, against the instrumental behaviors and hieratic cultural institutions dominating the art world. This was especially the case in England, where, according to John Roberts, YBA s used “jokes, facetiousness, face-pulling, and goofiness” to propel an “unprofessional and disputatious” practice at odds with the high formality of museums and Postmodern critical discourse alike.10 The second was mimicry: a tactic already deployed in the 1970s in feminist artists’ comical reversals of patriarchal imagery and, by the mid-1990s, more complexly articulated in Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory. Gunning identified the mimicry in

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her work—the domestic mountaineer, the medico footballer—as a form of “implicit questioning.”11 The ambiguity of Playing Football—familiar and yet not, free but constrained—is of a piece with Bhaba’s model of postcolonial mimicry. It is an effect “constructed around an ambivalence” that “must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” in order to generate “the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal.”12 Gunning’s women footballers, an instance of what Bhabha terms “the sign of the inappropriate,”13 had a double target. Broadly, they register the putative inappropriateness of women’s presence within a male-dominated art world. More specifically, they indicate that the cultural inappropriateness of YBA art was a tactic monopolized by lowbrow lads. Increasingly, the meeting of contemporary art and football would be propeled by such multivalent mimicry. Artists engaged with the mass cultural presence of football in order to drive an implicit questioning of the powers of culture, both high and low. As football itself increasingly encompassed everything from violent parochialism through to complex global media strategies, its meanings for artists oscillated wildly between the freedom of play and the constraint of sporting spectacle. At the end of the twentieth century, subaltern cultures rather than practices of empowerment dominated artists’ engagement with football. In the past 25 years, numerous artists have addressed football, some in career-defining or breakthrough art works. But they no longer picture the game in terms of the aspirational vitality of Modernism’s athletes. Instead football engenders images of containment and repression, marginalization and exclusion, surveillance, and spectacle.

Political Football: Infiltration and Social Inquiry In January 1991, Maurizio Cattelan, a young Italian artist with no formal training, a limited track record, and few prospects, made a play for the major league. He arrived uninvited at the Bologna art fair and set up an unregistered stand in a corridor. No one checked Cattelan’s credentials and no one called his bluff; for the duration of the fair this rookie artist mixed it with the art-world players. Cattelan’s unauthorized participation in the fair combined subterfuge, masquerade, and art. Playing the infiltrator and trickster was a well-worn Avant-garde gambit but Cattelan wanted to do more than bamboozle the gallerists and collectors. Calling the project (the event as such and its photographic documentation) Stand Abusivo (“Illegal Stand”) (Figure 6.1), Cattelan regarded it as his first serious foray as an artist.14 It was located, he said, “at the intersection of social inquiry, sculpture and performance.”15 What he peddled at his folding table was not conventional art works but a football team. Cattelan had recently formed the AC Forniture Sud team and presented fairgoers with a modest range of related memorabilia, presented on a table painted as a football pitch. AC Forniture Sud, which translates as Southern Supplies, was a team of African (primarily Senegalese) migrants playing in provincial competition in the EmiliaRomagna district surrounding Bologna. Like Cattelan, the Forniture Sud players were

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Figure 6.1 Maurizio Cattelan, Stand Abusivo, 1991. Installation/performance at Arte Fiera Bologna. Collection of the Maurizio Cattelan Archive.

interlopers. The young black men represented a growing wave of unofficial migration, using the Italian authorities’ propensity to move along rather than prosecute unauthorized arrivals as a gateway into Europe. Frequently encountered as agricultural laborers and street vendors, this southern supply was a target of abuse in the increasingly xenophobic north of Italy. Cattelan’s initial jibe in Stand Abusivo was directed at the commercial operations of the art market. Always somewhat coy about the commodity status of the art works they exhibited, art dealers preferred to characterize themselves as partners with or, at worst, interested patrons of artists. The booming contemporary art market of the 1980s invited unflattering comparisons between commercial art galleries and professional football clubs. Both managed stables of contracted competitors, with much attention being paid to performance, value, and interclub movements. Art magazines began to produce league tables ranking the status of dealers, curators, critics, and artists. And artists were informally grouped into national sides competing in a global arena: the neo-expressionists of Germany, the cool neo-pop Americans, and the poetic mythographers of Italy, whose “three Cs”—Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia—were then among the “must have” players in many a curator’s dream team. Cattelan’s Stand Abusivo insisted on the essentially mercantile character of art dealers’ activities and associated these with emerging social and political tensions in

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Italy. Acting as a squatter at the Bologna fair, Cattelan said, “I adopted the method of the African immigrants who at the time sold anything and everything on the street, and I transposed that to the fair, which was simply a more refined version of a street market.”16 As Graziella Parati notes, in Italy, “The stereotype of the African immigrant was the street vendor; derogatively mimicked through their catchphrase vu’ cumpra [from vuoi comprare?; “Do you want to buy?”].”17 Stand Abusivo both mimicked and marketed the street vendor, quietly chanting, in chorus with all of the legitimate art dealers, “Do you want to buy?” Fond of characterizing himself as an art-world outsider, Cattelan gleefully asserted that “I love the idea of my work showing up like an uninvited guest.”18 He claimed an affinity with his African footballers, socially marginal men whom he positioned within football, which Italians accorded an “almost sacred status” in Cattelan’s opinion.19 Unsure of his own status in the hallowed territory of art, Cattelan remarked in 1994 that, “For a while I saw myself as being almost like an immigrant. I thought the best thing in that case would be to act like a complete foreigner, so that one could lay claim to one’s own autonomy and origins.”20 But illegal African immigrants had little autonomy and their origins were precisely the problem: they would be treated with more severity than an uninvited guest. If apprehended, Cattelan risked only an embarrassing ejection from the art fair (one which would, no doubt, have been documented as an enhancement to his parodic intervention). An illegal immigrant, on the other hand, would be given 15 days to legitimate their status in Italy before facing expulsion; unable to do so, most went deeper underground or crossed borders further into Europe. Immediately after his intrusion into the art fair, Cattelan produced a large work for legitimate display at Bologna’s Galleria comunale d’arte moderna. Stadium (1991) (Figure 6.2) was an oversized foosball table; at 7 meters in length it could accommodate a full football team of eleven players on either side. In the gallery, Cattelan staged foosball matches between his AC Forniture Sud and Cesena, a Serie A team from Romagna, then looking down the barrel of relegation (Figure 6.3). Here, the division between the Italian and the immigrant was writ large. Cesena’s all-Italian team (wearing their black and white strip, emblazoned with the name of their sponsor, an agribusiness company) faced off against the Africans of Forniture Sud. Wearing a strip, designed by Cattelan, emblazoned with the German word Rauss (“Out”), a neo-fascist anti-migrant slogan that he had seen on Paduan walls in his youth, Forniture Sud represented the target of burgeoning racism. Cattelan’s team had been only a mild affront to art fair visitors. What he had in mind with open competition around the foosball table was a football-driven social inquiry into the rise of regionalist racism in Italy. Encapsulated in Lombard League founder Umberto Bossi’s slogan that “Africa begins at Rome,”21 such racism made immigrants the scapegoats for deep resentment against the supposed burden of the south upon the north. While Parati claimed that the Italy of the 1990s was an “alternative country where an anti-immigrant tradition is not yet established,” she acknowledged also that “an immigrant nonetheless faces insurmountable discrimination.”22 Significantly, in the early 1990s, it was in northern Italy—including Padua, Cattelan’s home town, and

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Figure 6.2 Maurizio Cattelan, Stadium, 1991. Wood, acrylic, steel, plastic. 100 × 651 × 120 cm. Installation view: AnniNovanta Galleria comunale d’arte moderna, Bologna, March 28-September 8, 1991. Photo: Fausto Fabbri. Courtesy of the Maurizio Cattelan Archive. Bologna, where he exhibited—that xenophobia and racism became prominent elements in Italian party politics. Often determinedly flippant when discussing his art, Cattelan made an exception in the case of Stand Abusivo and Stadium, treating the two as paired works which established his modus operandi as an artist.23 The formation of a migrant football team

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Figure 6.3 Maurizio Cattelan, Cesena 47—A.C. Forniture Sud 12, 1991. Performance at Galleria comunale d’arte moderna, Bologna, 1991. Black-and-white photograph, 120 × 190 cm. Courtesy of the Maurizio Cattelan Archive. in 1991, he stated, “was an idea that gelled with the times, the period of the rise of the extreme right in Italy, the beginnings of the Northern League, the separatist party, violently opposed to immigration.”24 In fact, Cattelan launched AC Forniture Sud when immigration was a matter of both political controversy and ideological ambiguity in Italy. Immigration laws passed in 1990 had sought to regularize the status of immigrants already in Italy. This reform, dubbed the sanatoria (“healing”), benefited some 220,000 immigrants while also implying that they bore the traces of an infection that had once (or still) threatened the nation.25 In any case, the so-called healing promised not “a Utopian nonracist country but . . . a paese poco-razzista [a less racist country]”26 In the same month that Cattelan staged Stand Abusivo, the Lega Nord united previously dispersed political parties such as the Lega Lombard, Lega Emiliano Romagnola, and Alleanza Toscana into a powerful regional bloc campaigning for the separation of northern Italy (or Padania) from the federal system. In these circumstances, there can be no doubt that Cattelan intended to pit against the north a team composed of the very groups it demonized—the southerner (both Italian and African) and the immigrant (both internal and international). The foosball games staged around Stadium thus aligned the “defense of the native born” against the threat of contaminazione: that is, multiculturalism and hybridity.27 In choosing football as a marker of regional chauvinism, Cattelan recognized not only the existing association of football hooliganism with racism but also that football was an emerging platform

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for the development of right-wing populist politics; Silvio Berlusconi, after all, would soon use the supporter base of his AC Milan team as a foundation for his Forza Italia party.28 Cattelan’s works mark a significant shift in artists’ perception of football and its meaning. In 1984, Renato Guttuso, the venerable Italian figurative painter, reflecting on a series of paintings he had made for the Italian Olympic committee, voiced a classically humanist position: “Nowadays we take pleasure in degrading everything: but I believe in sport as an instrument of culture.” Sport, he felt, offered a “safe catalyst and even a moral help.”29 For Cattelan, only a few years later, football had become a very different instrument: divisive, politicized, and xenophobic. Football represented, in microcosm, the growing social divisions within Italy; between the native-born and the immigrant, between north and south, between white and black, between the legitimate and the interloper. As right-wing exploitation of resentment and territorialism fragmented Italy’s political landscape, Cattelan determined, in Stand Abusivo and Stadium, “to use something popular and prominent to deliver a message: football and immigration were the perfect tools.”30 And yet, for Cattelan, freedom and self-definition—the central terms in the nineteenth-century equation of sport with wholeness and art—remained pivotal to his practice. Over the course of his rapid rise to international contemporary art stardom, Cattelan repeatedly asserted that art was a domain in which he could forge his own identity, however he chose: “Art is a kind of open environment where you can make your own rules, and it works as soon as you follow those rules. What counts is staying true to yourself and your own vision of art, whatever it is.”31 On the other hand, football, as Cattelan pictured it in the 1990s, embodied the new rules emerging in Italy’s Second Republic (an informal title for the polity after the 1992 elections): party political platforms were being constructed around regional chauvinism, racial exclusion, and populist grievance. Stand Abusivo and Stadium have an ambivalent character, indicative of what became a common attitude toward football among artists in the 1990s: one that coupled the inherited, ideal discourse of free agency with the recognition of contemporary football as a cocktail of power, territorialism, and social divisiveness.

Football’s New Pitch: The Stadium as Media Architecture The structures of contemporary football—the substitution of franchise for club, of stadium for pitch, of televisual consumer for fan—seem to artists to be dedicated to the articulation of power rather the exercise of the body in liberty. The principal vectors are now capital, spectacle, and commodified tribalism. Just as fans lament football’s transition from club to corporation, or from local community to global brand, so artists reflect on the incorporation of intensely affective experiences—playing, supporting, and living football—into a multi-billion dollar experience economy. The space of the arena, once a carnivalesque affirmation of community, is now a theater of hate, or, as measures to control violent tribalism were introduced, an architecture of soft incarceration.

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This was the space that Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas explored in his Stadium: Homage to the Audience (1989–2006) (Figure  6.4), an ongoing project consisting of successive iterations of a multimedia installation. This sequence of art works approached the stadium as an architectural form rooted in classical antiquity. While recognizing that the stadium had always been a “container for mass events,” Muntadas sought to map operations and effects taking place in the contemporary stadium, a “media architecture” shaped by technology, capital, consumption, and power. 32 Stadium was typically staged in a modestly-sized, rectangular room. In its center, Muntadas installed an oval of simple, unfluted columns. These marked out an abstracted and condensed field of contest; not a playing field as such but an allusion to the historical foundations of the stadium (and sporting spectacle) in the Roman arena. Dramatically lit by spotlights in a semi-darkened room, the columns of Muntadas’ arena also evoked the stark neo-classicism of the totalitarian arena, in particular, Albert Speer’s cathedral of light, an array of vertically projected anti-aircraft spotlights deployed at a 1937 Nazi party rally. The floor of this arena is covered with sand, upon which are projected images of stadium attendees; relocated from the stands to the arena, the sports audience becomes the star of the show. In each corner of the room, a cycle of 320 images and texts was projected onto a large screen. The action, so to speak, did not take place on the playing field but in and

Figure 6.4 Antoni Muntadas, Stadium: Homage to the Audience, 1989–2006. Installation and projected images, dimensions variable. Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, IVAM , Valencia, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

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around the stadium itself; in fact, visitors had to turn their back on the arena to view the screens. Muntadas framed the site of sporting competition with ideologies, technologies, and procedures representing significant moments in twentieth-century sporting spectacle. An image of the Colosseum marked an historical point of origin of almost abstract purity. Subsequent images indicated radical technical changes in the stadium experience: the artificial environment of the roofed stadium; the massive public address systems and giant screens that flood the arena with a continuous soundtrack of exhortations and advertisements; the television camera crews tracking, broadcasting, and replaying the spectacle to a global audience. The audience appears as a regimented and choreographed mass; Muntadas projected images of terrace barriers and directional signage governing seating arrangements, along with flagwaving Americans and saluting Nazi party members. Athletes were represented as figures swept up in a succession of political systems: the Ubermensch (a Nazi neoclassical sculpture), the media superstar (an athlete signing autographs), and the hostage (a grainy image of a hooded Palestinian terrorist at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games). Far from being a field of pleasure, the terraces of the stadium are pictured as a site of power and horror; police patrol with sniffer dogs, football fans are crushed against a perimeter fence. Muntadas’ installation cataloged the thoroughgoing permeation of the stadium by politics and technology, and with it the redefinition of sporting spectacle in the second half of the twentieth century. The stadium was no longer merely a platform for sporting competition, it acted, argues Iris Dressler, as “television studio, as prison, as a relevant target for attacks, as a testing ground for counter insurgency measures and terrorist attacks, as location factor, as entertainment park, as political stage, as a means of advertising.”33 As Dressler observes, the body in the stadium (both the athlete’s and the spectator’s) is now stage-managed, disciplined even in its carnivalesque excess.34 All is choreographed, from the assigned, color-coded seating through to the crowd’s video- and audio-assisted ecstasy. The stadium was now “a place or instrument . . . of premeditated and organized contradiction: between presence and absence, inclusion and exclusion, ideology and the innocuous, the private and the public, hierarchy and equality, control and unpredictability, violence and spectacle.”35 Prior to initiating the Stadium sequence, Muntadas had previously explored the intersection of media and power, and the ambiguities of public, private, and politicized spaces. Resident in the United States since 1971, Muntadas would have witnessed the structural and textual acceleration of sporting spectacle into its Postmodern form; the fusion of public spaces and televisual consumer events into media architectures that were both physical and virtual. The Louisiana Superdome (an image of which appears in Stadium) opened in 1975 and epitomized the new multimedia, multipurpose mega-stadium. With a capacity of 77,000 and boasting a reconfigurable arena, the Superdome accommodated a wide range of events—sport, concerts, political conventions, even a papal visit—making it clear that the structures of spectacle applied not only to sport but also to politics and religion. The stadium, as Muntadas suggests, is an engineering challenge not merely in its physical scale but also in its structural mutability, its fusion of audio-visual technologies, and its plug-and-play connections

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with media networks. The Stadium installation was, in effect, an artist’s blueprint plotting the solutions developed to meet this challenge. The concept of the stadium as a platform for political theater was, by the late 1980s, familiar. Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” had rigorously codified the aesthetics of Nazi stadium spectacles in Leni Riefenstahl’s films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1936). Furthermore, she had pointed to the translation of aspects of fascist spectacle into the mass choreography of Busby Berkley’s musical which, in turn, provided templates for the ever-burgeoning theatricality of opening ceremonies for the modern Olympics. At the same time, the connection between the stadium and rightwing oppression had been made literal in the use of Chile’s national football stadium as a prison in the aftermath of General Pinochet’s 1973 coup. This association of the stadium with death and horror was reinforced by a succession of tragic mass deaths at football stadiums in Moscow (1982), Bradford, Brussels (both 1985), and Sheffield (1989).36 By the late 1980s, parochial, racist, and political violence seemed inseparable from football culture, whether in European hooligans or the transformation of football clubs into gangs of political enforcers (as in the case of Winnie Mandela’s Mandela United Football Club). Muntadas’ projections of the words “power,” “politics,” “entertainment,” and “manipulation” among images of policed and media-saturated stadiums made headlines out of effects that the Postmodern spectator experienced both directly and implicitly. Likewise, Muntadas’ images of media technology, merchandizing, and promotion registered the overt union of sport and the entertainment industry. For football fans in the United States, a prominent symptom of the advent of Postmodern sport was the establishment of the New York Cosmos team. Founded in 1970 by entertainment executives (the Ertegun brothers of Atlantic Records fame, in partnership with Warner Communications), the Cosmos recruited legendary international players such as Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer, surrounding them with Hollywood-style glamor.37 The Cosmos were a prominent, but far from unique, instance of the reconfiguration of the spectator as a consumer. As Raymond Williams had observed in the early 1960s, everyday life as a “pattern of culture” or “structure of feeling” was giving way to the consumer identity, “the stimulated and controlled absorption of the products of an external and autonomous system.”38 For artists, faced with the immersive procedures of televisual spectacle, football seemed more like surrender and imprisonment than freedom.

Global Brands and the Marketing of Sporting Rivalry The recent mutation of football teams from local clubs into global franchises has given rise to a succession of curious double identities. A football club claims deep local roots while simultaneously extending its presence and audience worldwide. Tribal loyalties and the visceral theater of conflict are evoked even as these diffuse into televisual and online experiences. Historical heraldry, such as the club crest, strip, or stadium, is recast as branded leisurewear. Glaswegian artist Roderick Buchanan is better placed than most to explore the identity of the football fan in the age of the club-as-franchise. “Of all the cities of

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England and Scotland,” writes historian Andrew Davies, “Glasgow is most widely associated with sectarianism . . . The city is renowned for its religion, violence and football, three elements which crystallize in the uniquely bitter encounters between the city’s two major football clubs, Rangers and Celtic.”39 A rivalry dating back to the 1880s has seen the condensation of political and religious antagonisms, many of them rooted in the English occupation of Ireland, into fans’ allegiance to the Protestant Rangers and the Catholic Celtic. The “Old Firm” rivalry is a pillar of the voluminous literature on Scottish sectarianism, an issue that is frequently seen in terms of contemporary and historical football-related violence.40 Recognizing football as the platform upon which Glaswegian social divisions are learned, performed, and perpetuated, Buchanan has undertaken a series of art projects which reveal how contemporary social experience is shaped by deeply rooted histories of sectarianism. In the video Love/Hate/Celtic/Rangers (2002), Buchanan asked a group of school students to name which football club they loved and which they hated. Fast-paced editing resulted in a rapid-fire succession of teenage talking heads chanting “Celtic” and “Rangers.” However, because the prompting questions are excised, there is no direct way of determining each of the speakers’ preferences. Attempting to detect each child’s allegiance, the viewer focuses on vocal intonation and facial expression, looking for clues and, almost without realizing, acting out the daily inscription of Glasgow’s sectarian geography in social exchange. The schoolchildren themselves have already learned the affiliations that will be a defining element in their lives. Bar one, that is: the final speaker, a young girl, gleefully cries “Aberdeen.” In that playful defiance, Buchanan discovers the possibility of a Glaswegian identity beyond historically demarcated rivalry. In other works exploring fan affiliation, Buchanan unearthed a new factor driving a paradoxical growth and diffusion of sporting tribalism. As branded merchandise became an increasingly significant source of income for sports teams, and global television broadcasting increased both their allure and reach, the proliferating use of jerseys, warm up gear, and caps as everyday streetwear introduced a cosmopolitan note into previously sectarian streetscapes. In Work in Progress (1993–95) (Figure 6.5), Buchanan photographed Scottish fans wearing Inter Milan and AC Milan kits whom he had encountered on the street. Continental style superseded Glasgow’s traditional tribal colors, acknowledging sporting rivalry but displacing it to Europe. As Scottish fans donned the kit of Italian teams, it seemed that the heraldry of opposing tribes was everywhere but its foundations nowhere (or rather, were in clothing stores rather than in the Balkanized streets of Glasgow). Likewise, in Coast to Coast Dennistoun (1997–2000) and Yankees (1996), Buchanan documented the embrace by Scottish and European youth of American major league teams; basketball, baseball, and gridiron (but not, pointedly, football). Buchanan’s quasi-anthropological street photography brought to light peculiar, even comical tribes—Parisian Yankees, for example—and identified in youth fashion a symptom of one of the most significant recent changes to sport. Fan allegiance was no longer shaped purely by local or genetic affiliation; that is, attending a match or inheriting a family loyalty. It could now be shaped by televisual consumption and articulated

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Figure 6.5 Roderick Buchanan, Work in Progress, 1993–95. Thirty-nine photographs, mounted and laminated onto rigid PVC plus vinyl lettering. Each photograph: 49.00 × 39.00 cm. Collection: National Galleries of Scotland.

through brand affiliation. Buchanan had used the colors of Celtic (green) and Rangers (blue) to register the historical “fault-line of sectarianism” running through Glasgow.41 Buchanan used traces of humor and comical reversals of chauvinism to stall the bellicose rhetoric of football rivalries. In Turnaround (1999), he screened two versions of an England–Italy match broadcast with the audio track switched. The innate bias of the television commentators was evident in the mismatch between commentary and play. Although most viewers would have found the Italian commentary unintelligible, the varying cadence and intensity of both English and Italian commentators’ voices revealed their different and biased perceptions of the game. Encouraged by Buchanan to dwell upon the commentators’ voices as such—their vocal performance as opposed to its captioning of screen images—viewers could hear how national affiliation shaped a spectator’s attention to and valuing of a football match. At the same time, a national perspective on the game, dramatized in the commentators’ voices, became, in the timehonored phrase, sound and fury amounting to nothing. For Tombez la Chemise (literally, “Take off your shirt”; colloquially, “Get ready to play hard”) (2002), Buchanan edited together video footage of the conclusion of multiple World Cup matches, showing the traditional courtesy of players exchanging shirts after the final whistle had blown. Footballers who had, moments ago, represented nations in conflict became first (without their shirt) a neutral, merely physical unit and then (having donned their opponent’s shirt) the Other against whom they had been pitted. This instant mutability of allegiance made the preceding 90 minutes of chauvinistic frenzy seem almost comical.

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Ceremonial Freedom in the Era of Spectacle In repeatedly mapping constraint and commodification within football’s global economy, contemporary artists appear to have abandoned the body-in-liberty that was the hallmark of Modernism’s version of football. Within the twenty-first-century spectacle of football, it has never been easier and never more difficult to be a football fan. What elements of football’s promise of freedom remain for artists? Khaled Sabsabi, a digital media artist living in Sydney’s western suburbs, addressed this question ambivalently in Wonderland (2013–14) (Figure 6.6). Two large screens, facing each other across a narrow space, enveloped the viewer in footage of the Red and Black Bloc (RBB ), supporters of the Western Sydney Wanderers. Sabsabi is fascinated by the choreographed body of the football fan (so much so that in other installations, he has paired the RBB with footage of Balinese dancers). Even onscreen, the RBB are an intimidating physical and vocal presence, teetering on the brink of a mob. The footage raises the specter of machismo, hooliganism, and tribal violence even as it celebrates the fairytale rise of an emerging football club in Sydney’s maligned western suburbs. In the crowd’s ecstatic rituals, Sabsabi sees signs of self-orchestration and selfaffirmation. The residents of Sydney’s western suburbs have long been derided: the “westie” is colloquially declared a working-class, under-educated, welfare-dependent migrant. The Wanderers have become a focus for westie pride. Founded in 2012, the club topped the Australian A-League table in its first season and, at the end of its second, took the Asian Football Confederation Cup and was named Asian club of the year. This unheralded, record-breaking debut was transformational, converting the

Figure 6.6 Khaled Sabsabi, Wonderland, 2014. Dual channel HD video color, sound, 25 minutes 30 seconds. Courtesy of Milani Gallery.

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western suburbs into the wonderland of Sabsabi’s title. Significantly, the Wanderers club was built on strong community foundations. Community and online consultation generated the club’s name and colors, as well as shaping the style of football played. (And it is important to note that major league sport teams in Australia are still structured as membership clubs.) The RBB itself was formed independently and was seen by fans as their contribution to the formation of the Wanderers; the group delivers a fan presence—vocal, visual, theatrical—never before seen in Australian football. For Sabsabi, the RBB represent an anarchic, seriously unserious, affirmation of western Sydney pride. In the age of spectacle, football, for Sabsabi, still offers the fan access to “the central transfigurative power of ceremony,” something that can be pitted against the “white noise of political theater.”42 Indeed, in 2015, Wanderers fans (along with Melbourne Victory’s North Terrace fan bloc) successfully lobbied for the introduction of an appeal and review process for banned fans by staging highly-publicized mass walkouts from football matches. Such modest, and admittedly ambivalent, successes are few. The football stadium remains a highly constrained and contested territory. As Jordanian artist Ala Younis showed in Plan for a Greater Baghdad (2015) (Figure 6.7), her installation for the 2015 Venice Biennale, the stadium still serves as the lens focusing the ambitions of dictator and liberator alike. Combining architectural model, historical photographs, and documents, Younis traced the convoluted story of the Baghdad Gymnasium project. The project originated

Figure 6.7 Ala Younis, Plan for Greater Baghdad, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo, 2015. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.

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in the late 1950s with a visit by Le Corbusier to Baghdad, linking the internationalization of European Modernism with the modernization of so-called developing nations. Over the 25 years that elapsed before the stadium’s eventual completion in 1980, Baghdad transitioned through a succession of regimes before its inauguration as the Saddam Hussein gymnasium. The eventual uses to which the stadium was put reflect the condensations of sport, spectacle, and conflict that have preoccupied artists in recent years. The stadium hosted sporting events, along with political campaigns and patriotic concerns, and was occupied as a military base by American troops. Younis’ pristine architectural models populate the Modernist purity of the stadium with models of Le Corbusier, the dictator Hussein, Iraqi artists, and Mickey Mouse. Among the documents displayed is one that maps the continued play of constraint and resistance within the football stadium. A 2003 letter from Iraqi sportswriter Hassanin Mubarak to the United States’ President requests an end to the occupation of the People’s National Stadium in order that athletes and all Iraqis could “return back to their lives.” Whatever the tainted history of the stadium, it represented the opportunity for a kind of post-dictatorial normalcy. A return to the stadium was a pathway to the Olympic Games and other international forums. Where Modernism’s footballers leapt in freedom, Younis joined numerous contemporary artists in witnessing footballers (and football fans) playing on the site of their own captivity.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

de Coubertin, Ode au sport, 7–8. Mumford, Watching Sport, 136. Morgan, Why Sports Morally Matter, 174. Sartre, in Morgan and Meier, Philosophic Inquiry Into Sport, 169. Morgan, Why Sports Morally Matter, 243. “The Forbes SportsMoney Index,” Forbes, February 2017: https://www.forbes.com/ sports-money-index/#24f3cb521d35 [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 38. Smithard, “Grabbing the Phallus by the Balls.” Roberts, “Mad for it,” 32. Roberts, “Mad for it,” 29. Fortnum, Contemporary British Women Artists in Their Own Words, 68. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 39. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 38. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 39. Parati, “Strangers in Paradise,” 171. Matt, Interviews 2, 68. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 39. Bonami, Maurizio Cattelan, 180. Agnew, “The Rhetoric of Regionalism,” 160.

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Parati, “Strangers in Paradise,” 183. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 39. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 39. Parati, “Strangers in Paradise,” 170. Parati, “Strangers in Paradise,” 170. Dawson and Palumbo, “Hannibal’s Children,” 167–8. See: Agnew, Forza Italia. Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano, Renato Guttuso, 16. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 39. Grenier, “Tout Cattelan!” 38. Dressler, “What is a Stadium?” 22. Dressler, “What is a Stadium?” 21. Dressler, “What is a Stadium?” 26. Dressler, “What is a Stadium?” 21. See: Darby, Johnes, and Mellor, Soccer and Disaster. See: Newsham, Once in a Lifetime. Williams, The Long Revolution, 297. Davies, “Football and Sectarianism in Glasgow during the 1920s and 1930s,” 200. See: Murray, The Old Firm. Claire Mitchell, “Roderick Buchanan: The Dear Blue/Green Place,” The List, March 27, 2007: https://www.list.co.uk/article/1696-roderick-buchanan [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 42 de Almeida, “Everything and Nothing: Khaled Sabsabi,” 110.

Part Four

Soccer and Gender

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Feminist Art and Women’s Soccer Jennifer Doyle

Sports structure and orient artworks differently. Artists may take sports scenes as a representational subject, as does Thomas Eakins in his paintings of rowing, baseball and boxing (e.g., Salutat, 1899), or they might center their work on athletes themselves, as does Catherine Opie in her portraits of football players (2007–9) and of the swimmer Diana Nyad (2010–13). Artists might work directly with the physical practice of a sport, as do Jennifer Locke and Charles Fairbanks in their (very different) approaches to wrestling (e.g., Locke’s Match, 2007; Fairbanks’ Flexing Muscles, 2010). Artists might work with a sports culture and context, appropriating the signatures of a sport’s fan-culture, its instruments, or its spatial logic in the construction of objects and installation. David Hammons and Kori Newkirk have both made use of basketball hoops, Jeffrey Gibson beads punching bags (e.g., What We Want, What We Need, 2014), and Sabrina Chou has used bleachers, field-markers, and rackets in her installation art (HR, 2015). The more mediated the sport, the more media itself becomes a part of a sport’s entry into the art gallery. For example, Vanalyne Green’s video The House that Ruth Built (1989) meditates on gender and desire by narrating the artist’s relationship to men’s baseball as a national pastime through television broadcasts. In his series Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2005), Paul Pfeiffer erases a series of athletes from broadcast images of their performance; for his installation, The Saints (2007), he created the visceral experience of being in a crowd at a match using only sound. Pfeiffer centers our attention on the apparatus that makes the spectacle feel spectacular— viewership, spectatorship, and audience are the subject of these works. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) (which I discuss below) both fall into this category and have circulated widely within museum exhibitions. Less well-known works of this genre include Pied La Biche’s Refait (2010), a dual-channel video in which the artists create a shot-for-shot re-make of the penalty shoot-out of a 1982 World Cup match, and Miguel Calderón’s Mexico vs. Brazil (2004), which edits together broadcast footage of matches featuring the two teams to imagine an impossible result, in which Mexico wins 17–0. The scale of “the global game” as a commercial spectacle yields an incredible range of artworks: the sport fruits an intense archive in broadcast, through eSports, print culture, and social media. Artists work with all of this material. Soccer is less the subject of these sports than it is an occasion to engage the mediation of experience. The 135

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mediation of our access to the game is one of the strongest elements of art about sports around which there is this commercial universe. Not all sports participate in that commercialized spectacle, however, and not all athletes competing in sports with a commercial life have access to that image-world. This essay considers how the intense sexism of sports media and the rigid gender segregation of mainstream sports cultures impact contemporary art about sport. Cheryl Cooky, Michael Messner, and Michela Musto have demonstrated that while women’s participation in sports has increased dramatically, and while there is a much richer, more abundant sport-centered mediascape, over the past 25 years media coverage of women’s sports has worsened. They write: “The deepening quantitative dearth of coverage of women’s sports and the ways in which the continuous cacophony of exciting coverage of men’s sports is counterpoised with the tendency to present most of the few women’s sports stories in a matter-of-fact, uninspiring and lackluster manner.”1 Reviewing the place of women’s sports in local televised news (in Los Angeles) and on ESPN ’s highlight shows, they found “a deepening silence”: across their sample (drawn from several weeks of broadcast in 2014), a mere 3.2 percent of coverage addressed women athletes.2 The stark contrast in the quantity and quality of media material centered on women athletes can be seen in the character of feminist work about women’s soccer. The elements that make the men’s game feel spectacular are totally absent from feminist engagements with the sport; the material situation of making work about women’s sports is qualitatively and quantitatively different.3 Before exploring how gender matters to artists working with the “global” and “beautiful” game, however, let us briefly consider the general question of how media matters to the experience of sports, and how artists work with media itself, as a material, in ways that bear upon our understanding of the sport spectacle as not simply the transmission of an athletic event, but the production of our sense of what sports is, as well as our sense of the value of a sport practice as a spectacle. This is particularly important for the feminist scholar, as the active suppression of women’s sports is broadly rationalized through sexist assumptions about women as “lesser” athletes whose accomplishments are inherently less interesting—less worthy of broadcast or news coverage—than those of men. What, we might ask, then, makes a sport spectacle worth watching? As Barbra Morris and Joel Nydahl observe of the suite of cinematic inventions that made filming and editing television broadcast more mobile and more reactive in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., the Steadicam and the Skycam), “the live events most enhanced by the new form of drama are sports spectacles.” Morris and Nydahl argue, in fact, that where earlier television broadcast tended to support the primacy of attendance at a live sporting event for its experiential intensity: Television producers can [now] design sports spectacles laced with visual surprises that present a range of dramatic experiences which the live event cannot. A stationary camera with a single lens recording the action around and on a basketball court roughly parallels the single point of view a spectator has access to on-site at an arena and, in fact, describes the possibility for cinematography

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available to networks transmitting the first televised sports events decades ago. The new drama of television, however, is highly cinematic, a product of multiple and special effects now integral to program production.4

Media forms saturate our experiences of professional men’s sports. In 2014, for example, there were over thirty cameras used in the broadcast of each World Cup match. Thrilling bird’s eye views of the run of play, close-ups, replays, and super slow-motion intensify our sense of access to the game and its players. These technologies can squeeze a sense of agony from any gesture or action, no matter how banal. They can also remove all force from a tackle, all intention from a dive. Replay slows down fast sequences of action and breaks them down into easy-to-consume and decontextualized elements. Erik Barnouw, writing of broadcasts of gridiron football, observes that “brutal collisions [become] ballet, and end runs and forwarded passes [become] miracles of human coordination.”5 Within the culture of broadcast sports, a match’s story is not made on the pitch. It is composed by editors hunched over screens in a control room. The visual and aural narratives constructed through these formats pattern how we see, think, and feel about a sport. There is, furthermore, an increasing synergetic exchange between the match broadcast and new media forms. Videogames like EA Sports’ FIFA mimic the cinematographic language of the telecast—they are recognizable to players precisely through their citation of “old media” forms like the television broadcast. The telecast, in return, absorbs the signatures of the game (e.g., the use of video game graphics to track player movement and the offside line in match broadcasts).6 The spectator’s experience of mainstream and broadcast-based men’s sports is defined by this practice of remediation, in which a broadcast event’s reach is both deepened and expanded through the citation and deployment of the signatures of other media forms.7 Women haunt these intensely mediated encounters with professional men’s sports. If they appear in the field of vision at all, it is as an intrusion—as the body that does not belong, and as the body that must be banished. This was the case for Sian Massey, when she was mocked by Sky Sports presenters while working as an English Premier League sideline referee, and for Eva Carneiro, when she was heckled by fans while working on the pitch as Chelsea’s team doctor. Women are also folded into and absorbed by a mediascape that positions them as underneath the spectacle, as prior to technology— as unmolded flesh. A woman, for example, figures in the original story of the Steadicam, the tool-of-choice for filming sports. In 1974, working at the cusp of the technological innovations that brought us to this saturation point, Garret Brown produced a reel demonstrating what his Steadicam could do, with the aim of bringing his invention to Hollywood. On that reel is a film of Ellen Shire, his wife, running down, and then up, the Philadelphia Art Museum’s broad steps. (The two lived in Philadelphia.) When Rocky’s producers saw Brown’s reel, they decided to set the film in the city of brotherly love so that its hero could run up those steps, just as Ellen had done. Arguably the most iconic scene in all of sports cinema is, in other words, modeled after a woman’s fitness routine. If we are surprised by the fact that a woman features as the source for Rocky’s run up the museum steps, it is because mass media representations of women’s athleticism (ordinary and extraordinary) are few and far between. More often, women

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appear in images of, and stories about, men’s athleticism as incidental bodies against which men’s athleticism is defined. Take, for example, the opening lines of John L. Parker’s 1978 novel, Once a Runner: The young man could see dim figures on the track even in this pale light, slowly pounding round and round the most infinite of footpaths. There would be, he knew, plump, determined-looking women slogging along while their fleshy knees quivered. They would occasionally brush damp hair fiercely from their eyes and dream of certain cruel and smiling emcees: bikinis, ribbon-cuttings, and the like.8

Cassidy, the protagonist for this cult novel for competitive runners, defines himself against these women who jog to fight their inevitable fleshiness. He is “an athlete” and a “real runner.”9 The women “slogging” along the track are neither. For a good stretch in the twentieth century, as it happens, some thought women were incapable of running distances longer than 800 meters. The women’s 800 meters was only added to the Olympics in 1960, an event which spawned public debate about women’s capacity. During that decade, in the United States, women were banned from all official road races. In 1967, Katherine Switzer was physically tackled by a Boston Marathon race official. She had registered using the initial “K”; she finished and is the first woman to have run that race as a registered athlete. The women’s 1,500-meter run was only added to the Olympics in 1972; the marathon in 1984. All of this is to say that in the late 1970s, women ran. And they ran with a sense of purpose insofar as each ran against a sense of what a woman was “for.” But they ran in the shadows. Feminist perspectives on sports orbit around the prohibitions against women’s participation and the suppression of images of women’s athleticism. When Rocky’s producers decided that the film should be set in Philadelphia they certainly did not consider the idea of centering the story on a woman—such a thing was beyond the thinkable. (It is worth noting that the biggest women’s boxing movie to date, Million Dollar Baby [2004], centers on the story of a boxer who became paralyzed in the ring and was then euthanized by her trainer.) The woman in Brown’s film is, of course, an incidental detail in the backstory of the making of Rocky. I bring this story to your attention because it underscores the givenness of the erasure of women in motion from the picture. Broadcasts of women’s sports and artworks centered on women athletes almost never engage in remediation—there is no comparable mediascape into which the woman athlete can be located. There is a simple reason for this: women athletes are, quite simply, erased from the picture. This is particularly visible in works centered on women’s soccer, because the contrast with work centered on the men’s game is so stark. I first started writing about art and sport to address this difference in the character of contemporary art about the men’s and the women’s game. I was led to do so when, in 2008, I was asked to speak to an exhibition centering on masculinity and sport in contemporary art. I found myself disturbed by the absence of images of female athletes from the exhibit (which did, however, include work by female artists). Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport in Contemporary Art and its later iteration at the Wexner Center

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(2010) were unusual in that its curator, Christopher Bedford, acknowledged that men and masculinity were the exhibition project’s curatorial framework. He was, furthermore, interested in staging conversations about the (often fraught) relationship of women athletes to masculinity. (Girls are often told, for example, that playing soccer will masculinize their bodies—a “warning” that is at once sexist and homophobic.) Most sports-centered exhibitions marginalize or exclude women’s sports altogether and offer no explanation for having done so.10 Women athletes rarely make an appearance on gallery walls unless an exhibition is centered on a Women’s World Cup or the history of the women’s game. Surveying contemporary art overly engaged with sport, I found a dramatic difference in both the amount and formal character of work featuring images of women engaged in sport. It takes more effort to find art centered on women athletes. Rather than lament this asymmetry, we must learn from it. In 1971, Linda Nochlin took on the question, “Why have there been no great female artists?” She argues rightly that the question “falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: ‘There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.”’11 In this foundational essay in feminist art history, Nochlin teaches us that the very terms grounding the question are the problem: the feminist art historian must interrogate the assumed meanings of “great,” “artist,” and even “female,” especially if that word is joined to “artist.” The feminist scholar writing about representations of women’s sports in contemporary art is confronted by a compound version of this problem. If we wonder why there is so little contemporary art centered on women’s sports, we must also confront the aggressive naturalization of the notion that no woman can ever be a great athlete. And therefore, no art about a woman athlete could be great art. The artist Michelle Grabner found herself at the intersection of just these discourses when the New York Times art critic Ken Johnson dismissed an exhibition of her work via a reference to “soccer moms.” I Work from Home (2014) weaves the textures of domestic space into abstract, mathematically generated painting and objects. The artist’s practice is grounded in contesting the traditional separation of studio and home, and the accompanying ideological structures that separate out (female) reproductive labor from (male) creative labor. In his review, Johnson makes snide references to housework and childcare while describing the show, dismisses the artist’s work as “bland,” and then concludes: “If the show were a satire of the artist as a comfortably middle-class tenured professor and soccer mom, it would be funny and possibly illuminating, but it’s not.”12 The “soccer mom” is, in the misogynist’s imaginary, that fleshy-kneed woman against whom the real man (here, real artist) is defined. For members of the contemporary art community with even a remote sense to feminism, the review was a scandal.13 Grabner responded to Johnson by making a “fully functional” soccer ball distinguished by gingham panels drawn from her own image vocabulary (Figure 7.1). The work was produced by The Thing Quarterly (a periodical which takes the form of art objects, accompanied by a pamphlet), and presented a “physical rebuttal” to Johnson’s review.14 Such feminist rebuttal objects abound in contemporary soccer-art. See, for example, Franziska Vollborn’s Ohne Titel (“Untitled”) (2006), in which the artist

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Figure 7.1 Michelle Grabner, The Thing Quarterly Issue 27, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and The Thing Quarterly. inserted a vaginal pink crochet panel into an ordinary black-and-white soccer ball. Feminist sport art is often used in this kind of conversation with existing forms and structures. In her No More series (2011), Jenny Löbert layered portraits of women German national team players over Panini World Cup cards of male players. (Panini first issued cards for the Women’s World Cup in 2015.) The great goalkeeper Nadine Angerer, for example, is painted over the image of Andreas Möller; Möller’s name is scribbled out. This work (along with Vollborn’s sculpture) was exhibited in On the Other Hand, an exhibition centered on women’s soccer at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. The most stunning part of the exhibition was the display of the floral-patterned Villeroy & Boch Mariposa dish set given to members of the German national team when they won the European Championship in 1989. The simple display of this magnificently condescending “trophy” points back to the abject status of women’s soccer, as, at best, a housewife’s distraction. Not all feminist work engaged with soccer takes the shape of an intervention in the paradigms of the men’s game. The specific, distinct character of the women’s game orients the work of some artists. These artists explore the social and structural situation of the women’s game as something that unfolds outside the commercial structures of men’s sports and mainstream media, as an intensely gendered and genderqueer space. The women’s game has a very different texture than does the men’s game. Because it is less mediatized, access to the game is less mediated. The broadcast spectacle of the women’s game does not necessarily characterize the spectator, the player’s, or the artist’s relationship to the game. Women players and women’s teams are wary of the visual

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Figure 7.2 Marriage, Soccer (from Fortunate Living Trilogy), 2004. Video still from single-channel, color video with sound, 7 min. Courtesy of the artists. field—the visual regime of sports media is, for women athletes, a hostile space. Artists explore the women’s game as a space of free-play and intimacy, and surface an ambivalence regarding visuality—this work tends to be anti-spectacular. I am not sure, for example, that one can say Soccer (2004) (Figure 7.2) is about the women’s game as such. This performance video (one component of a three-part installation) is authored by Marriage, the authorial persona that artists Wu Tsang and Math Bass gave to their collaborations. Dressed in purple satin bodysuits with pads slipped over their knees and elbows, Tsang and Bass run in place while they rehearse the basic gestures that define soccer training. The two have the ungainly and inchoate sexual presence, amplified by their satin bodysuits. They run in place and sweep the ground to their left and to their right as they shout, “touch left” and “touch right.” They jump in the air and jerk their heads as they shout, “head left” and “head right.” They each awkwardly juggle a ball with their feet, knees, and shoulders. They kick the balls against the wall. Sometimes they just sit. Or stretch. Or catch their breath. They are clumsy, goofy, and shy in relation to each other. They are sweet, weird, and in training. They shout: “What do we want?” “It!” “How do we want it?” “That way!” Queen’s anthem, We Are the Champions, drifts in and out of the soundtrack. (If there is any public body to which the performers aspire, it is perhaps one like Freddie Mercury’s.) This weakly choreographed, lo-fi and oddball work gestures toward the specifically queer nature of the women’s sports team—and toward what Jack Halberstam describes as the “utopian vision of a world of subcultural possibilities” associated with transgender

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experiments in gender ambiguity.15 That utopian impulse registers on the screen, though, in a gesture. In a shy look, a stolen glance, and in a slight discomfort with being caught in this setting, in which the two are both perpetually together and not. An odd tenderness develops between the two “players” as they rehearse these routines together, moving in parallel lines toward some form of unspoken intimacy. If I describe this work as queer it is not only because these athletes are queerly gendered, but also because it playfully draws out the erotics specific to queer fantasies about what it means to play together. There is no game in Soccer. It is “just” practice—a desire not quite formed but strewn nevertheless across the field of vision. If, as José Muñoz writes, “Queerness is essentially a rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility in another world,” that queerness registers as a gesture, as “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”16 Soccer refuses to offer the basic elements demanded of the sports spectacle as a mediated event. There is no competition; there is no game; there is, in fact, no audience. In a statement included in this issue an LTTR dedicated to the subject of “queer failure,” the artists remind us, “the point of intersection between the performers and the camera is a real space . . . We’re working with the shadows,” they write, “we are the ghosts. We are the understudies, waiting for someone to catch a cold.”17 Where Soccer sits squarely in the world of the hapless amateur, Julia Lazarus’s Die Brüchigkeit der Spielerinnenkörper (“The Brittleness of the Player’s Body”) (2011) (Figure 7.3) centers on the highest-level women athletes: the German women’s national team.

Figure 7.3 Julia Lazarus, still from Die Brüchigkeit der Spielerinnenkörper (“The Brittleness of the Player’s Body”), 2011. Video, 9:20 min loop. Courtesy of the artist.

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Lazarus’s nine-minute looping video opens on an immaculate, empty gymnasium into which pour the players and their trainer. Lazarus records the team as a trainer leads them through a series of warm-up exercises. We hear only his instructions, the sound of their sneakers on the gym floor, and the occasional soft click of cameras— which might be the press, but they might also be “in-house” photographers working for the national federation. The video is matter-of-fact, and beautiful. The players—all dressed in their national uniform—go through a series of injury-prevention exercises together (thus the title: “The Brittleness of the Player’s Body”). The images of the women, dressed alike and doing the same things, repeats across the screen. In an important sense, their bodies are the same—and they, as a team, make up one body. But the brittleness signaled in the title suggests that if they are the same, they are the same in their difference. We do not see spectators. This is a tightly controlled, closed-door training session. The highest-profile, most frequently exhibited works engaged with soccer are anchored by exactly the opposite situation, and are centered on men. These works are less interested in sport, or the athlete than they are in the spectacle of sport. The spectacular is itself the work’s content. Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) and Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) both center on our romance with the technology of the sport broadcast. As I suggest above, the media spectacle of men’s sports is overwhelming in both its volume and its complexity. Especially in the televised sports spectacle, media itself becomes the platform through which the spectator experiences his passion for the sport. Glossy production, rapid edits, dynamic graphics, and elaborate sound effects theatricalize spectatorship in terms of technology and, implicitly, gender. Statistical forms of analysis turn bodies into arrows, diagrams, and numbers. The distance between the visual experience of watching a World Cup match and the visual geometry of a game like EA Sports’ FIFA decreases with each revolution in product development (moving now toward VR and 3-D). Such technological rituals organize an enormous amount of attention and desire around the male athlete’s body, for the pleasures of the presumed male spectator/ consumer.18 Technology operates as an alibi for the homosociality of men’s sport by making subjective pleasure look and feel like objective facts, by rendering a desire for proximity into a need for accuracy. The infrastructure of the match broadcast provides the material for Harun Farocki’s 12-channel installation Deep Play, which submerges the spectator in a room full of visual data culled from production of the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final broadcast. Lines move across one screen, tracking the offside position; another channel tracks each player’s movement across the field; one screen camera is trained on the French National Team’s bench; another only on that of their Italian opponents. We have an external shot of the stadium over the duration of the match, and even a security camera’s view of the parking garage. The work teases out the neurosis embedded in the sport spectacle—a paranoid demand for more information, for more detailed tracking of the body, for more accurate forms of measurement. Elaborate protocols of reading and viewing manage how we see and experience these scenes of intimacy and belonging. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is perhaps the most perfect expression of the collision

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of intimacy and publicity in the sport spectacle. Multiple cameras reproduce for us the experience of keeping company with the athlete in the middle of the arena. The film exploits what Eve Sedgwick calls the “privilege of unknowing” which allows us all to luxuriate in the spectacle of Zidane’s athleticism without, however, considering what it is that we are doing as our eyes linger over the crook of Zidane’s neck, as we admire the sweaty sheen of his skin, or contemplate the sublimity of the athlete’s weathered face.19 Take art historian Michael Fried’s remarkable appreciation of Zidane’s total absorption in the game: Indeed, Zidane’s dazzling and unerring footwork, his astonishing control of the ball, his instantaneous decision making—all exemplify his seemingly unremitting focus on the game even as they combine to keep the viewer perceptually on edge, as does the sheer violence of his high-speed physical encounters with rival players as they try to strip him of the ball and vice versa . . . Another factor in all this is Zidane’s physiognomy, not just its leanness and toughness, emblematized by his balding, graying, closely cropped skull, but its basic impassiveness . . . which adds to the impression of an inner ferocity that, not at all paradoxically—think of the great stars of classic Westerns—could scarcely be more photogenic. (To say that the seventeen cameras “love” Zidane is an understatement.)20

Gordon and Parreno’s film is an intricately choreographed ballet of admiration and disavowal. This beautiful portrait reaches toward something like the experience of keeping company with Zidane while he plays this match, but it is also a deep mediation on how Zidane is visibly “produced” as a spectacle by cameras, by radio, and by television broadcasts. It is marked by a nearly painful awareness of the fact that it is hard to see through the spectacle of the game (the moodiness of the film is amplified by Mogwai’s melancholic soundtrack). As we watch Zidane move around the field in the early minutes of the film (and the game) his thoughts stretch across the screen. The player recalls his boyhood attraction to evening football telecasts: “As a child, I had running commentary in my head when I was playing. It wasn’t really my own voice. It was the voice of Pierre Cangion, a television anchor from the 1970s. Every time I heard his voice, I would run toward the TV as close as I could get, for as long as I could. It wasn’t that his words were so important. But the tone, the accent, the atmosphere, was everything.” Even Zidane’s primary scene, in other words, is not the sensual immediacy of the action on field, or even the thrill of being in the stands. It is the intimacy of the television broadcast experienced at home. Zidane takes not desire as its subject, but the mediation of desire—not our desire for the man, but our desire for the image of the man. Zidane explains, “I love the idea of transmitting the image of the player, of this guy on the field that brings happiness to those looking at him.”21 When he takes the field, he knows he is on that screen, pulling another little boy toward him. Or, rather, more precisely, he knows that the story of his play is being narrated by another generation of commentators participating in the production of the sport spectacle. When he voices his origin story for Zidane’s soundtrack, he joins Cangion—he is absorbed into the apparatus of the sport spectacle himself.

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Zidane clearly cites Fussball Wie Noch Nie (1971), Hellmuth Costard’s “real-time” portrait of George Best as he played a Manchester United match against Coventry. Costard’s seven cameras concentrate exclusively on Best. The film is Warholian in both its simplicity and its erotics. Where Zidane is saturated with a certain suspense, Fussball Wie Noch Nie is exquisitely boring. This is in large part because Costard’s film is stripped entirely of the soundscape of a match broadcast (Zidane, in contrast, is scored by a sonic exchange between the sound of play, broadcast, and music). Fussball Wie Noch Nie is scored only by laid-back jazz—a soundtrack that feels completely incidental to the match itself and to Best’s performance. Any questions about the film-maker’s decision to concentrate exclusively on Best are laid to rest by the film’s half-time interlude: the viewer follows Best into a stadium’s “boot room.” Once we are sequestered in this small, wood-paneled den, Best turns around and stares directly at the camera in a direct echo of Andy Warhol’s screen tests. We are given complete access to his beauty. Fussball Wie Noch Nie is differently intimate than Zidane. Although, like Zidane, Best was both a celebrity and a sex symbol, the broadcast image of the sport was, in 1971, qualitatively different. During the match itself, cameras do get nearly as close to Best as it does in the half-time interlude. The film thus pivots on this surprising, stolen moment with the athlete. This encounter is presented as an interruption of the match, staged underneath the stadium beyond the reach of the television camera and outside the frame of the broadcast spectacle. Zidane fuses that locker room intimacy with the media intensity of a Real Madrid match. It is a love letter to the athlete, drawing from and expanding on the vernacular practice of today’s fan. Gordon and Parreno’s film has much in common with YouTube’s football homage. Hundreds, if not thousands, of homemade compositions are set to the highlights and lowlights of a player’s career to pop songs. Zidane—The Emotional Movie, for example, created by “rapidwands/zizou312” and posted by multiple users on YouTube in 2007, scores clips of Zidane on and off the pitch (many of these are pulled from Gordon’s film) to the Timbaland/One Republic pop song Apologize, which then fades into the Sick Puppies song, All the Same. The opening lyrics of that painfully sincere rock ballad are: “I don’t mind where you come from, as long as you come to me.” Other Zidane homages draw their music from Coldplay (Beautiful World), Madonna (Love Tried to Welcome Me), and even The Spice Girls (Viva Forever). There seems to be no irony in the use of pop ballads to score these montages. If anything, these songs (culled from European pop radio playlists) are perfect vehicles for communicating the powerful longings that undergird world soccer culture. These texts—Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait and Zidane—The Emotional Movie—are formally linked by their explicit deployment of what James Tobias describes as “the musicality of time-based media,” and by the movement of sentiment along the currents of popular music.22 But Gordon and Parreno’s film is a big budget and highbrow translation of a popular, wildly sentimental, and decidedly lowbrow hobby in which the “art” is produced by the disavowal of the popular.23 Zidane elaborates on the spectacle which substitutes for the person, to allow for a viewing pleasure that might otherwise be too visibly queer. In doing so, the film raises the homosocial intensity of football culture by another factor. It repeats it, aestheticizes it, washes

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it clean, and makes it respectable. Zidane is a successful spectacle (an image in which we are interested, an image for which there is an audience, an image that we feel permission to look at and enjoy)—it is in fact a hyper-spectacle in which the thrill of the enjoyment on offer is derived from the awareness that we, as audience, are part of a global spectacle. We are happy spectators to our own spectatorship. Zidane turns homosocial desire into a glowing spectacle. All of these films made by men and centered on broadcasts of men’s soccer matches were made with the full cooperation of teams, leagues, and, in the case of Zidane, the athlete’s management and advertising sponsors. Feminist work centered on women athletes cannot, at the moment, enjoy this kind of happy collaboration with the corporate entities that manage and produce the sport spectacle. Women’s sports are presented by mainstream media as making a bad spectacle, either via sensationalist stories of female monstrosity, or via the reproduction of the notion that women’s sports are boring. Broadcasts of especially women’s club matches use fewer cameras, little to no graphics, they are scheduled at less desirable broadcast times sometimes on “floating” cable channels that do not appear on digital television menus. The 2007 Women’s World Cup and the women’s tournament in the 2008 Olympics—the two biggest events in the women’s game—were not given comprehensive coverage. Following the entire tournament was only possible if one watched streaming broadcasts from a single camera planted in the stands, with only ambient noise from the stadium. In the United States, coverage of these events has improved since then but it is still miles away from the daily, obsessive attention given to the men’s sports. The circulation of what broadcast footage exists of women’s matches (usually of international tournaments) is tightly regulated—with relatively little material out there, the illegal distribution of Olympic soccer matches on YouTube, for example, has been easier to police. Viral videos about women’s sports are less likely to feature the prowess of athletes than they are to luxuriate in overt misogyny. A YouTube search of “women goalkeepers” turns up a mix of celebratory and derogatory videos—the latter are often presented as a crude argument against women’s abilities. Misogynist representations of women’s sports center on its status as an abject spectacle—as not only an athletic failure, but as also a poor image. Take, for example, a 2008 viral video mocking the idea of a “WNBA Live” video game (NBA Live was the most popular basketball game at the time), for example. In the video parody (uploaded to YouTube by “Basket Bawful”), a man in homophobic lesbian-drag plays at being a WNBA star introducing his bored friends to a new game—an abject outdated and comically slow moving “virtual” basketball game, in which a lone pixelated female (pink) stick figure limps across the scene and makes a bad shot. The player then falls over, “injured” when she gets a “yeast infection.” There is, it turns out, a whole subgenre of YouTube videos mocking the WNBA—not because the authors of these videos have a problem with the organization, but because they can’t get over the idea that women play basketball, and that there are people who want to watch them. For years, that WNBA Live parody had a home on Sports Illustrated’s website, where it was posted within their “hot links” section with no critical comment.24

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This kind of overt misogyny reproduces a naturalized, ideological story regarding the sexual body, a narrative which renders the sexual/feminine body into an object— and which places that body in a difficult relationship to physical expressions of the body’s capacity. In her foundational essay on gender and motility, Iris Marion Young writes, “We often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance, rather than the media for the enactment of our aims.”25 The Female body is an obstacle to be overcome; it is an object to be acted upon. We can use Erica Rand’s term “body management” to describe confrontations with this gendered problem in media.”26 Take, for example, the following women’s soccer “scandal”: in the fall of 2009, ESPN broadcast a story about a “catfight” on a soccer field (a series of unpunished hard fouls in a regional college match, broadcast on a local television channel). ESPN ’s video went viral, and international. Multiple posts of the footage on YouTube have been viewed over a million times each. The college student who was the center of the footage became an international headline. The story was a media phenomenon, and represented, by far, the most media exposure given to women’s soccer in 2009. The referee who failed to discipline her in the game (as was his job) was never named in the media, nor was he sanctioned for letting the game get out of control. It is hard to imagine video footage of a regional men’s game in any sport becoming this newsworthy, even if such a game involved clearly violent behavior (soccer players of both sexes sometimes throw punches, and are normally ejected from the field for doing so). The story was attractive because it feeds into the notion that female athletes are female monsters—that the sports in which they participate make them unnaturally violent. The entry of women into the visual sphere of sports media is fraught with what Toby Miller has called a “cosmic gender ambivalence.”27 The becoming-visible of the female athlete raises lesbianism immediately as a problem to be visually managed—on the field, in the visual presentation of the sport, and in the stands.28 Pat Griffith writes, “Women’s presence in sport as serious participants dilutes the importance and exclusivity of sport as a training ground for learning about and accepting male gender roles and the privileges that their adoption confers . . .”29 Anxiety about the inherent, structural, and defining queerness of especially women’s team sports limits the absorption of the female athlete into such media forms. That anxiety is two-fold: sports media is always already uninterested in women’s sports (as having decided it is not appealing to male spectators and consumers), and women athletes themselves have a lot to lose. Marriage plays with this in Soccer: The low-fi/DIY aesthetics, their oddity, their isolation speaks to the abjection of female athleticism but also suggest that the homosocial space of women’s sports is a more generous, and more elementally queer one for its “failure” to produce a good media spectacle. Lazarus’s study of the German women’s team’s warm-up also taps into this situation: the women move through a series of tightly choreographed movements. One glimpses, here, the athlete’s image as regimented and controlled. The ideological limits that organize mainstream representations of the female athletic body surface in Stand Your Ground (2008) (Figures 7.4 and 7.5), Moira Lovell’s photographic installation of a series of claustrophobic portraits of the women who

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Figure 7.4 Moira Lovell, “Emily and John,” from Stand Your Ground, 2008. C-Print; 70 × 60cm. Commissioned by Pavilion. Courtesy of the artist.

play for The Doncaster Rover Belles. The Belles are one of the older continuously playing women’s teams in England. (Women working the stands selling programs for the local professional men’s team, Doncaster Rovers, founded the Belles in 1969.) In these portraits, the Belles do not meet the camera with the obligatory disarming smile asked of women athletes on those anomalous days when the media takes interest. Nor are these traditional team photos presenting the united front arranged in tidy rows on the pitch, bodying forth the team’s identity en masse. As much as the game is marked in England as a working-class sport, it is even more deeply coded as masculine, thanks largely to the England Football Association’s 50-year ban on women from its fields (1921–71). The context for this ban captures almost every dimension of the “cosmic ambivalence” attending to women’s sports. As Barbara Jacobs writes in her engaging history of The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies (a popular factory team which played through the end of WWI and into the 1920s), in England, the story of women’s football traces the

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Figure 7.5 Moira Lovell, “John and Vicky,” from Stand Your Ground, 2008. C-Print; 70 × 60cm. Commissioned by Pavilion. Courtesy of the artist.

policing of class, gender, and professionalism in sports. Women factory workers playing charity matches, drawing tens of thousands of spectators challenged the establishment. These women were unseemly—cigarette smoking, swearing, and hard playing (and in some cases, plainly gay). These women played to support injured and unemployed veterans, widows, and striking workers. The 1921 ban was presented as in women’s interest—“the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” English Football Association leadership suggested that everything about the women’s game was troubling. The “jerking movements” of play was dangerous to women’s bodies; the fact that women played before mixed audiences was seen as dubious; the integrity of the economics of the women’s game were questioned.30 The FA ban became the model for similar forms of prohibition around the world. Because of this history and the sports culture that it created, in those countries where women’s soccer was in essence outlawed (England, Germany, Spain, and Brazil, for example), one’s “kit” feels like a black-leather motorcycle jacket. Even as it signifies membership

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in a team, a collective identity, it also signals a form of rebellion. In England, in other words, you don’t need to wear a purple satin body suit to feel like a gender freak—you can just wear your training outfit. Lovell pairs each of the Belles individually with the team’s coach. In this juxtaposition, we are invited to see difference—in gender, surely, as well in age and authority. When the English FA banned women from its pitches, it also importantly prohibited FA members from supporting the women’s game as referees, linesmen, etc. The ban was not just an attempt to regulate women footballers out of existence. It was an attempt to ban the re-wiring of men and women’s relationship to each other that women’s athletics invariably brings about. It was an attempt to undo the feminist, queering effects of the women’s game on gender and sexuality. Our access to the game has been regulated aggressively and deliberately for a century. If newsreel footage of women’s matches from this period feel magical and figures for match attendance startle us, it is because sexism robs us not only of access to the game in the present, it robs us of our access to that game’s past as well. We discover, over and over again, how much we have forgotten. Lovell’s images are anxious. Why, one might ask, are the players not on the pitch? Why are they not pictured together, in a team portrait—or playing? Why are these portraits staged in such an anonymous interior space? This is not incidental to Lovell’s subjects: on January 3, 1995, BBC 1 broadcast a documentary featuring The Doncaster Belles who had been, until that moment, England’s super-dominant club team. Paul Pierrot’s The Belles was, in the words of sports journalist Pete Davies, “a romp; it showed them playing, training, working, clubbing, going ten-pin bowling, winning the FA cup, drinking and dancing with the trophy, getting back to the business in the league the next Sunday and winning that, too.”31 Although no one in the film comes out as lesbian, the players celebrate their victories and mourn their losses in what are clearly gay bars, and they are gender-rebellious.32 The documentary does not shy away from the social texture of the woman-centered, working-class space that defined the team’s world. The Belles features startlingly intimate scenes filmed by the players themselves. They speak about their relationship to the sport while lying in bed, for example, and while undressing in the bathroom and tending to postmatch cuts and bruises. We are with them when they celebrate a big win in the changing room and at a gay bar. We see the players on the disco floor, FA cup in hand, and mirrorball overhead. They are deliriously happy. The Belles is moving. It lavishes a women’s team with the kind of attention they rarely receive. The team is unguarded in their interactions with the camera: the film is structured by trust, enabled by the filmmakers’ decision to allow the women to film each other and shape the documentary’s story. The Belles also captures a transitional period in the team’s history (they would lose their dominant position to Arsenal the following season), as well as shifts in the place of the women’s game in England as national associations (universally run by men, most of whom had little to no interest in the women’s game) took more control over women’s football, usually at the expense of the sport’s development.33 The Belles is also a liberating view. Traditional depictions of women athletes “balance” the story of a woman athlete’s accomplishments in her sport with attention

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to boyfriends, husbands and children—or, if there are none of those to be had—then to her place within her family (as a loving daughter, for example). Football, however, centers the lives of the Doncaster Belles. While we do see them at home and at work, the pace and the rhythm of their lives is plainly set by the league’s season. The Belles created a stir when it was aired and inspired the creation of a television series that ran for 5 years on BBC (Playing the Field, 1998–2002). Within the context of British television broadcast history, the documentary benefited from a shift in approaches to queer life. In 1989, Channel Four began to air “Out on Tuesday,” a weekly program dedicated to representing LGBT life in the UK . A range of major works in queer cinema were broadcast through this series, including Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989). In the 1980s, Channel Four attempted to reach “niche” audiences with programing aimed at under-addressed audiences. This included hour-long weekly highlights of women’s football matches (the commentary for which featured cringeworthy sexist remarks). These broadcasts, Jean Williams points out, “sustained a very respectable number of viewers.”34 It was within this context that The Belles was produced. The broadcast of The Belles left the team with a difficult burden. The documentary showed the team members in women-centered, non-traditional contexts. The film allotted little time to reassuring the viewer of the athlete’s heterosexuality and femininity. In fact, the film leaves the viewer with the impression that the team is, at minimum, feminist. The players themselves come off as unapologetically competitive and also as devoted to each other. The few personal relationships that orbit into view only do so insofar as those partners and co-workers support the player’s involvement with the team. The degree to which this queers the women on the team is a testament to how rare it is, in fact, that we get any narratives about women that are not oriented by (hetero)sexual romance, reproduction, and home-making. The team’s story and culture might have inspired a television series, but it shocked the English Football Association, which sent the team a strongly worded letter of rebuke. Players who had been on the national team were dropped, and star forward Gil Coutaurd was stripped of her captaincy of the national squad. Journalist Pete Davies followed the team for the season during which this match aired, and saw firsthand the impact of its broadcast on the team. Afterwards, the club avoided all contact with the media. Davies described the team as suffering from a “dread of publicity.”35 Players, Williams explains, recall this time with ambivalence and express different opinions about how they were represented. One tells Williams that players’ families were “upset” because “these are respectable women and they are just letting off steam.” Because the documentary centered on their love of rough-and-tumble play, it seemed to reproduce the stereotype of women athletes as unfeminine, as, in this case, “uncouth ladettes.” But for others, the documentary and the television series based on it felt accurate—“Playing the Field showed women’s football in a true sense.”36 For me, it is refreshingly unapologetic about the pleasures of play. It feels familiar. Today, the only way to see The Belles is by making an appointment with the British Film Institute National Archives. One watches it in a basement room not altogether different from the space in which Lovell produced her portrait of the team in 2007. In

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representations of men at play, intensely homoerotic scenes flourish under our noses but only with the promise we not “see” this. The “obviousness” of the feminism and the queerness of women playing together means that we are barely allowed to see them play at all—and, given the threat of homophobic retaliation, women athletes (whether they identify as gay or straight) have not looked to the visual field for affirmation. Lovell’s portraits seem to manifest the pressure to “straighten” the female athlete out, to reassure the spectator by forcing us to read these women via the mediating presence of the manager—this story isolates each player from the other, triangulates us and them through the male managerial body, and edges the game, too, out of the frame. These portraits show us how the conditions of possibility for representing the texture of desire within this setting are hugely different from those which condition the presentation of the men’s game in contemporary art. Take one of Lovell’s portraits and perhaps you see a couple. Look at the installation series, however, and the male body becomes a superfluous and awkward presence. The mediatedness of the spectacle of the men’s game seems to provide the artist-fan a distance that gives him permission to adore his subject. Without that visual archive, without the spectacle of the spectacle filtering us from them, the task of representing the female athlete is more charged, and more overdetermined. Zidane can act like the cameras are not there—his absorption in himself, in himself as athletic spectacle, lets him get on with his work, and lets you look at him without the particular discomfort of fearing that somehow he might look back, as if he knew what you wanted. In the world captured by Lovell’s camera, when the lens is trained on her, the female athlete does not move. The spectator is an unwelcome presence in this space, in much the same way that these women are unwelcome within the deeply patriarchal and homophobic spaces of English football. The artist refuses to give us either a moving image or an image of motion. These women do not have the luxury of disavowing the camera’s presence and all that it implies. It is as if these women want to be somewhere else—off the visual record, and, like Marriage’s duo, playing on another planet.

Notes 1 Cooky, Messner, and Musto, “It’s Dude Time,” 263. 2 Cooky, Messner, and Musto, “It’s Dude Time,” 265. 3 This essay expands on previously published work. See: Doyle, “Art vs. Sport”; Doyle, “Gender, Media and Desire in the Sport Spectacle.” 4 Morris and Nydahl, “Sport Spectacle as Drama,” 101. 5 See: Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 347–8; cited by Morris and Nydahl, “Sport Spectacle as Drama,” 103. 6 Networks and videogame companies have also contracted with each other as a means for amplifying the reach of their brands. For a discussion of this form of intertextuality and corporate collaboration, see: for example, Abe Stein’s discussion of the intertextuality of sports videogames and sports broadcast in Stein, “Playing the Game on Television.” 7 See, for example, Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.

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8 Parker, Once a Runner, 1. 9 Parker, Once a Runner, 122. 10 Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008–9). I wrote about gender and sport-centered art in support of Chris Bedford’s expansion of that project for the Wexner Center (2010). See: Doyle, “Soft Subjects.” Other sports-themed contemporary art exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art include: Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins (2010), Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscape (2010), and The Beautiful Game (2014). None featured artworks depicting women athletes practicing a recognizable sport (I am excluding one artist’s video depicting a woman in a bathing suit juggling a ball, included in The Beautiful Game). One strong exhibition centered on the women’s game: On the Other Hand: Artistic Throw-ins about the 2011 Women’s Football World Cup at the Schwules Museum in Berlin (2011). 11 Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 22. 12 Ken Johnson, “Michelle Grabner,” New York Times, October 23, 2014: http://www. nytimes.com/2014/10/24/arts/design/michelle-grabner.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 13 See: for example, Jillian Steinhauer, “On Ken Johnson and the Question of Sexism,” Hyperallergic, November 4, 2014: http://hyperallergic.com/160698/on-ken-johnsonand-the-question-of-sexism/ [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 14 The Thing Quarterly Issue 27: Michelle Grabner, 2015. 15 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 96. 16 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 17 LTTR 3: Practice More Failure (2004), n.p. 18 That presumption is at odds with market research, as women constitute an increasingly significant percentage of the audience for nearly every major spectator sport. 19 Sedgwick, “The Privilege of Unknowing.” 20 Fried, “Absorbed in the Action,” 333–5. 21 “L’impression d’être Zidane sur le terrain” (interview between Zidane and Frédéric Hermel) in Zinédine Zidane: Un portrait du 21e siècle (Paris: Hors Collections Editions, 2006). 22 Tobias, “Cinema, Scored.” 23 Taha Belal, in contrast, openly mines popular visual culture in his looped compilation Renaldo Remix (2008). Belal directly appropriates clips from a series of viral homages to Cristiano Ronaldo’s footskills. The result is a mind-numbing repetition of Ronaldo’s flicks and stepovers scored by alternating strands of rock, techno, pop, rap, and disco. 24 “WNBA Video of the Day,” Sports Illustrated, May 23, 2008: http://sportsillustrated. cnn.com/2008/extramustard/05/23/hotclicks.0523/index.html (now defunct). 25 Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 144. 26 See: Rand, “Court and Sparkle.” 27 Miller, Sportsex, 130. 28 In the summer of 2009, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics banned “kissing cams.” “Kissing cams” scan crowds at baseball and basketball games to broadcast images of kissing couples in the stands. The audience at WNBA includes many lesbian couples, and so such a camera is likely to catch a kiss between women fans, who are there to root on a team that more than likely includes lesbian players. In their statement explaining the ban, the Mystics explained that they didn’t consider such displays of

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34 35

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lesbian affection “appropriate.” Sheila Johnson, Managing Partner for the Mystics, quoted in Mike Wise, “Mystics Give Big Issue the Kiss-Off,” Washington Post, July 27, 2009: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/26/ AR2009072602357.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets, 17. For more on The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies, see: Jacobs, The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies; for more on the history of women’s soccer in England, see: Williams, A Game for Rough Girls. Davies, I Lost My Heart to the Belles, 99. For scholarship on gender, sexuality, and women’s football in England, see: Caudwell, “Women’s Football in the United Kingdom”; Caudwell, “Femme-fatale.” See: Williams, A Game for Rough Girls; Williams, A Beautiful Game. In the latter text, especially, Williams tracks the consequences of FIFA’s turn to management and control of the women’s game in the 1980s. In general, as men’s football associations began to administer the women’s game (something FIFA required of FA s in order for them to enter teams in the Women’s World Cup), the people who had developed and stewarded the sport globally were shut out, especially from leadership positions. Williams, A Game for Rough Girls, 81. Pete Davies, “Belles left running to stand still,” The Independent, March 11, 1996: http:// www.independent.co.uk/sport/belles-left-running-to-stand-still-1341432.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Jean Williams, A Game for Rough Girls, 82.

8

Gender, Pleasure, and the Look: Female Fans and Men’s Soccer Carrie Dunn

Introduction: Women and the Media Coverage of Men’s Soccer in the UK Women within the UK mainstream media coverage of men’s association football (soccer) continue to be objectified and sexualized. This chapter examines how women are presented in football media, how British female fans of men’s soccer in England feel about being presented with these images of women to consume, and the ways in which female fans perceive the mediatized figure of the male footballer. Based on my original research,1 this chapter reports that female soccer fans are heavy consumers of soccer media—even that which, like Sky Sports’ popular Soccer AM, is heavily targeted to a male audience, and presents women as decorative cheerleaders or “soccerettes” but not as the “authentic fans” defined in the literature of fan research. This chapter suggests that female fans are forced to negotiate their identities when consuming these media in order to accept the sexism and objectification of women with which they are presented, and thus to continue to participate in mainstream soccer fan culture. It also shows how many respondents rejected the idea that they took pleasure in looking at the bodies of male players, arguing that instead they took pleasure in looking at the sport itself. As Parry argues, the footballers are co-opted as “heroes” rather than anything more sexual,2 and as Lines argues, female sports fandom offers a chance to admire power that women themselves may covet.3 When the institutionalized sexism of football is made explicit, for example through the sexism seen in sports media or the heteronormative assumption that female fans watch football solely to gaze at men, female fans have to position themselves as separate or distanced from the situation in some way in order to remain connected with their fandom and the identity they have already scoped out for themselves. It requires them to ignore the objectified female figure that could be perceived as the “abusive hypermasculinity” described by Jones,4 and any overt sexist or homophobic comments; it requires the female fan to construct herself as “neutral” in order to avoid the “ideological dilemma.”5 These experiences demonstrate the dilemma that female football fans have: they have to continually negotiate their identities, as fans and as 155

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women, in an institutionally sexist sport and an institutionally sexist fandom, reinforced by the media they consume.

Football Fandom and Everyday Life Football fandom impacts on everyday life, not just the times when one is actively supporting one’s team. As well as match attendance, other demonstrations of one’s allegiance are also key elements to one’s support. In Fever Pitch, author Nick Hornby makes a scathing assessment about female fandom when he concludes that “[t]hey always seem to have lost their records, or to have relied on somebody else in the house—a boyfriend, a brother, a flatmate, usually a male—to have provided the physical details of their interests”6; he is putting forward a common stereotype that women are less likely to be obsessive fans with incredible statistical recall and a house full of years’ worth of memorabilia and spending hours watching matches on the television. However, my research7 indicates otherwise, and shows that female football fans are highly dedicated to their fandom as well as heavy consumers of football-related media. This chapter looks in detail at this consumption of football media, with particular reference to the Sky Sports magazine show Soccer AM, and concludes by assessing the ways in which female fans create and navigate identities for themselves as “authentic” fans within a sport and a fandom that is institutionally sexist.

The Media Representation of Football and Female Fans Contemporary newspaper reports prove that for as long as there has been organized football in England, there have been female fans.8 Before the Football League began in 1888, Preston North End were forced to withdraw their offer of free entry to ladies when 2,000 women were turning up at the ground.9 Lewis points out that “by 1948, 37 percent of women . . . were spectators of one sport or another, mainly of football, cricket, and tennis,” adding that “some women were accompanied by husbands or boyfriends, but others were spectators in their own right.”10 When the Ladies Free concession was scrapped, women were frequently offered a reduced entry rate; by 1890, the minimum entry price charged in the Football League was 6d, with boys and women usually 3d.11 Then after World War I, when women entered the workplace in large numbers for the first time, women also began attending football matches in large numbers. The Leicester Mercury’s coverage of the local side’s game against Clapton in 1922 noted a large number of women attending the match without a male companion.12 Contemporary reports suggest that the crowd for the 1929 Cup Final between Bolton Wanderers and Portsmouth was split equally between men and women, and local newspapers began to nickname Brentford “the ladies’ team” due to the high number of women traveling around the country to watch them. Dunning and colleagues argue that prior to the 1966 World Cup in England, newspapers began to sensationalize their coverage of football, including focusing on

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crowd disturbances, in order to increase sales. This presented the football ground as a place where violence was commonplace, expected, and even acceptable, thus attracting an element who sought a place to fight, making the concept of the “dangerous” ground a self-fulfilling prophecy.13 Coddington describes the popular perception of the football ground during the 1970s and 1980s as “a haven for racist, sexist thugs,” explaining that many women were put off going to football for fear of violence during this period, although this was not the case for everyone.14 So in the past 30 years, (analysis of) football media has served to invisibilize female fans; media coverage has tended to reinforce the heterosexist gender binary in which men are imbued with power and play an active role, while women are passive and objectified. Although there is not a great deal of work on the modern media representation of female football fans, there is some examination of the media representation of football fans as a whole and the heterosexualized female figure in particular, such as Harris’s examination of The Sun’s representations of women in coverage of the 1996 European Championships, held in England. He looked at the FA’s advertising campaign to attract more women to matches, which “[used] slogans such as ‘How can I lie back and think of England, when Venables hasn’t finalized the squad?’ and ‘I fancy the Italians, because in Ravanelli and Zola you have a proven strike force working in front of a fluid 4–4–2 formation.’ ” These slogans and posters clearly framed the female supporter in sexual terms, both as an object herself and as a voyeur who sexualizes the male footballers. Harris assessed the images of women presented in the paper as acceptable roles for females at football, and concluded that there are two primary but non-active roles The Sun expects women to play during the tournament: “the model,” i.e. scantily-dressed and decorative; or “the admiring woman,” i.e. the wife or girlfriend, quiet, passive, and glamorous.15 Harris touched on the increasing popularity of football in the UK , and the concurrent rising number of women attending games,16 but also looked at a news story about a woman who sold her television set because she was fed up with the amount of football her boyfriend was watching, and used this to illustrate the “traditional” roles that men and women are expected to fulfil within British culture— men like football, women do not. He quoted some anecdotal evidence that young girls are socialized into hating football by friends, family, and everyday media images; this idea that mainstream British culture is structured to socialize girls into disliking football is prevalent—yet inaccurate, as my results show.

Female Fans’ Media Consumption Many respondents mentioned in their initial questionnaire that they watched live matches as well as football-related programs on television. Since the launch of the dedicated Sky Sports channels as well as additional digital channels and on-demand viewing, it is relatively easy to access broadcasts of or about football. Ninety percent of my questionnaire respondents said they watched television highlights of matches they had attended; 86 percent watched television highlights of matches they had not attended; and 83 percent regularly watched live matches on television. To locate

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football news, 81 percent of respondents used their club’s official website, 53 percent used the BBC Sport website, 50 percent used their club’s unofficial website, and 50 percent regularly read a daily tabloid newspaper’s sports section; evidently football media is of key importance to football fans, who are heavy consumers of different formats. Sky Sports’s Soccer AM, an extremely popular, long-running, studio-based magazine show, features the “soccerette,” who enters the set wearing a short skirt, high heels and the replica shirt of her favorite team. After a brief interview with the male presenter, she strips off her replica shirt to reveal a tight-fitting white top with Soccer AM’s logo emblazoned across the chest; then, flanked by the male presenter and one of the guest fans, she walks up an impromptu catwalk. The episode of September 28, 2013, chosen at random and easily accessible via the Sky Sports website, is a good example of the way this segment of the show is constructed. The camera is focused on the male presenter, Max Rushden, who is standing in the studio alongside a small set of bleachers on which a group of Leeds United fans are sitting, in front of a set of doors, surrounded by silhouetted, pink-shaded female figures holding a football. The doors open, and a woman emerges in an IFK Gothenburg shirt and tight black lurex trousers. Rushden’s catchphrased greeting to her is: “Bada-badabing!” He then asks her name and where she comes from; when she responds that she is Swedish, a shout comes from an unseen onlooker—“I love Sweden!” Rushden later asks her: “More importantly, what we want to know is, are you single?” She says that she is not, and the reply is met with groans. However, and intriguingly, Caroline responds with a certain level of disdain for the entire segment and for the way she is spoken to. When Rushden asks her how old she is, she replies witheringly: “Too old for you, darling.” Rushden introduces a quiz section, in which he will ask her a series of largely football-related questions in which she must choose between two options, and asks her if she understands the (evidently straightforward) rules. With a certain amount of surprise, she responds, “I do, I’m not . . . stupid”—and Rushden’s reply to that is simply, “It’s happened before,” both insulting to the previous participants, but also giving the impression that any footballing knowledge or on-camera poise in the Soccerette is unnecessary when compared to how she looks on screen. After the quiz, Rushden asks her to remove her shirt to reveal the new pink skinny-fit Soccer AM women’s t-shirt— as she does so, the reveal is met with whooping and whistling. One of the Leeds fans then does the same to reveal a black baggy Soccer AM men’s t-shirt—met with rather less excitement, and more teasing. Rushden asks Caroline what she thinks of the shirt, and she evidently thinks it is too small and too tight, saying, “It’s for a child, no?” Rushden and Caroline then walk up toward the camera in the style of models stalking the catwalk, to the music “Mr Big Star.” Usually a fan is asked to join in with the pair, but instead a group of Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders are brought out, also in tight pink t-shirts, short skirts, and sporting golden pom-poms. Rushden speaks directly to camera as he is surrounded by these scantily-clad women: “This is my job.” Despite this apparent “laddishness,” many respondents in my research were regular viewers of Soccer AM. Watford fan Lisa was a typical example, who rated the show very highly. She says:

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Lisa: They do the football fans, and a girl coming out in a football shirt. You get some right wallopers on there. I’d love to get on, sit there and do it when they do the fans’ thing. CD : Something like the girl modeling the shirt, do you not find it irritating? Lisa: Oh, yeah, I do. I’m like for goodness sake. Yeah, it is, but they’re just taking the piss. A lot of things they’re just taking the mickey.

Lisa distinguishes between “football fans” and the female model wearing a football shirt. The replica shirt—a traditional display of fandom and club allegiance—does not make the Soccerette a football fan. It is significant that Lisa acknowledges her annoyance with the entire Soccerette concept, but feels that it does not affect her enjoyment of the program as a whole; she does not feel that it warrants complaint because it is “taking the piss”—it is based on humor. I suggest that Lisa does not want to be perceived as humorless (or indeed the “humorless feminist” of myth), as someone unable to take a joke, or as obviously different from other football fans, who by their conspicuous participation in the show do not object to its structure. Tottenham fan Emma does not see the Soccerette as a “joke,” more as an acknowledgement of “typical” male heterosexual desire, but she says that she does not find this objectionable or exploitative. She says: The Soccerettes, they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t want to, would they? It’s like all the teams that have got their own cheerleading squad or whatever. It’s never going to be the same as America. If girls want to do it, and they’re quite happy—I do look at it and go, God, they’re crap. They’re there for the man’s point of view, they’re doing what they’re there to do. It’s all a bit stupid, really.

This is a common reaction to other arenas of female objectification by the male gaze, such as Page 3, lap-dancing, and even pornography; the decision to make oneself an object is a free one, and thus it cannot be criticized. Emma’s words indicate that she sees herself as taking a moral high ground; men gaze on the Soccerettes, which is “a bit stupid,” while she (and presumably other women) pass judgement on the Soccerette’s modeling performance, which is invariably “crap.” For Emma, the presentation of the objectified Soccerette is not the “abusive hypermasculinity” described by Jones,17 which would require the female fan to assert her femininity in direct opposition in order to distance herself from it; it is simply a masculine practice of fandom that the female fan can either adopt or ignore. The female fan watching Soccer AM constructs a “neutral position” in order to avoid the “ideological dilemma”18 of explicitly acknowledging the sexism on show while also enjoying and consuming the program. The show does not intend to exclude her from watching, nor does it intend to offend her, but no special allowances are made for the female viewer. She can view—or gaze—along with her male counterpart and assume the active male role if she wishes; her femaleness is not considered or taken into account. Rotherham fan Lucy was more reflective about Soccer AM, expressing some reservations about the way it is structured and its content. She talked about the show’s

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female presenter Helen Chamberlain, and voiced disappointment that she had posed for nude photo shoots in the past. She says: She went through a phase where she kept taking her clothes off in a lot of places, and I thought Helen, you don’t need to do that, you’re a woman, you like your football, you know what you’re talking about, you don’t have to be totty as well. I do enjoy Soccer AM but I do sometimes wish they’d have a few more women guests who are on there not because they’re going out with a footballer.

Lucy’s feelings about Chamberlain as expressed here seem to be conflicted; she likes the program, and likes there being a female presenter who is knowledgeable about football, but she does not like Chamberlain having posed for nude pictures, subjecting herself to the same sexualized male gaze as the Soccerette. She implies with the words “You don’t have to be totty as well” that she thinks that Chamberlain perceived an imperative in action—the need for a woman in a male-dominated domain to be perceived as a sexual being. Lucy argues that the female football fan must make a choice—either she can be a knowledgeable football fan or she can be sexually objectified decoration (“totty”). To be “totty” is to be demeaned in the eyes of other female fans, and to devalue one’s fandom; but to be “totty” is also to increase your status and appeal to men, particularly male fans, and this is illustrated by Lucy’s comment that female guests are invited on to Soccer AM if they are the partner of a footballer. For women, footballing knowledge does not raise your cultural capital or improve your chances of a high-profile interview on this television program; only attractiveness and a relationship with a male connected to football can do this. It appears that in this particular context a woman cannot hold the cultural capital of football knowledge; but she can share in the cultural capital that belongs to a man. She can also hold capital in her own right, but this is based purely on her aesthetic attractiveness. Lucy attributes some of this attitude to the media’s perception and discussion of female football fans. She discusses one example of “unhelpful” newspaper coverage: Lucy: I don’t think it helps when you get, it was The Sun the other week, they had like a Girls’ Guide of how to get into football. This is what the offside rule is. Say you like Thierry Henry. It does a lot of the time treat women as though they only go because they fancy the players. That’s as much of a generalization as well. CD : Yeah. “Girls like going because they like looking at the players.” Lucy: I get this as well, you know, when they have the cheerleaders at half-time at some grounds and all the men are chanting get your whatevers out. If you ever said, they’d say, “Well, you’ve been looking at their legs all match.”

This extract indicates that Lucy believes that the media’s predilection for treating women as a homogenous group with no knowledge about football and emphasizing the opportunities to gaze at attractive young sportsmen has the knock-on effect of making it acceptable for male fans to behave in sexist ways, for example by directing

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chants at women, or by gazing at young female cheerleaders. Lucy believes that should a woman mention to a man at football that his objectification of a woman in the ground is offensive, because of the stereotype that has been created and perpetuated, he would immediately say, “You’ve been looking at their [the players’] legs all match,” which would be impossible to disprove. Should a female fan object to the presentation of women on sports programs in the media, as Lucy does, she is running the risk of distancing herself from the rest of the fanbase. There is an argument that would say that the woman who happily accepts the gender stereotypes portrayed in the media and participates in them (in this case simply by viewing),19 as Lucy and Emma do, also accepts that “women are primarily prized and displayed for their looks,” and while women are depicted only in relation to men (which occurs on the heavily gendered Soccer AM) then this undermines individual women’s argument that they dress and act simply for themselves rather than male approval. Emma is an example of a woman who maintains that women who display themselves in a sexualized manner within a sporting context are simply operating under the freedom of choice; but one argument would be that these women are colluding with a kyriarchical structure and reinforcing gender stereotypes, which is the point that Lucy was making with regard to Helen Chamberlain. When the institutionalized sexism of football is made explicit in this way, similar to the pattern illustrated with the viewing of Soccer AM, female fans have to position themselves as separate or distanced from the situation in some way, in order to remain connected with their fandom and the identity they have already scoped out for themselves. Yet, as Liz observes, female fans also need to negotiate the “authenticity” of their football fandom, and demonstrate that they are watching the sport and not “gazing” at the male players (despite male fans having the opportunity to “gaze” at women, such a demonstration of heterosexuality does not undermine their fandom, as the reverse would do for women). Thus drawing on the frameworks provided by Mulvey and Guttmann,20 I offer three ways in which female fans construct their “relationship” with footballers—as the object of a “crush” (a fantasy romantic relationship), as an “idol” (as someone untouchable and equivalent with pop stars and famous actors), and as a role model (as a favorite player to be liked and emulated). The second and third of these relationships often link together, as will be shown by the narratives of respondents. The figure of the female is presented as the meaning-less Other for men to look upon and impose their own interpretation; the male is active, the female is passive, and the determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure displayed on screen. Mulvey argues that mainstream cinema reflects the obsessions of the society which produced it, and alternative cinema has the capacity to act as a counterpoint and challenge; mainstream cinema codes what would be erotic (the female figure) into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.21 I argue that the same can be said of mainstream English professional football, which in the twenty-first century has become interwined with, influenced by, and influential to the media. Mulvey analyzes the pleasure of scopophilia, assessing the appeal of taking other people as objects, and subjecting them to a gaze. Freud discussed the phenomenon

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and illustrated it with examples of children’s voyeurism, arguing that there is a human desire to see what is private and forbidden. Mulvey extends this to apply to the cinema; though voyeurism is unwilling, surreptitious observation and cinema is manifest, it is within a hermetically sealed world. The actors are unaware of the audience, which creates separation between the viewed and the viewers, and thus plays on the human fantasy of voyeurism.22 Again, there is a parallel with fans watching football; the football ground too is a hermetically sealed world; the players will be on the field and participating in the game in the same way regardless of who is there watching them. Rather than explaining football’s appeal to women solely as an opportunity to utilize a sexually objectifying gaze, I argue that football also offers women fans an opportunity to assume power and take on a “male” role; assuming this active, masculine power of the gaze makes fandom attractive to women. However, I also suggest that because the opportunities for women to assert this power are so limited, they are thus likely to describe their fandom in traditionally gendered terms by co-opting the vocabulary of the “crush” to explain their love for their favorite players. When a woman is a fan within a male-dominated realm, there is invariably a heterosexist assumption that her fandom depends upon being sexually attracted to one of the men involved. Thus, her fandom is somehow less “genuine” than a man’s, because there is a concurrent assumption that his fandom can never be triggered or forged by sexual attraction (see Cline, discussing her crush on rock singer David Lee Roth, arguing that such feelings are “overstep[ping] the bounds of proper feminine behavior” and that admitting to a sexual attraction that influences your fandom condemns you to be infantilized).23 Bailey argues that some female fans may feel that, as identification with the heterosexual male star is not possible, treating the star as an object of sexual desire is thus the only other option. However, he suggests a third possibility—simply ignoring the opportunities to identify with or objectify. Similar to their need to ignore the heterosexism of the objectification of the female figure in the sports media, female football fans have the option to remove themselves from a difficult negotitation of identity.

The Role of Female Sexual Attraction in Soccer Fandom As Cashmore and Parker noted in 2003, the new millennium has offered male athletes different ways in which to construct their image of masculinity. They offer up David Beckham as an example of a sportsman who has embodied a multifaceted masculinity: working-class boy made good, father, husband, but also a canvas upon which fantasies can be projected. His adoption into “celebrity culture” with his marriage to pop-star wife Victoria also extended the range of masculinities which he could present, noting particularly a more public lifestyle and an increasingly extravagant dress sense. They suggest also that Beckham offers his fans the opportunity to consume him and his image in multiple ways; they observe that he also offers an “ambivalence” as well as “androgynous good looks,” broadening his appeal.24 I suggest that a decade

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later, Cristiano Ronaldo has similarly taken on this role, offering up a curiously sexless yet semi-clad image of himself in advertising his own clothing and underwear range. Although it can play a part for some women, none of my respondents reported that their fandom had ever been motivated solely, primarily or even in part by being physically attracted to, or physically admiring, any of the players. Lines argues that female sports fandom offers a chance to admire power, and channel their own frustrated sporting desires into watching rather than doing.25 This aligns with Ehrenreich and colleague’s analysis of Beatlemania, which concludes: “If girls could not be, or ever hope to be, superstars and madcap adventurers themselves, they could at least idolize the men who were.”26 Equally, if girls in the UK in the twenty-first century cannot be or ever hope to be highly-paid professional footballers with all the recognition, celebrity, and adulation that entails, they can at least admire the men who are. Parry argues that athletes are co-opted as heroes even by people who have no interest in sport, and that females have male athletes as their heroes more often than they admire other females.27 Football fans often choose players from their own team as their heroes, primarily due to their increased levels of familiarity with these sportsmen as they watch them regularly.28 This was the case with many of my respondents, who named their heroes and favorite players, and discussed their reasons for liking them. Many appropriated the typical terminology used to describe female fans (such as the obvious “groupie”) and their relationship to the player or players they like best (such as “crush” and “in love”). For example, Paula, a 47-year-old Charlton fan, recalls her adolescence in which she shunned the traditional female fandom of pop for football, and replaced the usual singer pin-up with a Charlton player. She says: Oh, I was in love, absolutely besotted, with Cyril Davies who played No 7 when I was about 14. First schoolgirl crush . . . Everyone else had pictures of David Cassidy on their desks. I had Cyril.

When narrating this, Paula was happy and amused to recall how she had behaved as a teenager, but there was also a sense of pride that this was a “normal” example of teenage female behavior, as opposed to the “unusual” behavior of going to football at the weekend. As a teenager, Nadia, a 34-year-old Liverpool fan, had friends who she calls “football groupies.” There is no indication in her narrative that these young women actually tried to initiate a sexual relationship with the players they admired; they simply behaved in ways more usually associated with female pop fans—loitering outside the buildings where the players were, for example. She explains: These two girls that were my penpals in Liverpool, they were real football groupies. I see them now—girls about 18, hanging around the training ground. I remember one of them was obsessed by John Aldridge. He knew her really well, by name and everything, he’d give her a birthday card and stuff. She used to hang around him so

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much every day. So I just went down there one time. Then I think as well the next summer my best friend came up with me and we spent the weekend there.

It is obvious that the John Aldridge admirer was not a “groupie” in the strictest sense of the word—after all, the example Nadia gives that demonstrates that he knew her “really well” was that he knew her name and wrote her a birthday card, rather than anything physical or sexual. I suggest that this is why Nadia adds the modifier to create the noun “football groupie,” which refers to a female who has an “obsession” with football to the extent that she will go to the training ground to meet players on a daily basis. There is of course no indication that the same phrase would be used to refer to a male who did the same thing; usually a man with this level of obsession (or possibly dedication) would be called “an anorak” or “a geek,” both vaguely derogatory terms, but both terms that do not seek to explain a reason for the obsession, whereas “football groupie” implies that there is a sexual motivation for it. Nadia makes clear here that though her penpals were “groupies” and “obsessed,” she was not, and that she went to the training ground only because her penpals encouraged her to. When she went the following summer of her own accord, it was just for a weekend rather than “every day,” as her penpals did. The way Nadia began supporting may be a factor here; she was not born or brought up in Liverpool, but picked her team because her older male cousins supported them. To attribute any part of her fandom to a “crush” would be to feminize it, and diminish it further. Susie, forty at the time of the interview, was similar to Nadia in that her support for her team Ipswich was not based on proximity, and so her relationship with the team and the players was distant as she got to see them infrequently. This may go some way to explaining the intensity of her feelings for so many of the players; the maxim “absence makes the heart grow fonder” seems to be true for her, as she built up ordinary footballers into fantasy figures that she could hardly believe were real. She uses the vocabulary of “the crush” to describe her feelings for several of the players, but she is also careful within this narrative to distinguish between players she genuinely felt an attraction to, and players she loved for their ability, as is demonstrated with this extract: I think I was in love with half the team. I liked Paul Mariner probably best as a player, but Russell Osman, I had a huge crush on Russell Osman. I remember throwing myself in front of his car in the car park so I could get his autograph. He had a blur of a 16-year-old spread across his bonnet! . . . I just remember Paul Mariner running out and thinking, my God, he’s real! My heart beat faster for Russell Osman.

Although she prefaces this piece of narrative with claiming she was “in love with half the team,” she actually makes a clear distinction between her favorite player and hero Paul Mariner, whom she could not quite believe was real when she first saw him, and her favorite player and crush Russell Osman, who made her “heart beat faster.” Her crush on Osman seems to have been genuinely felt and not simply performative of

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“normal” teenage girl behavior (as Paula’s narrative suggested); indeed, later in the narrative she indicates that her feelings may have dimmed with maturity but they have not died entirely, when she says: I had loads of posters on my walls and stuff. I found them all not long ago. I was clearing out my old stuff at home. There they all were. Russell Osman still does it for me, I think.

As long-standing fans, respondents were generally very aware that men tend to make assumptions about them, most usually that they go to football exclusively for the chance to look at men. Thus it was not uncommon for respondents to become defensive about their fandom even before the topic of other fans’ perceptions had been raised, and specify that they love the game for reasons other than the opportunity to look at young men in shorts, as Jeffries and Marr assume.29 Alice, a 36-year-old Notts County fan, concludes that some men simply do not like women entering their specifically male domain, because they see it as an unwarranted invasion of their male bonding ritual and time. This attitude from male supporters would indicate that Lines is incorrect when she argues that female onlookers are encouraged to take on a spectator’s role which renders them powerless. That would indicate that male spectators are equally disenfranchized, and from Alice’s experience, it seems that male fans guard their privileged role as spectators jealously, and do not want women to share this position. She says: “I think some blokes don’t like [women] going to football—meet my mates, up the pub, go in the ground.” Alice comes from a football-supporting family and attends matches with a close-knit community of fans, who have seen her grow up as a Notts County supporter. When she went to watch another team with her brotherin-law, who does not support the same team as her, she felt very aware of the first impressions male fans got of her, saying: It was especially noticeable when I went with my brother-in-law to see Forest. It was like, what’s she doing? My brother-in-law had a spare ticket! You’re having a drink with us? Do you know anything about football? I was like, oh God, it’s like the Stone Age. I’m not going to stand there going, ooh, look at his legs, for crying out loud.

Conclusion: Institutionalized Sexism and the Dilemma of Negotiating Fan Identity These experiences of life as a female football fan, including their consumption of football media, demonstrates the dilemma that female football fans have: they have to negotiate their identities, as fans and as women, in an institutionally sexist sport and an institutionally sexist fandom, reinforced by the media they consume. Despite the sexism on show, my research indicates that female fans have a high level of football media consumption—primarily focused on their own team, using their club’s official website

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for news and watching highlights of their team’s games, but also reading national newspapers and magazines and watching matches in which their team is not involved. Additionally, far from being “groupies,” or there simply to gaze at male bodies, no respondents had had a sexual relationship or even attempted to instigate one with any of their favorites. Though they may use the vocabulary of stereotypical female fandom, such as “groupie” and “crush,” they make it very clear that they do not pick favorite players because of their sexual attractiveness; indeed, they do not pick their favorite players at all, but rather favorite players pick themselves, in a way. The heterosexist, heteronormative assumption that female football fans take male physical attractiveness into account when watching the game seems to be largely untrue. Despite this, respondents are very aware that this stereotype exists and are keen to point out that in their own case it is not true, even if other female fans may follow the stereotypical pattern, and even if male fans still assume that the stereotype is globally, empirically true. It is clear from my respondents’ narratives that often they find themselves in a conflicted position, participating in a fandom which is institutionally sexist and thus (hetero-)sexually objectifies women (who are not generally deemed as part of the fandom). However, they had a range of attitudes and reactions about the representation of gender and female fandom in the media they consumed. Some highlighted examples of what they felt was “inappropriate” female conduct within football, and others chose to ignore examples of highly-gendered or sexualized sports media. Whelehan argues that the woman who happily accepts the gender stereotypes portrayed in the media and participates in them (in this case simply by consumption) also accepts that “women are primarily prized and displayed for their looks”, and while women are depicted only in relation to men (as the heavily gendered Soccer AM does) then this undermines “contemporary female assurances that glamor and style are done ‘for myself ’ and not for male approbation.”30 Yet female football fans are largely very well aware of the gendered nature of some of the media they consume in relation to their football fandom, and they thus create ways to negotiate potential issues. Although Whelehan says that these women are colluding with a kyriarchical structure and reinforcing gender stereotypes, some of my respondents argued that females who display themselves in a sexualized manner within a sporting context are simply operating under the freedom of choice. Their reaction to the football media is just another way in which my respondents perceive and perform their identity as fans.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Dunn, Female Football Fans. Parry, “Search for the Hero.” Lines, “The Sports Star in the Media.” Jones, “Female Fandom.” McLean, “Researching Academic Identity.” Hornby, Fever Pitch, 103.

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7 This research involved receiving 100 questionnaire responses from female football fans as a development stage (Hesse-Biber, Mixed Methods Research, 5) to gain some quantitative data and to help decide which respondents to interview. I conducted 27 interviews with 28 of those initial questionnaire respondents (all one-to-one interviews apart from one in which I spoke to a mother and daughter together). 8 See: nineteenth-century match reports quoted in Murphy, Williams, and Dunning, Football on Trial, 56; Taylor, Football and Its Fans, 7. 9 Taylor, Football and Its Fans, 7. 10 Lewis, “Our Lady Specialists at Pikes Lane,” 2167. 11 Lewis, “Our Lady Specialists at Pikes Lane,” 2169. 12 Murphy, Williams, and Dunning, Football on Trial, 77–8 13 Williams, Murphy, and Dunning, 17. 14 Coddington, One of the Lads, 2. 15 Harris, “Lie Back and Think of England,” 106. 16 Harris, “Lie Back and Think of England,” 97. 17 Jones, “Female Fandom.” 18 McLean, “Researching Academic Identity.” 19 Whelehan, Overloaded. 20 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures; Guttmann, The Erotic in Sports. 21 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 16. 22 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 17. 23 Cline, “David Lee Roth.” 24 Cashmore and Parker, “One David Beckham?” 25 Lines, “The Sports Star in the Media,” 209. 26 Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, “Beatlemania.” 27 Parry, “Search for the Hero.” 28 Ian Taylor argues that in earlier eras of football fandom, heroes were accessible to supporters because they came from the same backgrounds and lived in the same areas, and there was an expectation that footballers should engage with their fans. Taylor, “Football Mad.” 29 Guttmann pleads for the “acceptance of mutually admiring male and female gazes (and for gay and lesbian ones as well)” within the sports arena, but though this may be a noble aim, my respondents note that the female spectator admiring the male body has much less “space” within the arena to do so; while a man can admire a female body and understand the sport she is playing, a female is seen as less knowledgeable the more she acknowledges her sexuality (e.g., through expressing a physical attraction towards a sportsman; dressing in a “feminine” way at a male-dominated sports ground). Guttmann, The Erotic in Sports. 30 Whelehan, Overloaded, 51.

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The Politics of Soccer in Contemporary Ghanaian Art Daniel Haxall

“Why can’t the U.S. beat Ghana?”1 The Wall Street Journal posed this question after Ghana eliminated the United States men’s national soccer team from consecutive World Cups in 2006 and 2010. While the Americans finally defeated Ghana in the 2014 edition of the tournament, some described their opponent as “frightening” and a “nightmare.”2 One of Africa’s best squads, Ghana boasts a proud footballing history that dates to its establishment as a nation and continues today. With international success at the youth and senior levels of men’s soccer, the game occupies a central place in Ghana’s cultural imagination. The sport features in popular music, literary figures including poet laureate Atukwei Okai praise the national team in their writings, printed textiles celebrate local clubs, and artworks about soccer appear in major international exhibitions across the globe. This chapter examines three prominent artists from Ghana—Godfried Donkor, George Afedzi Hughes, and Owusu-Ankomah—and unique ways they depict the “beautiful game.”3 Where many document soccer in Africa by photographing the continent’s colorful fans or local traditions of homemade balls and makeshift pitches,4 Donkor, Hughes, and Owusu-Ankomah utilize painting and collage to present the game as a contested space. From celebrations of nationalism and the unity brokered by football to critiques of its corruption and divisive agency, soccer serves as a powerful metaphor, allowing these artists to engage immigration, global capitalism, fan behavior, and other issues bound within the politics of Ghana’s most popular sport.

Rise of the Black Stars As in many former colonies, English settlers introduced soccer to Ghana in the nineteenth century. The earliest clubs developed from school teams, and leagues were established by the 1920s. Hearts of Oak, based in the capital city of Accra, formed in 1911, while the Kumasi-based team that became Asante Kotoko debuted in 1924 as the Rainbow Football Club, eventually adopting its current moniker to celebrate the return of Ashanti kings after British exile. Regional and ethnic differences, as well as political affiliations, fueled a major rivalry between these iconic teams that continues today, and 171

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similar tensions led to the formation of rival football associations in the 1940s.5 The fractured state of the game paralleled the political disputes throughout the Gold Coast until Kwame Nkrumah rose to power and established the sovereign nation of Ghana in 1957. Nkrumah understood the potential of sport for fostering unity and national identity, and employed soccer to promote a sense of collectivism and pride. Despite the game’s colonial origins, soccer had, as Paul Darby argued, “been gradually wrested from European control, Africanized, and had come to represent an important vehicle for local self-expression and popular resistance against colonial rule.”6 Indeed, matches were staged as part of Ghana’s independence celebrations, and Nkrumah created a national football association and league, appointing Ohene Djan as director.7 The new soccer league contained two teams from each region in Ghana, allowing fans to maintain local allegiances while remaining part of a countrywide narrative. To further communalism, Nkrumah invested heavily in the national team, arranging contests with the world’s most famous clubs and sponsoring tournaments with other African nations. Ghana adopted the nickname “Black Stars,” evoking pan-African sentiment by using the name of Marcus Garvey’s famous steamship that was designed to reconnect Africa with its American and Caribbean diasporas. The use of the “Black Star” emblem suggested soccer’s function within Nkrumah’s political program: promoting nationalism, enhancing Africa’s reputation on the global stage, and brokering unity across the continent. As the former president observed: Not only can sports contribute toward the development of our nation and improve the physical fitness of our men and women, but they can also play a great part in the development of unity and understanding between the regions of Ghana . . . [Sports] have another and even more important role to play in present-day Africa. Through international competitions with other African States, sports can provide that necessary basis of mutual understanding which can so greatly assist the realization of our ideal of unity in Africa.8

Toward this end, membership of FIFA and CAF, the governing bodies of international and African soccer respectively, were secured soon after independence. Significant social issues could be addressed through the authority of such organizations, as exemplified by Djan’s leading role in convincing FIFA to ban South Africa from competition due to its apartheid policies.9 As University of Ghana historian William Narteh observed: Nkrumah saw the game of football very early as one of the mediums through which to bring changes, whether it was in local politics or national politics . . . A lot of African countries were then still under colonial rule, he wanted to project the idea of black power, that “What they can do, we as blacks can also do.”10

With Nkrumah’s patronage, the Black Stars won consecutive Africa Cup of Nations, a biannual continental championship, in 1963 and 1965. The men’s national team struggled following his ouster in the late 1960s but reclaimed the Africa Cup of Nations

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in 1978 and 1982. An investment in youth soccer led by Ghana’s Deputy Minister of Sport and Youth, Joe Aggrey, resulted in a period of unprecedented success throughout the 1990s. The Under-17 youth national team advanced to four consecutive World Cup Finals between 1991 and 1997, winning the event twice, and the Black Stars captured the bronze medal at the 1992 Olympics.11 More recently, the Under-20 men’s squad triumphed in the World Cup in 2009, while the senior national team placed no worse than fourth in the previous six Africa Cup of Nations. They have qualified for three straight World Cups and continue to receive support from the government as Ghanaian ambassadors.12 For example, the government recently spent $4.5 million to help fans travel to the 2010 FIFA men’s World Cup in South Africa to advance the nation’s image.13 Nkrumah’s pan-African rhetoric remains a means of espousing patriotism through soccer, with former President John Kufour imploring the team “to make Ghana and Africa proud,” and the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian encouraging continental support for Ghana in the World Cup by declaring, “We are all Black Stars.”14

Godfried Donkor, Football and the Politics of Icons With the emphasis placed on soccer in constructing national identity, the sport remains a popular subject in the popular culture and fine art of Ghana. For three artists born after independence—Godfried Donkor, George Afedzi Hughes, and OwusuAnkomah15—the sport functions as a multifaceted symbol of contemporary life, one loaded with sociopolitical implications. A self-professed soccer “fanatic,” Godfried Donkor has explored the game and its significance for over two decades. He first understood its influence during postgraduate studies in Barcelona that coincided with FC Barcelona’s famous “Dream Team,” winners of both the UEFA Champions League and Spanish League in 1992. As he recalled: It was in Barcelona where it dawned on me after a few weeks that in Spain, football is not just a sport it’s a religion. They have their games on Sundays, and on Mondays most of the people will come out into the street to discuss the previous day’s activities. And you have all of the people out in the streets discussing points of their teams and the players, and you have posters of the players, and pictures of the players almost in a saintly manner. This is where I began to look at football as much more powerful than just being a sport and the players becoming much more integral to society than just footballers . . .16

With this revelation, Donkor began making art about the game, creating new work every four years to coincide with the men’s World Cup. He frequently works in collage, sourcing illustrations, newsprint, photographs, and engravings from various time periods to combine them as a means of exploring complicated histories of representation. These often take the form of faux icons representing the game’s biggest stars, and Donkor utilizes Byzantine traditions of gold leaf and haloes to call attention

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to the lofty position of athletes in society. His titles refer to the players as Santo, or “Saint,” reinforcing the cultish fandom that envelops many supporters. Donkor pushed this link further by reprinting his collages as small cards and distributing them throughout the Camberwell Arts Festival during the 2014 men’s World Cup. Referring to the soccer trading cards and sticker albums coveted by fans throughout the world, the artist blends popular and art historical practices to represent the sport. Many of the footballers depicted by Donkor played for the fabled Brazilian squads who captivated the artist while growing up. For example, Jairzinho dominated the 1970 men’s World Cup, scoring in each of Brazil’s seven matches while leading them to the title. In Donkor’s portrait, the winger dons a halo before a green ground. His compatriots Pelé and Ronaldo appear over his shoulder as guardians or forebears, establishing a trajectory of great Brazilian goalscorers while acknowledging Jairzinho’s “discovery” of Ronaldo as a youth player. Committed to the role sport can play in mobility and socialization, Jairzinho offers free soccer clinics to children from some of Rio de Janeiro’s poorest favelas, encouraging healthy lifestyles and recreational activities away from gangs or criminal activity.17 His famous Afro, represented in the portrait, reflected Jairzinho’s social conscience and support for the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.18 Many of Donkor’s subjects possessed similar attitudes, for example Sócrates was celebrated for his play and the political messages he wore on t-shirts and headbands. As Donkor recalls: Sócrates was a particular favorite of mine, just because of the way he looked and the way he played . . . Later on, I discovered from research . . . that he was a real socialist political figure and at Sao Paolo and at Corinthians he set up some radical socialist ideas during the 1980s in Brazil when they had right-police governments, and that through football were actually able to counter some of that activity, so he became even much more of a hero, but I didn’t know that when I was a kid obviously.19

For the artist, many of these footballers were activists off the pitch and his research into the game’s history and politics often increases their esteem. Donkor frequently utilizes sport as a metaphor for race and the exploitation of black masculinity, linking colonial capitalism to contemporary practices under globalization. His image of Eusebio (Figure  9.1), for example, acknowledges the commodification of athletes, particularly as stock rates from the Financial Times form the backdrop of the collage. Donkor positioned the footballer in front of commodity listings and added a gilded halo and numerical ratings for “skill,” “teamwork,” and other variables that account for his “overall legend rating.” Born in present-day Mozambique, Eusebio immigrated to Lisbon as a teenager, leading Benfica to the European Cup title and earning the 1965 Ballon d’Or for European player of the year. Nicknamed the “Black Panther” and “Black Pearl,” he starred for the Portuguese national team, ironically becoming “Portugal’s best-ever player” despite being born in Africa.20 By superimposing portraits of footballers atop market values, Donkor likens the exportation of, and transfer fees paid

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Figure 9.1 Godfried Donkor, Santo Eusebio, 2006. Mixed media collage on paper, 64 × 48 cm. Courtesy of the artist. for, athletes like Eusebio to the slave trade.21 The association of soccer business practices with slavery is controversial, with some critical of such comparisons because of the millions of dollars paid to professional athletes.22 However, recent research has exposed child trafficking within international football, rendering Donkor’s work timely and insightful.23 Among the African greats celebrated by Godfried Donkor is Cameroon’s Francois Omam-Biyik, the subject of Santo Oman (2006). Renowned for his aerial prowess and scoring the winning goal against Argentina in the 1990 World Cup, the striker played in three World Cups as well as professionally in France and Mexico. Portrayed here with a halo while wearing his 1990 national team jersey, Santo Oman dribbles the ball before advertising hoardings constructed from the African-American magazine Ebony. Even though he disagreed with some of its conservative politics, Donkor found Ebony an “avenue into African American culture” and a tool for linking the historical with the contemporary.24 In Santo Oman, an issue from 1948 features Jackie Robinson with the caption, “What’s Wrong with Negro Baseball?” an editorial controversial for its critique of the segregated Negro League and its business practices. Robinson had broken Major League Baseball’s color barrier the previous year, achieving notoriety while excelling on the field. On the other side of Omam-Biyik is Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia from

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1930 to 1974. Hailed as a messianic figure and integral in attaining Ethiopia’s membership to the United Nations, the Emperor joins revered jazz composer Duke Ellington as further evidence of the footballer’s significance. Soccer, then, becomes a means for immortality and revolution, with Donkor celebrating those who dismantled racial segregation and furthered black culture. Many athletes foster social change through their media profile, and with racism a major international problem the African footballer remains an influential figure. In his portrait of Yaya Touré, four-time African player of the year, Donkor represents the midfielder striding across the pitch with legendary Cameroon forward Roger Milla above his left shoulder. Letters running along the sidelines spell out the word “protests” and flank a medieval coat of arms featuring a black woman with long braided hair.25 By linking historical representations of race to contemporary times, Donkor reminds viewers of Touré’s struggles to combat religious and racial prejudice. As a Muslim who does not drink alcohol, he declined an award for “Barclay’s Premier League Man of the Match” that included a bottle of champagne, leading the league to change its award format.26 And as the target of racist abuse, Touré recently encouraged African nations to boycott the 2018 men’s World Cup in Russia if such behavior remains in football.27 Unfortunately, the racism encountered by Touré plagues the game. Paul Pogba has suffered similar indignities while playing for Juventus, his former club team in Italy. Born in the suburbs of Paris to Guinean émigrés, Pogba became an international star and represented France in the 2014 men’s World Cup. Drawing from the largest African immigrant population in Europe, the French national team won the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championship with players born in Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, Guyana, and Ghana, as well as Algerian descendants.28 Celebrated as a model of integration, the French team became a symbol of postcolonial multiculturalism.29 In Donkor’s portrait (Figure 9.2), Pogba continues this legacy, wearing the blue French kit next to a traditional African mask that establishes his ancestry. The appearance of the Cristo Redentor statue from Rio de Janeiro represents the site of the 2014 men’s World Cup in Brazil, while the letters “ODB” refer to the rap group, Wu-Tang Clan.30 The Christian monument coexists with an African mask, American hip-hop band, and Muslim athlete, further signifying the convergence of cultures and identities that occurs in soccer. That Pogba’s parents immigrated to Europe is not unusual: approximately 4.6 million migrants from Africa lived in Europe according to 2007 statistics, a number that does not include undocumented immigrants or the one million new arrivals that occurred during the 2015 asylum crisis alone.31 Athletes remain a major African export, with many hoping to find opportunity and affluence in professional leagues abroad.32 In Trinity of the Saints, 2009 (Figure  9.3), Donkor connects this phenomenon to colonialism as wealthy European clubs import players from Africa and Latin America. Originally made for the 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa, the collage features a footballer adjusting his boot while accompanied by two gilded, soccer-playing angels. Unlike his other portraits, these anonymous figures represent a general idea of an Africa exploited by commercial interest. Advertising hoardings project stock market reports and the statement “I ♥ Africa,” a declaration of pan-African pride as well as the

Figure 9.2 Godfried Donkor, Santo Pogba, 2014. Mixed media collage on paper, 50 × 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 9.3 Godfried Donkor, Trinity of the Saints, 2009. Mixed media collage on paper, 50 × 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 177

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motto of international clubs who focus on the continent for potential recruits. Footballers and political figures attend the match, and the portraits of George Washington and the “Big Six”—the leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention that boycotted colonial imports in 1948—derive from the American dollar and Ghanaian cedi respectively. Donkor also used birds from the Trinidadian dollar to create a diverse crowd evocative of the colorful costumes commonly found at African matches. The currency and commodity listings, coupled with the heavenly status and gilded wealth of Trinity of the Saints, signify the material riches available through sport and incentives offered by those who would exploit aspirants. Ultimately this collage, like Donkor’s oeuvre in general, exposes the mechanisms that frame ethnicity in limited terms and govern the global marketplace of sport.

George Afedzi Hughes, Soccer, and Postcolonial Fetishism Like Godfried Donkor, George Afedzi Hughes explores the canonization of soccer players while critiquing the political implications of the game, especially regarding colonialism and globalization. His use of soccer as subject matter dates to 1987; however, it has appeared more frequently in the past decade with Ghana’s rise to international prominence. Hughes remains keenly aware of the sport, an aspect made apparent in paintings like Golden Boot (2010, Figure 9.4). Here, an oversized cleat commands a pitch flanked by headshots of spectators. The “golden boot” recalls historic golden idols and refers to the top scorer in a soccer competition, an award that ascribes commodity value to sporting success. Text spells out “YOUTUBE ” across the top of the painting, citing the ways fans consume sports in recent times, including GIF s and other Internet replays. An owl’s bust floats above the soccer match, capped by a halo with wings protruding from the bird’s head. As Hughes explains, the image represents the mysticism that often enters soccer in Ghana: There were instances in Ghana years ago when we heard rumors of occult practices by local teams, so the owl, a nocturnal bird is a symbol of the underworld. The presence of birds in my work often refers to spirituality, ritual, or the release of the spirit at death.33

These occult practices have been common throughout the African game since its inception. Many teams hired a spiritualist as a “consultant,” advising players about rituals and talismans to ensure success. These included washing with a particular soap, wearing the hair of a dead man, drinking special potions, and so forth.34 While some of these stories were exaggerated, in Ghana such practices were prevalent. Teams suspended players who did not obey the club mystic and one club even fired a coach who replaced traditional fetishism with Christian prayer.35 The Confederation of African Football banned spiritual advisers in 2002, fearing they generated a “thirdworld image” for a continent already heavily stereotyped.36 While players and coaches face prosecution for witchcraft, fans continue to employ magic to aid their team.

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Figure 9.4 George Afedzi Hughes, Golden Boot, 2010. Mixed media on canvas, 48 × 32 in. Courtesy of the artist and ARTCO Art Gallery.

During the Africa Cup of Nations hosted by Ghana in 2008, the “Juju Man” became a national celebrity, appearing on television while using cowry shells and chickens to predict results. When Ghana failed to win the tournament, many Christians believed God punished the team for these beliefs and practices. Yet Christian pastors also prayed for a successful tournament, hoping soccer would bolster Ghana’s national profile.37 The fetishism of soccer and its athletes extends beyond a spiritual component, and Hughes frequently depicts the commodity fetishism rife within professional sports. Disembodied, skeletal appendages recur as a device for representing the physical traumas and injuries suffered by players. Yet the fragmentation of body parts coupled with sports paraphernalia suggests discourses surrounding consumption and desire. In The Masked Goalkeeper (2009), the lungs evoke a player’s fitness, the hands are crucial to a goalkeeper, and the legs are the central feature of the footballer. The inclusion of the dollar sign suggests the monetization of these attributes in professional sports, especially within soccer where players are bought and sold via transfers. No other features identify the player beyond physical traits and monetary values, and the fragmentation of the body renders it as merchandise. While this association is clear, the artist’s rhetorical devices uncover the machinations of fetishism in sports marketing and player contracts. By isolating particular anatomical features, such as the legs and lungs, Hughes’ painting resembles Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the “fetish-beauty,” the

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abstraction of a sought-after object, in this case the body, into a system of representation. Since the fetish refers to a surrogate, or proxy for that which is desired, the body becomes separated into partial units that Baudrillard considers consumable. The divided body loses agency, and stripped of its totality and power, becomes an object safe for consumption.38 Without contextual references beyond the dollar signs, the disjointed bodies appear saleable, thereby reducing the footballers to a code of activity defined solely by physique and price tag. Where Marx and Engels believed that monetary value typically conceals the social character of labor, Hughes inscribes his athletes within a code of physical performance and net worth, exposing their commodification as transfers.39 In addition to salaries and transfer fees, Hughes explores the complicated social position of high-profile athletes. As he explained, the fractured bodies in Masked Goalkeeper suggest the various guises of the athlete: “The fragmented and dissected anatomy is a metaphor for the professional athlete’s susceptibility to public scrutiny and exposure to multiple roles: as athlete, role model, hero, and genius or in bad times as villain.”40 In a similar way, Crucifix (2011) chronicles the public life, and death, of the sports star. A masthead of The New York Times spans the top of the painting, with the caption, “I AM AN ATHLETE AND THIS IS MY CRUCIFIX . . .,” running below. A headshot of a man hangs upside down, forcing viewers to look closely to identify his face and reversing the immediate recognition celebrities typically receive. The portrait does not depict a real person but what Hughes considers a “scapegoat,” while the large Adidas cleat and soccer field identify the man as a footballer. He explained, “the floating letters refer to map coordinates, where the athlete’s position in time and location is monitored after losing one’s privacy to fame and the media.”41 Thus, the crucifixion alludes to the lofty status of athletes in society, but also the vilification of a player for their sporting and public behavior. Media scrutiny can certainly overwhelm highprofile athletes, and in the case of soccer, it can be deadly. For example, Colombian defender Andrés Escobar was murdered after accidentally scoring on his own team in the 1994 men’s World Cup, and events on the pitch can cause riots with fatal consequences. A 2001 contest between Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko in Ghana ended with 126 deaths after fans stampeded to flee “reckless” police, creating a public scandal and the worst stadium disaster in African history.42 Thus, the severity of Crucifix extends beyond media profile and alludes to the literal violence that too often mars the “beautiful game.” In addition to fan disturbance, Hughes connects the militaristic language used in sports to the aggression that plagues human history. Parallel (2011), makes this connection overt, as a black soccer boot corresponds with the pale silhouette of a machine gun. The word “STRIKER” is emblazoned across the painting, a term that refers to a goal-scoring forward as well as the handler of the weapon. By pairing soccer cleat with firearm, Hughes acknowledges the game’s “potential to create hostile rivalry between members of opposing teams, resulting in riots before and after games. The nationalist tendencies of soccer have often been catalyst in racist behavior among fans toward minority players.”43 In addition to the hawkish metaphors used to describe athletic competition, Parallel suggests how the industries of sport and militarism fuel

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the global economy. The inclusion of the Adidas cleat recalls the brand’s complicated history, as the German business famously supplied shoes to Jesse Owens when he defeated Hitler’s Olympians in 1936. The company then negotiated the Third Reich and postwar reconstruction to remain a major force in sportswear.44 As Adidas’ history reveals, corporate branding is seldom apolitical, particularly when the language of aggression is employed to market the latest merchandise. For example, Nike sells “soldier” hightops and the “Hypervenom Phatal” soccer cleat, with the “F” of fatal replaced by “Ph,” while Umbro caused outrage with their “Zyklon” shoe, because the product name unwittingly matched that of a chemical weapon used in the Holocaust.45 For Hughes, Parallel “shows two distinct paths that humanity could choose from. Both paths involve some form of contest, except the militarist choice has fatal consequences. Soccer is a form of civilized contest with the intention of winning games and selling merchandise.”46 Military imagery features in Rain Balls (2011, Figure 9.5), as well, with an airplane bomber dropping soccer balls, basketballs, and footballs over a sparse, abstracted landscape reminiscent of African design. A large lion wearing a crown rests its paw on a golden soccer ball encased by a bird’s cage. This is the logo for England’s Premier League, the world’s most lucrative soccer

Figure 9.5 George Afedzi Hughes, Rain Balls, 2011. Acrylic, oil and enamel on canvas, 62 × 38.5 in. Courtesy of the artist and ARTCO Art Gallery.

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league and one broadcast across the planet. The influence exerted by the Premier League is suggested by the way the ball is contained by the lion, a symbol of England since the Middle Ages. Rather than airlifting supplies or weapons across the world, television conglomerates and sport franchises export their brands, capitalizing on the global popularity of the game. While many have debated the impact of globalized sport, Hughes believes it can have a positive impact if employed correctly. He asked, “rather than dropping bombs why not sports equipment and merchandise.”47 Initiatives exist to help underfunded communities access toys and athletic gear among other essential supplies, however bombers such as those depicted by Hughes are seldom deployed altruistically. Where Rain Balls critiques the power exerted by England’s Premier League, Made in the Colonies (2008–11), references various forms of colonialism that continue through soccer: wealthy European clubs importing players from Africa and Latin America, the production of merchandise and equipment “in the colonies,” and the expansion of markets into Europe’s former territories. The title of the painting runs along the center of the ball while a simulated barcode links the object to consumption and merchandise scanners, data tracking and its increased role in soccer, and innovations in the game such as “goal-line technology.” A row of portraits spans the bottom of the composition, headshots effaced to obscure their racial makeup. Hughes often manipulates human likenesses in his work, fragmenting anonymous visages and fashioning them into new identities. He explained, “By creating new faces from found faces, I am blurring the specificity of identity and referencing the mitochondria DNA genetic mapping of the common ancestry of the human race.”48 Among the many things “made in the colonies” are populations, and Hughes traces our collective human ancestry through shared cultural phenomena such as soccer. With this capacity, soccer assumes a more optimistic position in Catharsis (2008), with the title suggesting release. A minimal painting of green pitch, white goal box, and iconic black-and-white ball, it suggests how football and sports could provide escape or comfort for participant and fan alike. Hughes admitted he was “referring to soccer as an activity that allows fans to express strong emotion in support of their teams . . . Its positive potential equally weighs the negative aspects of the game.”49 In creating affirmations of football alongside criticisms of its problematic aspects, Hughes articulates the conflicting narratives offered by soccer in society: agent of community and unity versus sower of discord and bigotry.

Owusu-Ankomah, Adinkra, and the Global Game Owusu-Ankomah fuses traditional iconographies with contemporary references in paintings that celebrate sport’s potential to foster global harmony. His large black-andwhite canvases depict nude males based on self-portraits, which he then covers with the adinkra symbols historically used by the Akan people as a pictographic system. The ornamentation serves as a background that continues across the skin of his subjects, recalling customs of body paint, tattooing, and scarification prominent in

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many parts of the world. Owusu-Ankomah considers the male form archetypal and universal, while his use of adinkra asserts the specificity of his Ghanaian identity.50 The artist honors the religious and social customs of pre-colonial Africa with this method, and by incorporating contemporary icons into his adinkra vocabulary he challenges viewers to rethink notions about history, ethnicity, and globalization. Owusu-Ankomah hopes to advance human collectivism through his fusion of Western and African artistic practices, beliefs, and symbolic languages. He stated, “With the resurgence of African and Black Cultures comes the merging of world cultures, bringing us all together as one to form one global culture.”51 Sport, and soccer in particular, carries the potential to shape such communalism, particularly as a mode of performance and expression that transcends creed or ideology. As such, football recurs in the oeuvre of Owusu-Ankomah as one of many tropes for representing his vision of the human race. In Movement No.  27 (2002), for example, two soccer players jockey for position, their bodies nearly camouflaged by adinkra patterns. Adjacent to these athletes is the crocodile image (Denkyem), a symbol for adaptability, as well as the twisting abstraction that affirms initiative, dynamism, and versatility (Nkyinkyin).52 The artist painted the Sepo dagger of justice and unification of a nation under law onto the backside of one of the footballers, while running along the top of the composition is the Aban crisscross shape symbolizing strength and domestic security, as well as the Aya fern denoting endurance, independence and perseverance. Further below appears the “war horn” (Akoben), a battle cry or call to action, and several characters beneath stands the “ladder of death” (Owuo Atwedee), a reminder of our mortality and the importance of leading a good life. As is common in Owusu-Ankomah’s oeuvre, a number of contemporary symbols populate the painting as well, including the logo of Mitsubishi, an automobile manufacturer. Sports, advertising, modernization, and traditional values collide as the artist attempts to unify and instill positive values among humanity. Similar ideas appear in On My Knees (2008), where a single athlete plays a ball that appears as planet earth strategically angled to highlight the African continent. A number of traditional adinkra motifs appear in the painting: the measuring rod (Hwehwemudua), urging quality in all endeavors; the knot of reconciliation (Mpatapo), a symbol of peacemaking; the wooden comb (Duate), evocative of beauty, love, and femininity; the abstraction (Gyawu Atiko) representing the shaved head of high-ranking royal and military officials; the “eyes of a king” (Ohene Aniwa) denoting vigilance and awareness; and the heart emblem of patience and tolerance (Akoma). With these notions grafted atop football, the sport assumes the potential for peace, reconciliation, and excellence, and the soccer player attains the prominence of royalty. While these examples project universal values through general representations of sport, two works directly reference the Ghanaian national team. A player advances with a ball in Star Black-Star Bright (2006), with the prominent “black star” over his shoulder signifying Ghana’s soccer program. Several familiar motifs resurface including the “war horn” calling readiness for action and the “measuring rod” of excellence, yet Owusu-Ankomah mines the rich variety of adinkra with various implications for his

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home team. The “checkerboard game” (Damedame) represents craftiness and strategy, challenging misconceptions and stereotypes about African footballing aptitude, while adjoining ovals form a symbol of advancement and development (Esse Ne Tekrema), perhaps indicating the nation’s rise in stature within international soccer. Other emblems relate virtue to the footballer, the “unburnable” (Hye-Wo-Nhye) sign of toughness and durability, and the hairstyle worn by warriors demonstrating their bravery (Kwatakye Atiko), attributes many admire in athletes. Go For It, Stars, 2004 (Figure 9.6), also celebrated Ghana’s squad, portraying two soccer players competing for a hexagonally paneled ball that appears amid the adinkraladen backdrop. Owusu-Ankomah invented a sign reminiscent of Olympic designs to show a player sliding to the ball, and several stars, particularly the prominent “black star” at the center of the composition, represents the Ghanaian team. Five interlocking rings form the Kuntunkantan symbol that boasts of pride yet warns of arrogance, and the dried okra (Nkuruma Kesee) evokes greatness and supremacy, appropriate icons for Africa’s most successful soccer team over the past two decades. OwusuAnkomah also included the “child of the heavens” emblem (Nsoromma), a sunburst representing the guardianship god provides mankind; and five connecting but not interlocked circles (Mpuannum) represent a hairstyle reserved for priestesses and the king’s attendants during divination rituals. Directly below the football appears the

Figure 9.6 Owusu-Ankomah, Go For It, Stars, 2004. Oil on canvas, 150 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ARTCO Art Gallery.

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sankofa figure, a bird turning its neck to its backside, which reminds us to “go back and get it,” a proverb for the importance of returning to one’s ancestral roots and wisdom. The artist employs that image frequently because, in his words, “The meaning of this sign is crucial—we need to remember the past in order to live consciously in the present and to ensure a positive future.”53 At once a celebration of the past and spirituality, these hybrid icons espouse a vitalist beauty while promoting soccer’s nationalistic pride. Owusu-Ankomah hopes to transcend the cultural specificity of his adinkra language through the human form and football, declaring in his artist’s statement: “I’m an artist who paints for humankind and who just happens to come from Africa.”54

Marketing Black Stars: Football as Patron Owusu-Ankomah developed Go For It, Stars into a print for FIFA’s Official Art Poster series, an initiative launched in 2006 to promote the men’s World Cup in Germany. As Jean Williams notes later in this book, such endeavors have been staged for decades, with exhibitions and posters accompanying the World Cup and Olympics throughout the twentieth century. The Official Art Poster series, however, signified a conscious effort by FIFA to market “art” prints separate from their advertising posters. In the press release announcing the portfolio, recently deposed FIFA President Joseph “Sepp” Blatter declared, “Football is deeply rooted in culture, it is not just kicking the ball. This is why I took pleasure in selecting the artwork for this beautiful edition.”55 Blatter and other FIFA officials worked with Renate Bauer from Brands United, a German artmarketing firm, to create the series.56 The portfolios feature prints from the host nation and each region in the world, with artists selected to represent their cultural heritage. In most cases, posters draw from existing work, and between fourteen and twenty-four prints have been included in the editions produced for the 2006, 2010, and 2014 men’s World Cups respectively. Bauer estimates speaking to over one hundred artists to select the participants in each cycle, and she seeks a balance between “world-class status” and “excellent emerging artists or exciting works on the subject.”57 The limited edition, individually numbered prints are then exhibited and sold separately, or as complete sets, for thousands of dollars. The 2006 version featured Owusu-Ankomah as well as Andreas Gursky, Rosemarie Trockel, Sarah Morris, and several others. His contribution, Go For It, Stars, affirmed the benefits of soccer, thereby fitting the objectives of FIFA by avoiding controversial subjects while promoting the game. As Jennifer Doyle discussed in her keynote lecture at Hofstra University’s international soccer conference, FIFA carefully protects their image and rejected any artist critical of the sport or its leadership.58 Where Tracey Rose was considered too provocative for inclusion, Owusu-Ankomah was an obvious selection because of the positive messages and nationalistic pride his art conveys. Even those known for sociopolitical commentary submitted less inflammatory work to the portfolio, including William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas, Kendell Geers, and others. Godfried Donkor, however, refused to participate in the program after finding it

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“political” and too entrenched within FIFA’s “vested interests.” He had begun Trinity of the Saints as a submission for the portfolio but withdrew with several other artists due to the “secretive” process and financial motivations governing the project.59 Despite protesting the FIFA Official Art Poster series, Donkor accepted a commission by German sportswear manufacturer PUMA to design Ghana’s national team jersey in 2012. Through a directive launched by PUMA Creative—the former arts initiative that previously sponsored programing to promote art and design in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean—the company commissioned AfricanAmerican artist Kehinde Wiley to paint portraits of African soccer stars in advance of the 2010 men’s World Cup. Wiley also designed a line of African-inspired merchandise, including cleats, t-shirts, and jackets.60 Following this successful endeavor, PUMA hired ten African artists, including Donkor, to create their respective national kit for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations. He responded with a design called “Raining Stars,” covering the shirt with cascading stars to suggest, in the artist’s words, the national team “imposing themselves on their opponent, almost soaking them with their skills and their power and their speed.”61 Unlike the FIFA portfolio, the PUMA commission proved “refreshing” for Donkor, who considered it a “challenge [to] do something overtly commercial but also without feeling I had to be subversive in a way. I felt I could just be playful . . .”62 This respite from his politically oriented work also enabled Donkor to support his national team, and he found Mark Coetzee, former director of PUMA Creative, easy to work with because of his curatorial background.63 The PUMA commissions and FIFA art series indicate two ways in which soccer organizations have attempted to bridge the divide between popular and high culture, introducing sports fans to art while utilizing professional artists to publicize the game. Such programs have increased within international soccer, and while the statistical success of overlapping sporting and cultural events has been debated, the growing number of these projects suggests how football remains intertwined with art and design.64 Such initiatives allow artists to participate in a sport they admire while reaching broader audiences with their work. In many ways, the public commissions continue a dialogue begun 60 years earlier in Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah about the place of soccer as a global phenomenon, agent of social change, and critical tool. Ultimately, soccer endures as an integral component of Ghana’s cultural identity, and for contemporary artists the “beautiful game” remains a means of contesting sport, politics, and ideology.

Notes 1 Matthew Futterman, “Why Can’t the U.S. Beat Ghana?” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2014: http://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-ghana-and-why-cant-the-u-s-beatthem-1402881831 [accessed: April 11, 2018]. 2 Matthew Futterman, “Why Can’t the U.S. Beat Ghana?” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2014: http://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-ghana-and-why-cant-the-u-s-beatthem-1402881831 [accessed: April 11, 2018].

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3 This chapter builds upon a previous essay in which I examined soccer in the broader context of diasporic African artists. See: Haxall, “Pitch Invasion.” 4 See: for example, the photographic work of Jessica Hilltout (Amen: Grassroots Football, 2010), Andrew Dosunmu (The African Game, 2010), and Neville Gabie (Posts/Playing Away, 1996–ongoing). 5 Fridy and Brobbey, “Win the Match and Vote for Me.” 6 Darby, “Let Us Rally around the Flag,” 231. 7 Alegi, African Soccerscapes, 54–5. 8 Kwame Nkrumah, “Sports and African Unity,” February 20, 1960: http://www. nkrumahinfobank.org/article.php?id=349&c=46 [accessed: March 19, 2018]; quoted in Darby, “Let Us Rally around the Flag,” 231. 9 Waite, “Ghana’s Black Stars,” 102. 10 William Narteh, as quoted in Hawkey, Feet of the Chameleon, 75–6. 11 Ricci, Elephants, Lions & Eagles, 74–5. 12 The women’s national team has not received the same type of support, or achieved a comparable degree of success, as the men’s team. The “Black Queens” did not qualify for the 2011 or 2015 Women’s World Cup, have never qualified for the Olympics, and have not advanced beyond the group stages of the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations since 2006. 13 Alber and Ungruhe, “Fans and States at Work.” 14 Kufour, as quoted in Mehler, “Political Discourse in Football Coverage,” 101; quoted in Bolsmann, “Representation in the First African World Cup,” 164. 15 Owusu-Ankomah was born the year before independence, while all three artists were raised in the newly sovereign Ghanaian state. 16 Godfried Donkor, conversation with the author, June 30, 2014. 17 Andy Lines, “The old boy from Brazil—World Cup hero Jairzinho on helping Rio’s slum kids,” Mirror, November 15, 2013: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ brazilian-world-cup-legend-jairzinho-2792333 [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 18 Miguel Lourenço Pereira, “Black Power, Os Rebeldes Do Futebol Brasileiro,” Futebol Magazine, September 22, 2014: http://www.futebolmagazine.com/black-power-osrebeldes-do-futebol-brasileiro [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 19 Godfried Donkor, conversation with the author, June 30, 2014. 20 Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, 125. 21 Jahn, Body Play, Power Play, 36–7. 22 See: for example, Gabriel Kuhn’s interview with Daniel Künzler in Kuhn, Soccer vs. the State, 31–7. 23 Hawkins, The Lost Boys, 2015. 24 Godried Donkor, conversation with the author, June 30, 2014. 25 Heraldic emblems with Moorish, or African, characters date to the thirteenth century and commonly represented a family’s role in the Crusades or the worldliness of a ruler. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/africans-in-medieval-and-renaissance-artmoors-head/ [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 26 Rob Cowling, “How Muslims are changing English football culture,” BBC, July 5, 2013: http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/23159023 [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 27 Stuart James, “Yaya Touré: Players could boycott 2018 World Cup in Russia over racism,” The Guardian, October 24, 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/ oct/24/yaya-toure-boycott-world-cup-russia [accessed: March 19, 2018].

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Marks, “The French National Team and National Identity,” 51–2. See: Dubois, Soccer Empire; Hare, Football in France. Godfried Donkor, e-mail message to the author, January 24, 2016. “Key Facts: Africa to Europe migration,” BBC News, July 2, 2007: http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/europe/6228236.stm [accessed: March 19, 2018]; “Migrant crisis: Migration to Europe explained in graphics,” BBC News, December 22, 2015: http://www.bbc.com/ news/world-europe-34131911 [accessed: March 19, 2018]; for statistics and research on immigration, see: International Organization for Migration website: http://www.iom. int/ [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Ghana ranks among Africa’s top exporters of soccer players, see: Darby, “Go Outside”; Esson, “A Body and a Dream at a Vital Conjuncture”; Esson, “Escape to Victory.” George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, September 13, 2015. Hawkey, Feet of the Chameleon, 249–62; Majeed, “God Is Not a Referee,” 359. Hawkey, Feet of the Chameleon, 251; Majeed, “God Is Not a Referee,” 359–60. Hawkey, Feet of the Chameleon, 262. Fumanti, “Black Chicken, White Chicken,” 264–6, 269–71. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Marx and Engels, Capital, 777, 779. George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, September 13, 2015. George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, January 14, 2016. “Ghana tragedy: Police to blame,” BBC, July 29, 2001: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ africa/1462508.stm. George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, September 13, 2015. Smit, Sneaker Wars. Jonathan Petre, “Umbro drops its Zyklon shoe after Jewish protests,” The Telegraph, August 29, 2002: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1405692/Umbro-drops-itsZyklon-shoe-after-Jewish-protests.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, September 13, 2015. George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, September 13, 2015. George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, January 14, 2016. George Afedzi Hughes, e-mail message to the author, September 13, 2015. Houghton, “Ancient Signs of Futures Still to Come,” 89. Owusu-Ankomah, as quoted in Okediji, “Anatomy of Time,” 30. All adinkra translations based on Willis, The Adinkra Dictionary. Owusu-Ankomah, as quoted in Spring, Angaza Afrika, 254. Owusu-Ankomah, Artist’s Statement: http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/ owusu-ankomah/ [accessed: March 19, 2018]. “FIFA and German Government launch Official Art Posters for 2006 FIFA World Cup,” FIFA .com, July 8, 2005: http://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/news/y=2005/m=7/ news=fifa-and-german-government-launch-official-art-posters-for-2006-fifa-w99123.html [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Brands United also created an Official Art Edition for the 32nd America’s Cup sailboat race, held in Valencia, Spain, in 2007: http://www.brandsunited.de/americacup/pdf/ ArtEditionBrochure.pdf [accessed: March 19, 2018]. Renate Bauer, as quoted in Matthew Krause, “Imagining Soccer,” Mail & Guardian, December 3, 2009: http://mg.co.za/article/2009-12-03-imagining-soccer [accessed: March 19, 2018].

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58 Doyle, “Imagining a World without a World Cup.” 59 Godfried Donkor, conversation with the author, June 30, 2014. 60 For more on Wiley’s PUMA commission, see: Haxall, “In the Spirit of Négritude”; Haxall, “From Bank Lobbies to Sportswear.” 61 “PUMA Football Presents Africa Artists Series. . . Ghana and Godfried Donkor”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-lLlz9G46o [accessed: April 11, 2018]. 62 Godfried Donkor, conversation with the author, June 30, 2014. 63 Godfried Donkor, conversation with the author, June 30, 2014. 64 Snowball, “Are Art Events a Good Way of Augmenting the Economic Impact of Sport?”

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Adventures of the Triolectic: Art, Politics, and Three-Sided Football Christopher Collier

In its development, any new idea will be connected to its point of origin, to the environment from which it has grown, but it will belong to the environment where it meets a resonance. Asger Jorn1

It was never actually supposed to be played. A metaphor, a thought experiment, a moment of madness: three-sided football was little more than a brief, speculative digression in the writings of its creator, the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn. The whim of an artist, trying to use science to overturn the political philosophies of his day, the game might easily have remained a purely imaginative solution. Yet during the 1990s, after 30 years of non-existence, it was finally put into practice by an unlikely collection of ultra-left activists, artists, and architects, somewhere in a park in Scotland. Now entering its third decade as an actively played sport, three-sided football has blossomed beyond these esoteric beginnings, gaining admiration around the world, with matches springing up from Belarus to Bogotá, Melbourne to Malawi, Borneo to Bilbao. This chapter sketches a preliminary history of the game, tentatively exploring connections to the wider thought of its mercurial inventor—a man once labeled “the greatest painter of the 1950s”—and the group of which he was once a member, the Situationist International.2 I consider how the practical renewal of Jorn’s “triolectical” system, by the underground groups who precipitated the game’s 1990s revival, resonated with Jorn’s turn toward this idiosyncratic methodology in the early 1960s, offering a glimpse beyond the exhausted political and artistic discourses of the day. From the complementary perspectives of both a researcher and player, I further situate the game in light of recent debates over the so-called “social turn” in contemporary art and, simultaneously, the collapse of the political left in the age of capital’s “real domination.”3 I propose that at the hands (and feet) of 1990s practitioners such as the London Psychogeographical Association, the Luther Blissett project, and The Association of Autonomous Astronauts, triolectical football brought intriguing new perspectives to such debates, moving beyond traditional dichotomies of art and 191

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politics, spectacle and participation, to offer new approaches to what the Situationists themselves once called “getting out of this and playing.”4

Mondo Mythopoesis Played by three teams, between three goals, usually on a hexagonal pitch, three-sided football presents a unique, transformative reworking of traditional football’s binary logic (Figure 10.1). According to its provisional codification, emanating from the proposals of the game’s 1990s re-discoverer Fabian Tompsett, there are only three rules: First, naturally, there are three teams. Second, victory falls to the team who concedes the fewest, rather than scores the most goals.5 Third, and finally, the ball must be round. With three-sided football, however, things are rarely so straightforward; the game frequently takes on a chaotic life of its own and even this minimal basis has been subject to (ir)regular diversions. Each game is not only a contest, but also a negotiation of strategy and subterfuge, placing traditional ball skills alongside a requisite grasp of the game’s grammar, logic, and, not least, mastery of a persuasive rhetorical repartee. Adding cooperation and betrayal to the competition that drives two-sided sports, in this game teams and players must make and break alliances with fluid frequency. Such are the qualities that have pushed the sport to unprecedented popularity in recent years. Yet for all this, the game might never have been played at all. There are many theories on the game’s origins, ranging from the obscure and conspiratorial to

Figure 10.1 Diagram of a three-sided pitch laid out for teams Y, R, and B, from The Book of Deptford. The diagram is seemingly derived from the original proposal by the Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League in Fatuous Times 4 (1994), along with drawings from the artist Philipp Otto Runge on the theories of German mystic Jakob Böhme, for his Farben-Kugel (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1810).

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the prosaic. Some players have speculatively drawn insights from experimental archeology, holding matches in prehistoric stone circles to explore theories that its origins lie in ancient fertility ceremonies and, in fact, pre-date the two-sided version of the game.6 Others argue it represents a suppressed footballing code, first outlined in the lost play of sixteenth-century pamphleteer Thomas Nashe. Originally conceived as a pedagogical mnemonic for teaching the classical Trivium, it allegedly functioned in the manner outlined in Frances Yates’ ground-breaking studies on Renaissance theater, but over time was crowded out by the various public school varieties that went on to coalesce into the modern game in 1863.7 Less imaginatively, yet others have suggested it arose as a youth team training exercise, organized by the onetime England international Luther Blissett during his time at Watford FC in the early 1980s.8 While all of the above make for interesting speculation, most frequently, however, the game’s origins are placed with Asger Jorn, a Danish artist and former member of the avant-garde Situationist International (SI ). In his tangled tome Naturens Orden (1962)—a discussion on art, philosophy, and physics—Jorn proposed three-sided football as a thought-experiment, in order to illustrate his general theory of “triolectics.”9 This theory represented the culmination of Jorn’s philosophical efforts of the 1950s and intended a “complete revision of the existing philosophical system.”10 It was also, perhaps, the ultimate outcome of his engagement with the SI , an organization he had co-founded some 5 years earlier but had recently left.11 Jorn’s relationship with the SI had been one of productive tension and his contribution to the group’s practices of “psychogeography,” “détournement,” and “unitary urbanism” was a defining one. The SI ’s increasingly anti-art stance is often cited as a reason for his 1961 resignation, despite the fact that he continued to support the group in an underground capacity, particularly financially. The SI ’s burgeoning transformation into a doctrinaire political organization is a well-worn narrative. Jorn, however, wanted to develop the “science” of situations in more playful directions, open to the contributions of both physics and art, to keep all aspects of the movement in complementary tension. It was in this context that triolectics emerged as his attempt to critically and artistically develop beyond reductionist approaches to dialectical materialism, but simultaneously, beyond the contemporary quantum physics of fellow Dane, Niels Bohr, famed for his theory of complementarity.12 To this end, Jorn set about fusing dialectics with complementarity. Dialectics asserted the ultimate unity of all oppositions; complementarity suggested the impossibility of any single unity fully encompassing all possibilities. Jorn claimed that in combining the two—as a three-way, complementary dialectic—their individual oppositions could be fundamentally transformed: “imagine a whole new type of football field,” he speculates, “where, instead of two teams and two goals, there are three teams in play and three goals.”13 He claims that in such a situation, victory would necessarily go to the team conceding the least. Further, the mutually canceling conflict found in conventional football would become impossible, leading to a radically altered dynamic: either equalizing stasis, or, he speculates, “an actual explosion.”14 Jorn used three-sided football to suggest that with three elements, an entirely new logic ensues. Like the photon’s “complementary” status within Bohr’s theories, as both

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particle and wave, each player in a game of three-sided football becomes a superposition of “opponent” and “ally,” until the unfolding of the game “collapses” them one way or another. This goes beyond the dualism of formal logic, but also the implied teleology of dialectics; ensuring both dialectical and complementary relations become, as Jorn scholar Peter Shield notes, “Archimedean points” to move one another.15 Jorn’s real interest was in furthering his speculations; three-sided football remained simply an analogy for him. No sooner was it described than immediately abandoned, for what he considered more effective formulations.16 Thus three-sided football remained largely forgotten—that was until in the 1990s, when a number of “underground” groups on the fringes of various extra-institutional occult, artistic, and ultra-left milieus were reviving and diverting Situationist tactics on new and unexpected terrains.17 Thirty or so years after Jorn’s speculations, a politicized print worker, Fabian Tompsett, “revived” the proto-Situationist group the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA ).18 Rejecting the institutional reception of the SI , emergent in the wake of the group’s first retrospective—an exhibition that took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the London and Boston ICA galleries, 1989 to 1990—Tompsett’s approach was a radical departure. He had been familiar with the SI for some time, yet in the early 1990s was simultaneously reappraising his longstanding relation to activism, following the failure of the 1991 movement against the Gulf War.19 The result was his return to unexplored dimensions of Situationist activity, and importantly, actually reimagining these in practice, through the decidedly unconventional and often highly amusing activities of the LPA . Between 1992 and 1998, the LPA mixed occult conspiracy with left communism in a “pataphysical” collage described by one reviewer as “Magico-Marxism.”20 At the same time, Tompsett also began reading and translating Jorn, whose writing was largely unknown in English. It was in this context that he rediscovered three-sided football and proposed its practical realization. The overwhelming majority of sources state the first actual game took place at the Glasgow Anarchist Summer School, in May 1993.21 However, they all appear to derive from a single article by the LPA in Fatuous Times 4 (Autumn, 1994), reprinted in the 1997 Mind Invaders anthology of artist, author, and occasional three-sided football referee, Stewart Home.22 This foundational game allegedly involved not only Tompsett and Home, but also Mark Dyson, a Glasgow-based architecture graduate and apparent member of the mysterious psychogeographical group the Workshop for a Non-Linear Architecture (WNLA ). This was the same Dyson who much later, in 2012, founded one of the game’s first regular leagues, an event instrumental in its renewed, latter-day uptake. To complicate matters, however, Dyson has also claimed this foundational game took place in 1994 at the similarly titled Glasgow Architect’s Winterschool.23 This was a regular event organized by architecture students, which in 1994 occurred during the first week of January.24 That a game of three-sided football took place at the Winterschool is confirmed in a contemporary review in the Glasgow Herald, yet evidence for its primacy remains inconclusive.25 Such ambiguity over the game’s origins is not altogether surprising, however, when one considers that the psychogeographers and neo/anti-Situationists of the 1990s

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frequently adopted such strategic dissimulation and myth-making in order to outmaneuver any enclosure within hostile discourses. Perhaps the congruence in names between the two events pleased Tompsett and Dyson, who used this coincidence to occult the game’s true origins? This possibility remains creatively open. The actual date of the first game is less important than what this playful opacity reveals, however: three-sided football, even going back to Jorn’s own conception, functions as what Home once labeled “mythopoesis.”26 A vehicle for attacking and disrupting hostile institutional discourses and processes of historification, it clears space for more autonomous practices and struggles to emerge, practices disruptive of existing mediations such as “art” or “politics,” perhaps even, one might add, “sport.” It is in this sense that Geoff Andrews, an important latter-day proponent of the game, refused to label it an alternative to traditional football, but rather presents it as a “prefiguration” of football’s possibilities, beyond its subsumption in capitalist social relations.27 Whether or not this interpretation seems onerous for what is, simultaneously, a light-hearted game, it was certainly in this “mythopoetic” manner that the uptake of three-sided football progressed. Where the WNLA approached it through variations on the Oulipo-style constraint techniques they pursued within their psychogeographical activities more broadly, others played the game more for its potential in furthering mythopoetic activities on a wider, mediatized terrain: a game behind the game. It was in this fashion that it expanded beyond the LPA and WNLA , through their connections within various underground presses, mail art, and self-publishing networks, such as the mysterious “Invisible College.” Further, it was precisely through such para-institutional correspondence networks that three-sided football arrived in Italy, to be embraced by proponents of the notorious Luther Blissett Project. This was a project that in late 1994 lent its identity to threesided football’s very first organization, an initiative which, in adopting the name of this enigmatic “collective phantom,” became the Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League.28 As a multiple identity that anyone could use, “Luther Blissett”—a name derived from the Watford and AC Milan footballer—originally arose when various groups active in Bologna through underground art, publishing, and radio began collaborating. So-called “Radio Blissett” broadcasts began in September 1994, shortly before the group’s first major media prank: the “disappearance” of non-existent English performance artist Harry Kipper—arranged in collaboration with Tompsett and Home. People using the Blissett identity went on to host a number of psychogeographical radio shows and engineer multiple scandals, pranks, and acts of cultural sabotage in Italy and beyond. Their approach was mythopoesis, entailing radical experiments in international collective practice: as a new urban myth, Luther Blissett became a folk hero for burgeoning communicative capitalism’s emerging “precariat,” adopted by hundreds, if not thousands, in Italy, Germany, the UK and beyond. It also became a code word for the budding international development of three-sided football. Following its foundation, stories abound that the Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League staged dozens of games in London and Rome between 1994 and 1996.29 There are even tales of a secret European championship, contested on a

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town-by-town, rather than national basis, although little documentary evidence remains.30 Better-recorded one-off games, such as events held in Hyde Park and elsewhere in London, did occasionally appear in the mainstream press however.31 For example, the match organized by the LPA in Grove Street Park, as part of Hackney Anarchist Week in August 1996, which garnered colorful write-ups in Goal! and the Observer newspaper. Participating in that 1996 game were representatives of yet another mythopoetic organization, one that would attempt to launch three-sided football on a worldwide— even intergalactic—scale. Formed in 1995, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA ) was a transnational network, united around a 5-year plan for the non-state, non-corporate exploration of space. Much like Luther Blissett, they also sought what one former “astronaut” has described as “networks of affiliation which do not yet coalesce into a ‘community’ as conventionally understood, yet provoke a circulation of self-determined knowledge and solidarity.”32 Following a similar approach to the LPA and Tompsett—who in fact represented the AAA’s East London section—the AAA adopted a program characterized by collective identity, media infiltration, playfulness, psychogeography, and triolectics, seeking—just as the Situationists had done before them—to provoke new spaces of revolutionary imagination and praxis. In words that echo Jorn’s 1950s description of psychogeography as “the science fiction of urbanism,” the AAA’s mission was “to institute a science fiction of the present.”33 Part of this was using three-sided football to train for, as their slogan put it, “moving in several directions at once”; for thinking with additional dimensions, perfecting a “competence in deception [. . .] preparing players for learning how to change and adapt the terrain they play on.”34 The AAA’s matches are better documented, and their “Intergalactic Conferences” in Vienna (1997), Bologna (1998), and London (1999) introduced many to the game. The London event, Space: 1999—A Festival of Independent and Community-Based Space Exploration, included The Intergalactic Triolectical Football Cup in Kennington Park, while in 1998 a protest match organized by AAA Rosko and AAA Paris Nord took place at Parc de la Villette, Paris, opposing the contemporaneous two-sided football World Cup.35 A key example of the AAA diverting the game beyond a traditional sporting framework was their three-sided “training mission” in London on October 18, 1998. This entailed a game at One Tree Hill, South London—a location of “psychogeographical” significance owing to its history of autonomous working-class resistance and occult intrigue. Taking place on a wooded hillside, the game was an early instance of a distinctive tendency within three-sided football: that of introducing strategic variability through the use of unconventional playing conditions, what could be called an experimental construction of situations. In this, it echoed the Oulipo-style constraint techniques pioneered by the WNLA , who played on the undulating landscape of Dundas Hill, Glasgow, in 1994. Yet it also anticipated games later organized by the DAta Miners and Travailleurs Psychique (DAMTP ) in the forests of Lithuania, as part of the Alytus Art Strike Biennale, 2009–15 (Figure  10.2), or games they held inside Soviet-era fuel silos, in Talin, Estonia.36

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Figure 10.2 Match at the Alytus Psychic Strike Biennale 2015. Courtesy Union of DAta Miners and Travailleurs Psychique.

Such an approach was later further developed by DAMTP, the New Cross Triangle Psychogeographical Association (NXTPA ) and Fedaration Internationale Autonome des Situationnistes Contemporain (FIASC o) at the First Quantum Flux Footballum Equinox Fest, held simultaneously in London, Amsterdam, and Carrara in 2016. This included games at Highgate Cemetery, Tate Modern, and the Greenwich Meridian, featuring moving goalposts attached to bicycles. Though the games were unsolicited, Home, Dyson, and the various “psychic workers” managed to stall Tate Modern’s security guards long enough for a 15-minute match to take place. Eventually the players were ejected, with the insistence that they email to request permission for such activities. The following day they obligingly emailed Tate for a permit; asked when they might like to play, they simply responded, “yesterday.” The playing of games subject to constructed situational constraints is an on-going facet of three-sided football, but one that presently occurs in complementary relation to the sport’s more public league structures. Indeed, rumors persist of a clandestine, transnational shadow-league, developed to actively experiment with these more adventurous forms of the game. Much like the illegal raves which provoked such ire from the British state around the time of the game’s 1990s inception, this league allegedly congregates in secret, holding midnight meet-ups upon short-notice tip-offs, to play in subterranean car parks, forests, and similarly secluded venues. Viable pitches are supposedly identified for those in the know—and potential threesided footballers who may be passing—by being scratched, sprayed, or otherwise tagged with a special “triolectical” symbol. The presence of such a glyph is often the only evidence that one of these surreptitious games has taken place at all.

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Figure 10.3 “Triolectical” glyphs left to mark assorted active pitches of a clandestine league. Courtesy Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League.

New Horizons, New Challenges Such experiments aside, by the mid-2000s, three-sided football had reached a more diffuse stage in its evolution. Furthermore, entering the second decade of the twentyfirst century it achieved a newly-global reach, yet simultaneously faced the encroachment of those very same commercial interests that have so successfully captured its two-sided cousin. Following the mythopoesis of its 1990s iterations, in the 2000s three-sided football’s broadening appeal occurred through a number of more conventional “art” contexts, although initially on its own terms. In 2006, in the predictable upsurge of footballing interest around the two-sided World Cup in Germany, the Glamour and Globalization: Football, Media and Art exhibition took place at Phoenix Hall, Dortmund. Curated by Inke Arns, it featured practitioners such as the Yes Men and 0100101110101101.org, alongside whom the LPA Historification Committee was invited to explain how Luther Blissett had introduced three-sided football at Watford during the 1980s. Here threesided football continued in mythopoetic mode, not only in the context of the exhibition’s conscious frame of reference—so-called “tactical media,” or “art-activist” practices—but also through the LPA’s further occulting of the game’s emergence. Other appearances of three-sided football within an art context took different directions, however, representing a new stage in its broadening evolution. In October 2007, the Beacon Arts Project, at Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire, UK , saw Sally O’Reilly and Mel Brimfield stage a game of three-sided football between local teams, presenting the game in a more convivial fashion, consistent with the contemporaneous trend for a “relational” approach within public art programing.37 In this respect it appeared to

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function within the ameliorative, community-building, “regeneration” agenda so dominant within UK regimes of art production and funding during the early part of that decade.38 Other broadly artistic events also utilized three-sided football as a way to stage creative interventions beyond traditional art contexts. In France, in October 2009, the architecture and video collective Pied la Biche staged a three-sided football tournament between existing, conventional teams. Part of the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, a tournament later restaged in Metz (2010) and Brétigny-sur-orge (2011). Likewise, in 2010, arts production company Invisible Dot staged a game as participatory performance art at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where players competed for a “Mike Shields Shield,” named after the local park-keeper. Also in 2010, Sally O’Reilly returned to three-sided football, during her writer-inresidence program at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. To coincide with the UK general election, she programed a game in nearby Haggerston Park involving local teams chosen to represent the three largest parties contesting the election. Representing the Labour Party were the team Philosophy Football, although their own roots were rather to the left of such an affiliation. As a team, they would prove instrumental to widening participation in three-sided football over the coming years. Philosophy Football began in 1994, when Geoff Andrews and Mark Perryman, former activists in the recently disbanded Communist Party of Great Britain, sought to respond to the increasing commercialization of football evident in the wake of the recently formed English Premier League. Initially, they simply produced football shirts, adorned with slogans opposing football’s commercialization—a move leading to an ill-fated lawsuit from sportswear manufacturer Umbro. In 2000, however, Philosophy Football became an actual team, contesting local amateur leagues and international tournaments. Throughout this, a left-wing ethos remained crucial, leading to parallels with other well-known, non-league clubs, such as Bristol’s famed Easton Cowboys.39 Following their foray into three-sided football at the Whitechapel event, however, Philosophy Football abandoned conventional football and began using their international networks to tour the three-sided game around Europe. In May 2011, they traveled to Madrid, competing against local players and sports journalists at the Stadio Centro Deportivo Municipal la Elipa. In November the same year, they took the game to Rome, facing St. Onofrio and Real Fettucciné, while in June 2012, off the back of their earlier tours, they traveled to Bilbao to play local teams, including Athletic de Bilbao, from Spain’s top division, La Liga. This event at the Plaza de Toros came at the conclusion of one of three-sided football’s biggest infiltrations of the “mainstream”: the Bilbao club’s 2011–12 “Thinking Football” program, in collaboration with the Bilbao Guggenheim museum, which featured discussions on Asger Jorn and three-sided football, as well as a 37-team three-sided football tournament.40 Yet it was events in Belarus, in 2011, that truly highlighted three-sided football’s suddenly more mainstream, more global, and often more commercial turn. Velcom, a Belarusian telecoms operator, commissioned the advertising campaign “Velcom Rules,” a tournament of “3G Football,” described as “a large-scale football activation, with the focus on innovation and brand position.”41 In practical terms, this involved three-sided

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football’s biggest ever manifestation, with 400 teams from across Belarus contesting a tournament televised by half of Belarus’s television channels, boasting a “brandapproved” (and extensive) rulebook, and even sporting its own video game. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game’s Situationist connotations were not mentioned. In similar events, in Malaysia in 2012, the football-variant futsal had a three-sided makeover, also as part of a corporate advertising campaign. This time Nestlé’s Milo drink used a three-sided tournament in Malaysian universities as part of their “NeXt Games” promotion. At the exhibition match on March 6, Malaysia’s deputy minister for higher education gave a speech promoting the event and claiming politicians might learn from its cooperative approach. Again, however, no connections, intellectual or otherwise, were made between the event and the game’s roots. Elsewhere in 2012, three-sided football’s newly-global status was cemented with the launch of Futbol 3 (F3C) in Bogotá, Colombia, by Fabio Cesar Fernandez Olaya. In 2013, his Athletic Association Football 3 Columbia won local government support to promote health and reduce internecine gang violence through the game, leading to regular formalized tournaments and a hugely increased following. Back in the UK , following their participation in the Bilbao event, Philosophy Football linked up with the game’s early pioneer Mark Dyson, who had been rekindling the sport through a series of one-off games in Deptford, South East London, since early 2012. With Philosophy Football’s collaboration and a team of local Polish builders, he set up the Luther Blissett Deptford League to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Jorn’s proposed invention of the game (Figure 10.4).

Figure 10.4 Match in the Luther Blissett Deptford League, 2014. Courtesy Tae Ateh.

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The International Jorn Memorial Tournament followed in 2013, in Regents Park, London, and in September of that year, Dyson traveled to Istanbul with Philosophy Football. Here they took part in a three-sided game organized by the InEnArt media arts group in conjunction with the 13th Istanbul Biennial, against Dynamo Windrad, from Kassel, Germany, and Turkish team Ayazma FC . Notably, the match was refereed by Habil Ibrahim Dinfdag, banned from officiating in the Turkish league on account of his sexuality. As the first game of three-sided football in Turkey, the game was covered for German and Turkish TV and resulted in the establishment of the International Three-Sided Federation, the charter of which was written during an impromptu midnight game in Taksim Square, at that point under siege from police as the focus of on-going anti-state protests. This glut of increased publicity saw new leagues springing up further afield. Early 2014 brought three-sided football’s Australian debut, with tournaments in Melbourne and Sydney, while by 2016, the first African games were held in Malawi, and the inaugural Asia Cup took place in Borneo. As the centenary of Asger Jorn’s birth, it was 2014, however, which proved the pivotal year for the game. As part of the celebrations, Dyson, the International Three-Sided Federation, and Silkeborg’s Jorn Museum organized the inaugural Three-Sided Football World Cup, May 23–24. Teams deriving from Pied la Biche, Dynamo Windrad, D3FC , Philosophy Football, DAMTP and others came together in Denmark, with individual veterans of various footballing and psychogeographical outfits and, of course, Tompsett himself.42 To the delight of home fans, the impressive trophy was won by local Danish team, Silkeborg KFUM , finally bringing the game back to Jorn’s hometown in style.

The Beautiful Game of Triolectical Football The world cup generated still further popularity, with television crews from as far afield as Japan and Brazil—even from FIFA itself—visiting the small park in South-East London where the Luther Blissett Deptford League still unfolded on Sunday afternoons. Yet it is for this reason that the future for three-sided football remains uncertain. As a global phenomenon, football is now utterly entangled with commercial spectacle. As described above, even three-sided football has not remained immune. Meanwhile, the art world long ago abandoned any pretense of autonomy from capitalist subsumption, its burgeoning biennials becoming much like footballing world cups: glittering concentrations of power, wealth, and influence. One might, furthermore, say the same of politics. Contemporary social commentary abounds with laments for the hollowing out of representative democracy, with soaring disillusionment, inequality, and the capture of political discourse by powerful private interests. Where, then, does this leave a game that hovers at the boundary, indeed, actively obfuscates the separation between these three monoliths of the modern age: sport, art, and politics? If one follows the implicit logic of the Situationists, all this apparent “spectacularization” is merely a symptom of capital’s so-called “real subsumption” of social life, including, of course, the above three, falsely separated spheres: sport, art,

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and politics. Real subsumption is a phenomena theorized by Marx as capital’s ultimate restructuring and reshaping of social life in the service of its logic of accumulation. This, he understood as an elaboration upon a less-developed, earlier phase of “formal subsumption,” in which capital had simply turned pre-existing structures and relations toward its own ends, rather than actively recreating them in its own image. Post-Situationist writers such as Jacques Camatte have periodized the development from formal to real subsumption as having definitively occurred between 1914 and 1945. If we accept this, then today we can no longer understand expressions of social life, such as sport, art, or politics, as simply fulfilling some moral, ideological, or “spiritual” function, somehow external or autonomous from capital, albeit sometimes co-opted—that is to say, formally subsumed—for the self-justification of a capitalist ruling class. Instead, they have moved beyond this, becoming really subsumed, becoming pre-shaped directly by the logic of accumulation. In short, any other function such categories might have possessed has today been subordinated to that of direct accumulation: It is no longer simply an elite they serve, but capital itself, embodied in and through the consuming masses. Sport, art, and politics have been fully popularized, that is to say become primarily a form of revenue generation, functioning in the direct interests of capital itself. It is a spectacle whose continuation demands—indeed requires—ever-growing participation. As prominent art historian Claire Bishop has noted, in recent years much art has concerned itself with participation and its relation to spectacle, traditionally held as its opposite.43 Building on her well-known critique of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, Bishop suggests this significant trend within contemporary art toward participation—the so-called “social turn”—is in fact a consequence of a lack of viable left politics; displacing a political lack into the necessarily inadequate and distorted form of an aesthetic expression. If one accepts the theory of real subsumption, however, the upshot is that the apparently anti-capitalist sentiment of such “social,” “participatory” artworks expressly overlooks the fact that today, their primary social function as art works, whether they like it or not, can only ever be to serve an overarching logic of accumulation: what the Situationists called “the spectacle.” Perhaps in this respect—Theodor Adorno and Peter Bürger are also instructive here—art is only now catching up with football and representative politics, both of which have, in the modern era, consistently held spectacle and participation in co-constitutive relation. As Bishop herself observes, “far from being oppositional to spectacle, participation has now entirely merged with it.”44 This essentially dialectical understanding, evinced first by Marx, then by the Situationists and their successors such as Camatte, explains why the increasing spectacularization of three-sided football, advancing simultaneously with everwidening levels of participation, might not be as contradictory as it first appears. Not only are both spectacle and participation dialectically co-constituted within each other, furthermore today, their apparent contradiction has already been realized and overcome in and through capital’s advancing real subsumption of social life. In acting out social lives pre-structured by the logic of capital accumulation, we participate in our own spectacularization, while simultaneously spectating upon this participation:

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spectacle has realized participation in order to suppress it; participation has suppressed spectacle in order to fully realize it. If three-sided football is to avoid this dialectical fate, that of contemporary art, representative politics, and its two-sided footballing cousin alike, then perhaps the answer lies less in directly opposing or defining itself in opposition to them. Rather instead, it should actively foster and expand its triolectical approach. As Camatte notes, “Madness has fled in front of the reality of capital [. . .] Perhaps it is only in an act of ‘madness,’ that humanity will be able to liberate itself.”45 Do the aforementioned, occulted, experimental forms of the game offer a glimpse of this triolectical “madness”? Rather than becoming some conceptual mediation between spectacle and participation, could they instead precisely prevent the mediation of each in its opposite; constituting a third, disruptive, complementary term; becoming instead their very condition of possibility in the first place? In the terminology of feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad, their site of “intra-action”?46 As Tompsett has noted, both Barad and Jorn take common inspiration from Niels Bohr’s proposition that the dividing line between subject and object, spectacle and participation, is always mobile; that such distinctions always co-emerge as complementary oppositions only in and through an active experiment.47 It is precisely in discussing this point that Jorn introduces three-sided football in the first place. Indeed, the very notion of triolectics stems from these considerations on the experimental co-emergence of observer and observed. The value of experiment, for Jorn, is not so much as a repeatable occurrence of scientific method, but rather as a unique and open situation; the experiment not determined a priori by either observer or observed, but instead the very condition of their emergence as meaningful distinctions. If it is through experimental intra-action that meaningful boundaries between spectacle and participation emerge, then it is precisely here that those seeking to disrupt their aforementioned capitalist realization might find a key site of strategic intervention. In the words of the Situationists, such experiments become a “Northwest Passage”: an opening within which new futures might be glimpsed, where the possibility of going beyond real subsumption, toward a fully realized world community faintly flickers. In this respect, rather than attempting either to retreat into a false autonomy of obscure and exclusive specialism, or conversely, simply promoting itself to the highest bidder as a quirky alternative to Association football, perhaps three-sided football can instead be the madness that flees in front of capital, staying one step ahead of those enclosing pressures that would seek to define and delimit its operations. This would mean remaining disruptive, strategic, playful, fun, and triolectical. Not only in terms of game-play, but also on those wider terrains of intra-action: the game behind the game. Not becoming stymied in dated, spectacular specializations—as sport, art, or politics— but neither simply pursuing the inverse, as some ideological reflection of contemporary capitalist imperatives: foregoing skilled specialism for generalized flexibility, rhizomatic networking, communicative “collaboratition” and the other such buzzwords from the murky corners of neoliberal game theory. Not to deny its own usefulness in reproducing

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capitalist imperatives, but precisely to infect this reproduction with fresh contradictions, parasitically using its mimetic, mythopoetic potential to continually undermine such acts of enclosure. This might, thus, entail a third approach: playing such specialisms off against one another, and expanding them exponentially—what Jorn called “comparative vandalism.”48 This is something already implied by researches conducted by members of the Deptford League, whose Black Book of Deptford traces the twenty-three known genealogies of the game, including, for example, researches into the inspiration behind Jorn’s triolectics evident in the work of nineteenth-century artist Philipp Otto Runge and his theory of color, a theory, in turn, arising in the writings of seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Böhme and traceable to aspects of Kabbalah.49 Similarly, Oxford University Evolutionary Psychologist Robin Dunbar has recently speculated on correlations between three-sided football and his so-called “Dunbar Number.” This anthropological variation on the “Law of Fives” surprisingly locates the game in theories of optimum group dynamics among Palaeolithic hunter-gathers.50 Meanwhile, scholars from a more scientific background have explored three-sided football as an experimental analogue for quantum chromodynamics: the three-way, asymmetric interactions between quarks within the nucleus of every atom. Indeed, in summer 2016, a team of quantum physicists gathered by New Scientist magazine came together to experimentally explore these analogies against players from the Deptford League, confirming that the three quarks inside a Hadron do indeed interact in a remarkably similar manner to the observed team dynamics within games of threesided football.51 Perhaps then, it is through such tactics of open creation, what the Situationists themselves called “a multidimensional inflation of tendencies,” that three-sided football might maintain an edge over its enemies.52 Guy Atkins once said that introducing a philosophy professor to Jorn was like pitching a chess master against a footballer who jumps on the table and kicks around the pieces.53 In this respect, three-sided football would do well to continue remembering Jorn’s example.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, 221. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 389. Camatte, Capital and Community. Small advertisement in Internationale Situationniste 1. Jorn predicted this would lead to a dull and defensive game. Indeed, one motivation for actually playing the game in the 1990s was to test this theory, something, happily, proved wrong. 6 Strategic Optimism Football, “Special Solstice Ritual Beanfield Anniversary ThreeSided Football Game Souvenir Program.” 7 DAta Miners and Travailleurs Psychique, “DAMTP Newsletter 16.” 8 London Psychogeographical Association, “London Psychogeographical Association Presents the Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League.”

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9 Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, 29. 10 Shield, Comparative Vandalism, 12. 11 Many texts touch upon Jorn’s involvement with the SI , for analysis, however, see: Jorn and Tompsett, Open Creation and Its Enemies; Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn. Although not specifically addressing the SI , Shield’s work also provides excellent context. In addition, several valuable contributions appeared in the journal Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration, co-edited by Tompsett in the 1990s. 12 Briefly, the theory of complementarity refers to the observation that two mutually exclusive states can nevertheless be equally true of a given entity, but that the two are irreducible to one another. 13 Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, 29. 14 Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, 29. 15 Shield, Comparative Vandalism, 48. 16 Namely Philipp Otto Runge’s color sphere: Jorn, The Natural Order, 30. 17 For considerations on the transmission and translation of Situationist practices leading to their revival during the 1990s, see: Home, The Assault on Culture; Home, What Is Situationism?; Goaman, “The Old World Is Behind You”; Collier, “Psychogeography Adrift.” 18 London Psychogeographical Association, “We’re Back!” The Comité psychogéographique de Londres (London Psychogeographical Association) had originally been the name adopted by founding SI member Ralph Rumney in the months leading up to the SI ’s 1957 formation. 19 Tompsett, “Open Copenhagen,” 60–1. 20 Bin, “Review of London Psychogeographical Association Newsletter and Manchester Area Psychogeographic,” 120. 21 This event took place from May 29 to 31, 1993, at the Govan Neighbourhood Centre. It involved around 250 international attendees in workshops, film screenings, and discussions. 22 London Psychogeographical Association, “London Psychogeographical Association Presents the Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League”; Home, Mind Invaders, 56–8. Home gives the date of the piece as 1995, although this is incorrect, as confirmed by the fact that the same piece is also referred to in the LPA newsletter no. 8, Samhain 1994, see: London Psychogeographical Association, “Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League.” 23 For example: Dyson, “In the Beginning . . .” 24 Olcayto, “A Glance back to Glasgow’s Winterschool.” 25 Henry, “High Profile Has Price.” 26 Home, “Mondo Mythopoesis.” This article, which also went to form the introduction to his Mind Invaders anthology of the same year, is in fact—in keeping with Home’s (anti-)artistic practice—largely an unattributed amalgam of variously plagiarized pieces from the milieu it describes. 27 Andrews, “The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the Game—the Point Is to Change It.” 28 Blissett referred to themselves as a “collective phantom,” for an analysis of this proposition, see: Holmes, “Unleashing the Collective Phantom (Resistance to Networked Individualism).” As mentioned, the name Luther Blissett “originally” derives from the footballer who played for the English club Watford during the 1970–80s, before making an ill-fated, high-profile transfer to A.C. Milan. The adoption of the

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30 31 32 33

34 35

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name by Tompsett for the game’s first league was thus a humorous participation in the Italian multiple-name activities, but also a reference to the footballing heritage of their chosen moniker, and to Blissett’s trajectory from the UK to Italy and back. The league’s foundation is proposed in Tompsett’s 1994 Fatuous Times article, see: London Psychogeographical Association, “London Psychogeographical Association Presents the Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League.” However, its inaugural meeting was advertised as taking place via the Invisible College, as part of the techno night/lecture evening Dead by Dawn, at 121 Centre, Brixton, March 4, 1995. For suggestions that an international league was operative at this time, see: Cramer, “Literatur und Fußball.” Cramer, “Literatur und Fußball.” Flyer, “First All London 3-Sided Football Match (Flyer),” April 9, 1995, Infoshop 56A. Backhouse, “The ‘Collective Phantom,’ ” 5. Asger Jorn, quoted in: Khatib, “Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles”; Balli, Quitter La Gravite, quoted in: Holmes, “Unleashing the Collective Phantom (Resistance to Networked Individualism).” Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Here Comes Everybody! Given in Home, Mind Invaders, 49. This deployment of three-sided football as a critique of dominant institutions is one that continued, informally, beyond the 1990s. For example, at the 2001 Foot & Mouth Festival, Edinburgh, with a game organized to coincide with the G8 summit in Genoa, as part of a global anti-capitalist mobilization. All participants played under the name Blissett. Later, in 2013, a spontaneous game took place in Taksim Square, Istanbul, while the square was the focus of a protest movement subject to brutal police repression. Since 2009, the DAta Miners and Travailleurs Psychique have staged three-sided football games in Alytus, Berlin, Talin, and New York as part of their activities. A biennial had been held in Alytus, Lithuania, for a number of years, but in 2009 it rejected art, becoming the Art Strike Biennial, against the burgeoning biennial culture and in reference the Art Strike movement of the early 1990s propagated by Stewart Home. Three-sided football, occulted from the contexts of so-called “serious culture,” was conceived as a tactic for resistant collective activity, beyond spectacularized participation in the capitalist art world. Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics; Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” The Easton Cowboys, formed in 1992, are a non-league left-wing club, known for organizing games against the Zapatistas in Chiapas and tours to Palestine, as well as having played the obscure street artist Banksy in goal during the 1990s. This was somewhat ironic in light of Jorn’s high-profile rejection of the Guggenheim International Award in 1964. Prkvadrat, “3G Football—YouTube.” Including Manchester’s Materialist Psychogeographical Affiliation, London’s New Cross Triangle Psychogeographical Association, the WNLA , and Easton Cowboys. Bishop, Artificial Hells. Bishop, Artificial Hells. Camatte, Capital and Community, 252–3. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Tompsett, “Open Copenhagen,” 57; Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, 18.

Adventures of the Triolectic 48 49 50 51 52 53

Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts. NXTPA , “Triolectical Football in N-Dimensional Space.” Dunbar, “A Game of Three Halves.” DAta Miners and Travailleurs Psychique, “DAMTP Newsletter 16.” Jorn and Tompsett, Open Creation and Its Enemies, 46. Shield, Comparative Vandalism, 20.

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Part Six

Soccer and Commercialism

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Over 100,000 Posters: The Unprecedented Commercialism of the 1966 World Cup in England Jean Williams

Monday July 11th The eighth World Football Championship was opened by Her Majesty the Queen at the Empire Stadium Wembley. The Queen, who was accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, welcomed the many thousands of visitors from overseas to England. Immediately preceding the Opening Ceremony, some 350 London Schoolboys dressed in the National colors of the competing Associations paraded around the arena and formed ranks in the center of the playing area.1

Introduction The historical development of official World Cup posters provides a fascinating means of considering the growth of the world’s most popular sport. There are important continuities with the history of the modern Olympic Games, which were inaugurated in 1896 in Athens. From 1908 the Olympic Games staged a small but influential football tournament, out of which the World Cup eventually developed. At the London 1908 Olympic Games, the Football Association (FA ) organized the competition, though it remained contested whether representative players were entirely amateur.2 Formed in 1863, the FA had agreed to tolerate professionalism since 1885, and the entirely professional Football League was formed in 1888.3 Friendly international football rivalries against other national teams began in 1872, and were instantly popular with spectators and the media alike.4 Formed in 1904, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA ), the world governing body of soccer, agreed to recognize the Olympic tournament as a world football championship for amateurs following the very well attended matches in Stockholm in 1912.5 Moving images, still portraits, candid snapshots, stamps, postcards, and specially commissioned medals and pins were sent around the world as part of the wider mediation of the Olympic Games. Not all of the countries who competed in the Stockholm Olympic football competition had national professional leagues, causing 211

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controversy over the letter and the spirit of the amateur laws. The FA fielded a wholly amateur Great Britain team who won their second successive gold medal: it was to be their last. The interwar period included a particularly well-attended series of matches at the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games, won by Belgium. Uruguay won the Olympic tournaments in 1924 (Paris) and 1928 (Amsterdam). The first FIFA World Cup was hosted by Uruguay in 1930, and was won by the host nation. This invented a tradition whereby home advantage seemed to be conferred by hosting the championship, but this was by no means a guarantee of success.6 There were seven South American and two North American representatives, while only four of the thirteen teams were European (Belgium, France, Romania, and Yugoslavia). Uruguay’s victory coincided with celebrations of the centenary of the first Uruguayan constitution and ten key games took place at the Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, built specifically for the purpose. Local artist Guillermo Laborde designed an oil painting of a goalkeeper rising to tip the ball over the crossbar and, in so doing, set a tradition of winning a public competition to have his design reproduced as a World Cup poster.7 The original painting became a national treasure and an original in the Uruguay Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (National Art Museum) has been restored and conserved recently. This chapter argues that the posters give an insight into the growth of intercontinental World Cup competitions, and a neglected aspect of the academic literature. First, the process of hosting a World Cup was partly reflected in the design of the poster, and specific geo-temporal concerns often influenced both the style and topical motifs used by the artist. Second, the idea of a football world championship fed into wider concerns about a particular nation’s place in the global economic, political, and social order. Consequently, the posters reflected the host nation’s self-image, to both domestic and international audiences. World Cup posters, like Olympic artworks and their antecedents (including cheap paper bills circulated by hand), acted as both public service announcements and metaphors for spectacle.8 However, the Olympic Games are a multisport, mixed-gender tournament held in a single venue. A World Cup is a single-sport, gender-specific event held across cities, and more recently by more than one nation. The visual lexicon of World Cups therefore diverges from Olympic history, with strong elements of civic self-identification for the host cities, as they simultaneously present themselves to an international audience, and to local or regional consumers. This combined design history and ritualistic display, blending sport, politics, industrial graphics, cultural geography, and national representation. But there are also strong and relatively under-explored links with fine art and high culture. The structure of the chapter briefly introduces all seven of the first World Cup posters in Part One, many of which had strong modernistic designs, reflecting world politics as much as sport. The second World Championship was hosted by Italy in 1934 and shared the intensely political atmosphere of the third, held in France in 1938. The World Cup hosted by Brazil in 1950 was the first for 12 years because of World War II . The Brazil poster showcased the flags of thirteen participating national teams from three confederations and, in so doing, the global reach of football. The growth of the tournament continued in Switzerland in 1954, Sweden in 1958, and Chile 1962, by which time the influence of space and satellite technology was evident.9 What can these

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designs and their mediation tell us about how football had changed and become part of wider mercantile cultures? This topic has received little attention compared with the posters of the Olympic Games and, though brief, the overview therefore provides a starting point for further critical engagement. In Part Two, the core focus of this work concerns the considerable commercial and design innovations of the England World Cup of 1966. The governing body of English football had been invited, but failed to participate in the first three World Cups in 1930, 1934, and 1938. In 1930 the Football Association asked the Football League to send a team of its strongest players but this plan failed to materialize. As the collections at the National Archives in London show, the Foreign Office often discouraged the Football Association representative sides and professional Football League teams from competing abroad before 1950 because of the repercussions for national pride, although there was some confusion of how far Englishness could be conflated with Britishness: England did not want to fail at anything. Civil War in Spain, the financial crisis around the world, and the rise of a new power in Germany, meant England wanted to look and remain strong. Losing a football match to anyone was not on the agenda.10

However, as hosts of the 1966 World Cup, England, and particularly the Football Association, were obliged to show overseas teams a gracious welcome. The tournament heralded an unprecedented level of commercial and domestic exploitation, importantly aimed explicitly at children and the family audience, exemplified by the first World Cup mascot: a cartoonish lion called World Cup Willie who wore a union jack waistcoat, and walked with a comical swagger.11 Popular and academic histories of the World Cup tend to focus almost wholly on the football played and the outcome of matches.12 More recent work by Dilwyn Porter has foregrounded discussions of the representation of the 1966 World Cup hosted in England, as the event has been reconstructed in memory, and dovetailed with other signifiers of English nationalism.13 When England won as hosts in 1966, it was the third time that this had been achieved in World Cup history; first by Uruguay in 1930, and second by Italy in 1934. Unlike both Uruguay and Italy, this has been the only time that England has won the tournament. John Hughson has explored connections between key players of the time with the fashion industry and youth culture.14 Hughson has also reconsidered the role of England’s head coach Alf Ramsay as a cultural icon.15 The concluding comments provide a general overview of the remaining World Cup posters for the adult male competition from 1970 to 2014. The chapter argues that, taken as a whole, posters have played a major role in publicizing the World Cup since its inception and, as interest in the event burgeoned in 1966, so did the professionalization of graphic design. Using the posters in the collections at the National Football Museum, Preston, and building upon the unpublished work of David Gill in researching the artists who created each design, the work suggests that historians have largely neglected the confluence of these aspects of football’s history, and particularly of FIFA’s leading role in the visual aesthetic of world sport. This extended to representations of each venue, local transport systems, and related ephemera. In today’s diverse and

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instantaneous social and mainstream media environment, posters play an important part in setting the tone, and brand, of each World Cup. The posters have also become more of an aesthetic and commercial statement than a functional one, because basic information such as the times and dates of matches can be obtained elsewhere. What values and structures of power in visual representation have World Cup posters signified historically? How have the design features of graphic representation shaped the identity of the World Cup over time?

Part One: Early World Cup Posters 1930–62 The development of World Cup competition out of the Olympic Games helps to explain why designating an “official” poster was integral to the cultural identity of each event, and to world championship sporting spectacle, as historic events to be anticipated and reflected upon. Posters spoke to those who did not necessarily share the language of the host country and the integration of text and image became part of football’s visual lexicon. Easily read at a distance, and graphically simple so that those traveling at speed could absorb information, posters simultaneously announced forthcoming events but also spread ideas. World Cup posters distilled in typography and image complex metaphors for the host nation, the cities in which games were played, and football as a worldwide cultural industry. On the one hand, the host country defined itself, projected an image of choice, and invited an international audience to participate in their celebration of football. On the other hand, regional stakeholders of various kinds had to be involved as paying spectators, local venues for the games, and as suppliers of tourism services. The Guillermo Laborde curvilinear design for the first World Cup poster in 1930 (Figure  11.1) resonates with contemporary graphic and industrial trends. With a population around two million people in 1930, the Uruguayan economy had begun increasingly to industrialize. President José Batlle y Ordóñez had a major influence in the establishment of a circle of fine art and business interests known as the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Montevideo in 1905.16 Studios were established for the graphic and decorative arts, architecture, and construction and Circulo teachers included Laborde (1886–1940) who had already exhibited his work publicly. Circulo graduates formed the core of Uruguay’s planismo movement, so-called because it derived from Cézanne’s techniques of building up an image with levels of opposing planes. However, natural forms including animals and plants were strong influences in Uruguayan art deco, which influenced the buildings of Montevideo in the 1920s and 1930s and the design of the World Cup poster. As well as the construction of Estadio Centenario in just nine months, the iconic Palacio Salvo had been finished in 1929, and was, at that time, South America’s tallest building. The 1930 Laborde World Cup poster incorporated planismo elements, with layered contrasts of typography and the crossbar. Meanwhile, the sinuous goalkeeper provides a strong human diagonal element. The design translated to other artifacts, such as enameled pins and posters, and were reproduced in both color and monochrome for matches.17 All of these items are now highly sought after collectibles. There were many stamps, programs, ticket

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Figure 11.1 Guillermo Laborde, 1930 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

stubs, medals, pins, cards, and other memorabilia from the first World Cup, many of which can be seen on display at the National Football Museum in Manchester. This remained a trend throughout the following tournaments with some very practical artefacts and others more decoratively embellished. Thirty-two nations entered the qualifying tournament for the 1934 World Cup, a sign of the tournament’s success and the relative cost of traveling to Italy. There were twelve European nations within the sixteen teams, and Brazil, Argentina, United States, and Egypt also sent teams.18 Uruguay declined to defend their world title. Designed by established Italian artist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the 1934 poster (Figure 11.2) had a strong diagonal banner of the flags in the background, opposed by the squared-off proportions of the player about to strike the football. If Laborde’s design was about elegant defense, Marinetti’s 1934 poster exalted attack. Marinetti had co-founded Futurism, publishing a Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro, Paris, in 1909 and football fitted with his passion for large, excited crowds, conflict, and velocity.19 The 1934 poster image was dynamic and deliberately Futurist in unsettling the viewer to arrest their attention; only the lettering observed a normal vertical and horizontal plane. Having extensively used poetry and lettering figuratively in his work, Marinetti was perhaps surprisingly sparing in the functionality of typography on the poster.

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Figure 11.2 Filippo Marinetti, 1934 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

Some of the venue posters were more chaotic overlays of color, photography, images, and lettering, as if ripped from scrapbooks and pasted together in a rush. Marinetti’s urgent and energetic poster stylized the ball as the sole curved object, sending a message to the world about Mussolini’s Italy. However, Marinetti was an artist in decline at the time of the 1934 World Cup. He had wanted Futurism to become the official artistic style of Italian fascism, which Mussolini resisted, although the two would ultimately be linked. Like the concrete towers of Bologna’s sleek new stadium, the 1934 World Cup poster envisioned a modern, technologically advanced Italy, proudly nationalistic and unafraid of political violence. Winning a World Cup as host was difficult. Retaining the title was considerably more challenging but Italy would do this and more. As John Foot has argued, “During the Duce’s reign, Italy won two world cups and an Olympic gold medal. Fascism was good for Italian football, and football was good for fascism.”20 This was especially the case given that Olympic football lapsed from the program of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Italy’s win in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and the 1938 World Cup hosted by France were both also propaganda victories. The Henri Desmé lithographs for the World Cup posters of 1938 (Figure 11.3) reflect the tumultuous political climate in Europe.

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Figure 11.3 Henri Desmé, 1938 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

Heroic realist style was designed to impress. Visually, the player dominated the ball and, by extension, the globe. Paris-based Desmé illustrated commercially produced book covers, gift cards, and posters. The chiseled features and athletic stance of the anonymous player’s idealized body dominate the sculptural design. Without a head or upper torso, the muscled leg and large boot have ominous overtones, only slightly modified by the hint of a rainbow in the background. The future was to be delivered by force, perhaps. With the announcement of the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, English, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish readers could now muse upon what World Cup football meant for their respective national teams. The poster for the 1950 competition provides a way of contextualizing both the public image of Brazil abroad and an increased focus of world attention on the World Cup (Figure 11.4). Hugo Meisl, an Austrian-Jewish sports journalist who had become an integral part of Britain’s serious popular media after World War II , described the significance of the logistical challenge facing Brazil: In June 1950 a fleet of planes will carry a very heavily insured cargo from many corners of the world to Rio de Janeiro. The cargo will be fifteen soccer teams, representing fifteen out of over-70 football nations united in soccer’s world organization . . . the final itself will be played in Rio’s giant stadium, a masterpiece

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Figure 11.4 J. Ney Damasceno, 1950 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

of modern sports architecture that can hold a 155,000 crowd . . . Many hundred thousands of pounds are involved: transport and accommodation of the 16 teams alone will swallow £100,000.21

Arsenal had recently toured Brazil to acclaim and this had led to intensified discussions of national playing styles.22 As well as “hospitality of astounding proportions,” Meisl emphasized the “big, modern cities” that tourists would experience in Sao Paulo, Rio Grande, and Belo Horizonte. Rio de Janeiro was at that time Brazil’s capital (Brasilia later became capital in 1960) and the Maracanã stadium was specially built for the occasion. The first postwar World Cup held in Brazil in 1950 therefore showcased the global reach of football more extensively than at any previous point in history. The clarity of the single leg and boot design on the poster was not as monumental as the design for France’s post in 1938. Instead, it united the flags of the competing countries on the sock that provided the main diagonal design feature, conveying with the boot firmly on the ball, denoting the host country’s confidence. However, the 1950 tournament would bring a nation low by expectation when Uruguay took home the trophy after Brazil were defeated in the last game to decide the tournament. The designer of the poster was chosen by a public competition announced in 1948 in the newspapers in a collaboration between the World Cup organizing committee and

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the commission for the Brazilian Society of Arts, led by its President Mario Polo and a judging panel of Professors Castro Filho, Henrique Salvio, and Alberto Sims.23 One hundred and fourteen entries were reduced to a longlist of fourteen, of whom there were four finalists and a winner, J. Ney Damasceno, from Rio de Janeiro City. Damasceno benefited from a prize of 37,000 cruzeiros; although little is then subsequently known of his life, he does not appear to have been an established artist. There were no official posters for the host cities. The design that won second place and 10,000 cruzeiros, from an un-named artist based in San Paulo, involved a cone of light projecting up from the Maracanã on which rested a football bearing all the flags of the national team topped by a golden laurel wreath.24 So these processes of selection are in themselves interesting for how World Cup posters were chosen to represent the nation as well as specific regions. The tournaments in 1954, 1958, and 1962 were also about new forms of confidence, with the designs becoming increasingly simple and sparse. The 1954 World Cup held in Switzerland was the first to be televised and marked a new age in visualizing football. Viewers would increasingly follow the tournament on screen than rather than through the press and listening to the radio. Commentating and punditry developed their own formalized conventions. Herbert Leupin, who included Coca Cola and many other multinational companies as his clients, designed the official emblem, the first for the World Cup. A Swiss graphic designer, Leupin specialized in poster design, for which he received many international awards. He also painted and illustrated children’s books.25 For the Leupin World Cup poster (Figure 11.5), the football bulged the back of the goal net while an open mouthed and outstretched goalkeeper looked back in surprise. In so doing, the goalkeeper looks out at the reader, as if we see the goal happening in real time. Increasing technocracy and specialism were also evident in the result. The Federal Republic of Germany national team head coach, Sepp Herberger, had invited German sports shoe manufacturer Adi Dassler, owner of Adidas, to travel with the national team in 1954.26 After reaching the Final game against Hungary, the German team were able to screw in longer studs to counter the rainy conditions in the second half of the match. Adidas technology achieved mythical status. Underdogs Germany turned a 2–2 first half draw into a 3–2 victory with six minutes to go, and this became a moment in postwar German reconstruction known as “The Miracle of Berne.” When a proudly mixed-race Brazil team beat hosts Sweden in 1958 to lift the Jules Rimet Trophy for the first time, there was some redemption for their defeat on home soil in 1950. The team carried the trophy on the back of a municipal fire engine through the avenues of Rio to the Presidential Palace. In design terms, the 1958 poster was typical of the minimalist Swedish graphic design style of the time featuring very uncluttered typography and where the words “Football, Futbol, Fussball” have considerable prominence. The anonymous player who has kicked the ball is in its shadow and, it is a transcendent image, as the ball flies off to the top right, trailing a banner of the flags of the competing nations as it rises. Also known as the International Style of graphic design, the poster promoted the Coupe de Jules Rimet and its simplicity perhaps reflected the increased pace of life.

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Figure 11.5 Herbert Leupin, 1954 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

The seventh World Cup competition in Chile 1962 saw Pelé and his Brazilian team secure their second successive World Cup crown, beating Czechoslovakia 3–1 in the final. Only the ball and the globe figured on the poster image with the lettering to announce the tournament; there was no human element. An otherworldly design, set against a green blue background, was a commissioned piece by Chilean sculptor and graphic artist, Galvarino Ponce, intended to evoke the space age and the recent Sputnik missions. As Brenda Elsey has shown, the Chilean organizing committee presented a small, humble, and efficient country with a mainly white, European-influenced culture, embodied by the slogan “Because we have nothing, we want to do it all.”27 The poster design therefore represents little sense of Chilean culture, but, as a diplomat as well as an artist, Ponce’s design was conscious of drawing the world’s attention to the host nation, via football.

Part Two: Selling Football in 1966 In design terms, England’s World Cup was personified by an anthropomorphized lion mascot called World Cup Willie. But this was a symbol of Britishness, not a distinctly-

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articulated Englishness. The mascot was symbolic of the new era of merchandizing and, fun, friendly, and furry, the tournament saw an unprecedented degree of commercialization.28 As David Gill has shown, British military regiments and US sports teams had used live animals as adopted mascots since the nineteenth century, but with the innovation of Walt Disney and Warner Brothers of merchandizing their cartoon character mascots, in the 1930s, a new marketing trend translated from the entertainment industries to sport.29 Linking sport with destination tourism, marketing, and profitability was evident in a difficult balancing act, since the FA wanted simultaneously to greet the largest number of overseas visitors possible and make them feel at ease as valued consumers, but ultimately wanted both home fans and international spectators to applaud a victorious England team. The tournament was hosted across seven venues in Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Sheffield, and Sunderland. Although beyond the remit of this chapter, this represents a large research agenda for the historian of the 1966 tournament because regional differences could be used by specific venues to welcome visitors. Sheffield City Council, for example, produced a tourism guide to the city listing what World Cup visitors might do when not attending games and inaugurating a special program of events to coincide with the tournament.30 The range of accommodation available ranged from: first-class hotels costing 89–139 shillings; holiday camps or hostels for 36–54 shillings; boarding houses at 32–51 shillings and, most cheaply, private houses where a room might cost 27–38 shillings. So, local and regional differences complicate the overall picture. The FA organizing committee pulled together a well-organized event on a proverbial shoestring budget, with a relatively small cadre of administrative staff. However, the support of Elizabeth II was significant and the 1966 World Cup could not have taken place without the support of the government of the day.31 Various state-funded communication and transport providers, such as the Post Office and British Transport, benefitted, as did private enterprise from airlines to newspapers who had a range of posters and advertising of their own.32 A range of non-profit charity providers and voluntary clubs also made a significant contribution.33 Because World Cup Willie was a visual representation, visitors who could not speak English were able to see his likeness on temporary signs used by London Transport to get visitors to Wembley and White City stadiums during the tournament, and provided a simple way of highlighting relevant information.34 The World Cup was mediated and re-inscribed with a wide range of meanings.35 In some senses this reflected Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s modernization of the British economy with £500,000 of central government funding to improve the seven host venues. There were also official branding approvals from the Home Office allowing the FA permission to use the coat of arms on the official emblem.36 Designed by Arthur Bew, a commercial artist, the insignia was commissioned rather than opened to competition.37 The model of an official logo, a tournament poster, and a mascot would remain the key three ways of promoting World Cups until the innovation of “Artmarks” (a stylized version of the trophy) for the Korea–Japan tournament in 2002.

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Financial constraints and lack of sophistication were major factors in the use of so many posters. The FA had hoped to get a discount on England’s football strips before merchandiser Umbro donated the England team kit for free of its own volition.38 The FA organizing committee set an ambitious target to sell just over two million tickets in two years from 1964 to 1966 with a very simple strategy: It was of paramount importance that as much publicity as possible should be obtained with the minimum outlay . . . every possible avenue was explored to obtain maximum coverage with minimum expenditure. With no newspaper advertising contemplated, attractive posters were an absolute necessity as a substitute to keep the posters in the public eye.39

A mascot instantly opened up new markets beyond the stadium.40 As Gill has shown, although there were mascots in the entertainment and sports industries before World Cup Willie, licensing a cartoon mascot and affixing that character to a whole range of merchandise was ground-breaking in sporting spectacle.41 The spare design of the 1962 World Cup poster contrasts with the use of World Cup Willie on a range of 1966 poster designs (Figure 11.6).

Figure 11.6 Walter Tuckwell and Associates Limited, 1966 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

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There are many more beautiful World Cup poster designs, but this was playful and humorous which is perhaps all the more remarkable given the huge pressures facing the FA and the England national team. The Public Relations firm who created World Cup Willie, Walter Tuckwell and Associates Limited, was at the forefront of the new character merchandizing industry with licensed products including James Bond, Noddy, Dr Who, and other BBC series.42 Tuckwell bought the merchandizing agency rights from the FA , and industrial artists Richard Culley and Reginald Hoy went through a series of design modifications for the mascot, from being a little boy, based on Reg’s son Leo, to a cartoon lion. The idea of a cartoon mascot was instantly popular among football clubs in the 1960s.43 This also set a tradition that has spread across major tournaments and in professional clubs. Licensing a cartoon character also unfixed World Cup Willie from the football tournament and made him available to a range of consumers, particularly children and families.44 This reflected trends toward the mass ownership of televisions and attendant opportunities for advertising.45 Attendances at matches for the Football League had also declined from 41 million attendances just after the war to 27 million by 1965–66. Overall the FA reasoned, improved affluence made for fewer visits to the football stadium, mostly in London and the Midlands.46 So, new ways to sell football proliferated, as World Cup Willie featured on everything from stamps and long-playing records to knitting patterns and children’s toys.47 There remains considerable potential for the release of sources in the private domain. For instance, the National Football Museum has a donation of a knitted World Cup Willie figure from the Patons pattern who has survived much love. For whom was he knitted, why and how was he kept? In concluding this section, it is safe to say that the specter of winning has overshadowed English football ever since 1966. Sports-wise England has won few victories in World Competitions in the postwar years . . . in Association Football our attempts in International events have often been frustrating and unsuccessful [sic]. The winning of the Jules Rimet trophy, therefore, apart from all other considerations, is a most refreshing, pleasing and satisfying triumph after many reversals.48

Although the FA chose to neglect World Cup Willie after the 1966 World Cup for almost forty years, the success of licensing a mascot has had a global legacy in selling sporting spectacle. Partly in recognition of this, the FA contested a lengthy court case to protect their rights to Willie’s image in 2006.49 At the time, the UK character license market was valued at £3.3 billion and has risen considerably in the past decade both for children and adult consumers. The sport’s governing bodies, like FIFA and the FA , have also become aware that they can monetize their own history and heritage through products related to earlier World Cups and other tournaments. So, posters and the other items listed here are just part of the range of sources. There is a whole research agenda around how these objects hold memories for individuals and groups. Quite apart from this, the subsequent memorialization of 1966 remains under researched still. This can be evidenced by a dinner given to Sir Alf Ramsey in 1974 on

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the occasion of the eighth anniversary of winning the title at the Café Royal London.50 Shortly before, failure to qualify for the 1974 World Cup had cost him the England manager’s job.

Conclusion: New Visual Identities in World Football The Mexico World Cup in 1970 was won for the third time by Brazil, who beat Italy into second place, and the Jules Rimet Trophy was awarded permanently to the team.51 Mexico’s Modernist World Cup poster design incorporated pictograms, also evident in the poster for the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games. The pictogram of a simple football (the football was again a metaphor for the world), the mascot was humanized as a small cartoon boy Juanito (little John), a Mexican “everyman.” Juanito sported Mexico’s football strip, controlled a football at his feet, and wore a sombrero embellished with the words Mexico 70. The Adidas-endorsed Telstar football (used in 1970 and 1974) and other merchandise was now broadcast worldwide and in color.52 Telstar communications satellites, launched from 1962, relayed television pictures, telephone calls, faxes, and live transatlantic television broadcasts. Telstar passed into all kinds of popular culture from music to games and comics. The 1974 FIFA World Cup was held in West Germany, including West Berlin, and became Germany’s second World Cup success, beating the Netherlands 2–1 in the final game. The tournament marked the first time that the current trophy, the FIFA World Cup Trophy, created by the Italian sculptor Silvio Gazzaniga, was awarded. The poster, designed by Fritz Genkinger, returned to featuring a football player striking the ball as its main theme with the use of color and broad brush adding to a sense of dynamism and speed. The 1978 World Cup was won by hosts Argentina causing controversy as a military coup had taken place in the country two years earlier. However, again overt politicization of the victory perhaps tainted this achievement. General Jorge Rafael Videla and other junta chiefs used the tournament as a form of propaganda for their “Dirty War” on political dissidents, many of whom became “the Disappeared.” The reinforcement of national identity, residing in the poster, was confirmed when the government passed a special law to secure protection of the design.53 The first time that the number of national associations entering the World Cup tournament had exceeded one hundred, but the incongruous unity featured on the poster, two men hugging and presumably celebrating a goal, did not reflect the tournament overall. The depiction of heavily pixilated players is rather sinister, as if they too are gradually disappearing from view. Spain hosted an expanded 1982 World Cup Finals tournament which featured twenty-four teams; the first expansion since 1934. Surrealist Joan Miró designed the tournament poster and died in 1983, making this one of his most high profile late works (Figure 11.7). The poster reflected a global aesthetic for football, heavily inflected by local and regional identity. Each host city also commissioned a poster in a signature artistic style. For instance, the print for Barcelona by Antoni Tàpies is one of many of these regional

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Figure 11.7 Joan Miró, 1982 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

posters held in the collection of the National Football Museum. Tàpies combined abstract mural and collage techniques of the Dua al Set movement that arose in Catalonia after World War II as the region struggled for independence. Mexico became the first country to host a World Cup twice in 1986. Well known for her music industry portraits and documentary work, the Mexican FA commissioned Annie Leibowitz to complete a series of posters, the first time photography had appeared in official designs. Leibowitz also created a series of official photos, having begun her career less than ten years before on Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. From now on, the visual language of advertising increasingly influenced poster design and used increasingly sophisticated means of commercialization. The National Football Museum has a collection of Leibowitz limited edition images featuring a man with a football in a desert. There is no typography or lettering, and the relationship of the photographs to a World Cup has to be made without traditional cues. Football borrowed and adapted from the narrative of other Italian cultural industries for the 1990 World Cup. For example, the soundtrack of Nessun Dorma by Luciano Pavarotti was used as the theme song of BBC television’s coverage and it subsequently reached number two in the UK singles chart, becoming synonymous with football. Italian abstract impressionist Alberto Burri designed the official poster to widespread

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approval—but the mascot, Ciao, was a stick-figure player with a football head and an Italian tricolor body. This was more contentious because it was an abstract cubist figure, not a cartoon child or cuddly animal character. The Colosseum in Rome dominates the poster, and the green space of the football field at the heart of Italian culture: an imposing, monumental design. African countries became more visible as part of World Cup spectacle with Cameroon reaching extra time in the quarter final, eventually won 3–2 by England. West Germany won the tournament, beating Argentina 1–0 in the final. In another classical allusion, the official match ball was the Adidas Etrusco Unico. The FIFA World Cup in the United States in 1994 was one of the most controversial; seeking to move into under-exploited markets for live spectators and media partnerships. Brazil won a record fourth World Cup title when they beat Italy 3–2 in a penalty shootout after the game ended 0–0 after extra-time; the first World Cup Final to be decided on penalties. The total attendance of nearly 3.6 million for the final tournament seemed to validate the decision to host the tournament in North America. The Local Organizing Committee commissioned Peter Max for the official poster. Max had been famous since the 1960s for Pop Art and Neo Expressionist design, including generous use of vibrant colors (Figure 11.8). The football player is an astronaut, who floats above the colorful globe, perhaps suggesting the transcendent potential of fame in such a highly mediated sporting

Figure 11.8 Peter Max, 1994 World Cup Poster. Courtesy of the National Football Museum, Manchester, England.

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spectacle. A German-born American illustrator and graphic artist, Max had also been the official artist for numerous major American events, such as the Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl. Warner Brothers created Striker, the World Cup Pup mascot; and Pentagram, an iconic graphic design firm, the trademark emblem. The visual lexicon developed more directly links with commercial interests and corporate sponsors. The 1998 World Cup was held in France, and had an expanded format featuring 32 teams and increased from 52 to 64 matches. Hosts France won the tournament by beating Brazil 3–0 in the final with a young, diverse, and apparently inclusive team of French nationals led by Zinedine Zidane. The competition to design the official World Cup poster was open to all artists and students in France and it was won by Nathalie Le Gall. A 27-year-old art student at the Montpellier Art School, Nathalie’s design captured the color and vitality of football’s biggest event as if the world were looking in on the stadium (as they had also been invited to do by Alberto Burri). However, unlike the monumentality and classicism of Italia ’90, the poster for France ’98 combined hand drawn and abstracted electronic elements to focus on the pitch like looking down from a satellite. The 2002 World Cup was the first to be held in Asia; the only one so far to be hosted jointly by South Korea and Japan. Appropriately, posters promoted themes of friendship, peace, and cooperation. Based on the traditional Asian art of calligraphy (brush and ink drawing) the commission was a collaborative piece by Byun Choo Suk from Korea and Hirano Sogen from Japan. A vibrantly engaging football pitch was again the focal point, drawn in thick brushstrokes. There were also three computer-generated mascots (The Spheriks), which were chosen by Internet vote and through fast food chain McDonald’s outlets. Members of a team who played “Atomball” (a fictional football-like sport), coach Ato was chosen as the name of the glowing orange character with a cyber goatee, while white and purple strikers became known as Nik and Kaz. The branding strategy of combining modernity and traditionalism produced broadcast revenues growth to $789 million, increasing to $910 million for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany.54 The poster design for 2002 had a legacy in changing World Cup design, introducing “Artmarks”—fusing the official trademark logo with a stylized depiction of the World Cup trophy. Artmarks were so lucrative in branding terms that FIFA and local organizing committees issued distinct versions in successive World Cup posters for 2006, 2010, and 2014. The 2010 World Cup in South Africa was the first hosted in Africa, and was won by Spain. The tournament was noted for controversy over the use of vuvuzelas (powered by blowing heavily through the instrument) and the unique sound of this kind of support. Similar concerns over the completion of the infrastructure schedule and human-rights issues marred Brazil’s preparation for the World Cup in 2014. Meanwhile, FIFA continues to grow its commercial portfolio of World Cup products and becomes ever more wealthy, as a supposedly non-profit organization. The representation of Brazil on the tournament posters for the 2014 World Cup was both one of football’s homecoming and a celebration of the migration and globalization of its players worldwide. As can be compared with the 1950 poster, football is integral

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to Brazil’s self-image as a country and a core component of its international identity. The mascot was a three-banded armadillo called Fulec, combining the words football and ecology. The “look” spoke to a legacy and heritage being reinvented, to be followed shortly after by the Rio Olympic Games in 2016. As the World Cup moves into new markets in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, the visual language of its posters, memorabilia, and so on continues to diversify and grow, along with its status as a sporting mega-event.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

The Football Association, “World Cup Diary,” 9. British Olympic Council, Minutes, 20 December 1907, 4. Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915, 14. Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving with the Ball, 35. Williams, “Jennie Fletcher,” 205. Lanfranchi, Eisenberg, Mason, and Wahl, 100 Years of Football, 24–5. Goldblatt, “Football Arte,” 21–2. Timmers, A Century of Olympic Posters, 7. Goldblatt and Williams, A History of the World Cup in 24 Objects. Mitchell, “The World Cup.” Goldblatt and Williams, A History of the World Cup in 24 Objects, 14. Glanville, The Story of the World Cup, 10; Giulianotti and Robertson, Globalization and Football, 18. Porter, “Egg and Chips with the Connellys,” 529. Hughson, “Ten Years Ahead of His Time,” 116. Hughson, “What’s It All About? Alf Ramsey and the 1966 World Cup.” Margolin, World History of Design, Volume 2, 548. Graham Budd Auctions, Lot 936. Glanville, The Story of the World Cup, 25–31. Belloli, “Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.” Foot, Calcio, 33. Meisl, “Soccer’s Road to Rio,” 5. Goldblatt, Futebol Nation, 91–2. “Revelação de Valores Na Arte,” 13. “Cartaz, Uma Providecial,” 14. International Poster Gallery, “Herbert Leupin.” Williams, “Given the Boot,” 87. Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen, 196. Smith, International Football Book No 9, 15. Gill, “Sports Mascots,” 36–9. Sheffield City Council, World Cup Competition Sheffield 1966 Visitors Handbook, 2. FIFA , “Press Centres & British Transport Arrangements,” 110–11. Mayes, The Football Association: World Cup Report 1966, 41–2. The Football Association, Minutes 18 June 1966 to 19 May 1967, 4. Nolan, “Temporary Direction Signs for the 1966 Football World Cup Finals,” Image no: 5276.

Over 100,000 Posters 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

The Football Association, World Cup (1966) England Ticket Application Form, 1. Mitchell, “The World Cup: More Than Just Football,” 1. McGuiness, “Ephemera from the 1966 World Cup,” 3. Kuper and Szymanski, Soccernomics, 58–9. Mayes, The Football Association: World Cup Report 1966, 41. FIFA , FIFA Official Bulletin 44, 705. Gill, “Sports Mascots,” 37. Noote, “World Cup 1966 Memorabilia: Walter Tuckwell,” 5. Gill, “World Cup Willie,” 10. Collins, “The Greatest Sporting Event Ever to be Staged in Britain,” 11. Bannatyne, Football League Research 1962, 4. The Football Association, “World Cup Diary,” 48–9. Patons Knitting Patterns, World Cup Willie, 1. The Football Association, “World Cup Diary,” 47. Gill, “Sports Mascots,” 38. Sir Alf Ramsey Testimonial Committee, Souvenir Brochure, 2. Bellos, Futebol, 396. Goldblatt and Williams, A History of the World Cup in 24 Objects, 15. Tomlinson, “Germany 1974,” 214. Kuper and Szymanski, Soccernomics, 282–4.

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Imagining Reality: Artistic Responses to the Commercialization of the Beautiful Game Ray Physick

Introduction Benedict Anderson argued that capitalism developed the illusion that people within a nation or community have an essential role to play within society. For Anderson, cultural engagement has “aroused deep attachments” to the modern state.1 Expanding upon this imagined community thesis, E. J. Hobsbawm argued that the modern nation seems more real when viewed through the lens of two teams of eleven playing football before a crowd of millions through the medium of television.2 Both writers were reflecting upon the apparent disintegration of real communities under modern capitalism and the use of the imagined nation as a masking agent. Accordingly, the modern state attempts to inculcate people within a given country with the idea that they have common interests: regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail . . . the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.3

Clearly nationalism can drive peoples to extreme measures to defend a country, even when there is deep social divide within the said nation. While the ruling class of a state typically resorts to war only in exceptional circumstances, to govern the imagined nation in normal times, to generate a feeling of horizontal comradeship, human practice is subsumed into the ways of everyday life.4 Cultural practice thus becomes a key factor in generating a sense of nationhood, with sport forming a primary component of this everyday life. Major sporting events are a good reflection of this, the English FA Cup Final and international sporting tournaments are sites where a singular national identity is generated despite social inequality, both within the stadium and among those following the contests through printed and visual media platforms. Jeffrey Hill, for example, has argued that the English FA Cup Final is a site for “civic and national unity of seamless communities . . . offering an idealized vision of community.”5 As with other national and international sporting events, the Cup Final represents an 231

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“imaginary constitution of the social order.”6 The reality of modern society, however, is that communities are becoming more socially divided, a situation that is reflected in the increasing social division within stadiums of elite football clubs. In addition to sport, the concept of the imagined nation often surfaces in art. Artists across many genres have often presented, not always consciously, the apparent horizontal nature of society through their work. L. S. Lowry, for example, painted urban landscapes that showed a harmonious society within the confines of industrial capitalism: this despite the fact that Lowry’s work also reflects the decline of Britain as an industrial nation.7 Moreover, Lowry indicated how sport, football in particular, was an integral part of the imagined community. His celebrated painting of 1953, Going to the Match, clearly articulates this notion, as does much of his work that relates to football and society. In developing a worldwide fan base, modern-day football clubs, usually European, have been busy developing versions of the imagined community. To borrow the phrase from FC Barcelona, football clubs today are more than a club (més que un club); a phrase that implies they are a social phenomenon with a key social role to play in society. Indeed, the once city-focused football club now employ avenues opened up by globalization to develop a sense of belonging among fans, who not only live in different parts of the country, but many thousands of miles away on continents with different cultural traditions. One method of fostering allegiance is through the branding of products and commodities that are, ironically, often produced by workers enduring slave-like conditions. The process of globalization has allowed sport to become an expanding field of investment for multinational companies. Indeed, Perelman has argued that “football has been one of the main vectors of this globalization.”8 In a reversal of the process undertaken by artists such as Lowry, many contemporary artists criticize the impact of globalization upon society. Rather than reflect an imagined community, they take a hard-nosed look at capitalism and the consequences of its economic activity. For a number of artists, football has emerged as a platform to explore the perceived imagined community being developed by powerful football clubs. The 1996 Offside exhibition, shown in Manchester during the UEFA European Championship, was the first collective assessment of the link between football and capitalism. Subsequent exhibitions such as Em Jogo (2004), Rundlederwelten (2006), and One Love (2006) continued this process. The Em Jogo and Rundlederwelten exhibitions were on show during the 2004 UEFA European Championship and the 2006 FIFA World Cup respectively. One Love, held in the Lowry Centre, aimed to emulate the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition of 1953, discussed by Mike O’Mahony earlier in this book. These four exhibitions provide a reference point for artists who currently work with football for their subject matter. Using the premise of the imagined community, outlined by Anderson and Hobsbawm, this chapter will explore how artists such as Lowry have at times reinforced the perception that the nation is based on a horizontal comradeship. This background will provide the base to analyze how modern-day football clubs use people’s love of football to develop an imagined community by association. The article will also explore how a layer of contemporary artists have responded to this situation in an attempt to

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show that the imagined world of the football club is in fact an essential cog in the economic and social relations produced by capitalism. These include artists such as Roddy Buchanan, Freddy Contreras, Neville Gabie, and Leo Fitzmaurice, all of whom have explored the deep social and cultural roots of football in their work. Contreras and Fiztmaurice have also demonstrated how elite clubs use the loyalty of fans to expand the market for sports goods such as football shirts: commodities that carry logos of powerful multinational companies. In effect, star players and fans are now a form of mass advertisement boards enabling multinational corporations to achieve deep market penetration for their commodities, transforming football into a now integral part of the entertainment industry. Players have metamorphosed into stars, the example of the movie star has clearly been developed to enhance the image of the sporting hero, thereby facilitating this process.9 This aspect of the article will provide the basis for a case study of Liverpool Football Club whose exploitative attitude toward the community is a product of its desire to re-establish itself globally within the superelite club bracket. American ownership, under the stewardship of the powerful sports conglomerate Fenway Sports Group, has accelerated this process. Liverpool based artist Christine Physick has explored this relationship between the club and community in the critically-acclaimed work she exhibited in February 2014 at the University of Central Lancashire, with a smaller selection of the work shown at the Quaker Meeting House, Liverpool, from October 29, 2014, to January 31, 2015. Her project looks in depth at the imagined state of elite football and how such clubs are increasingly becoming forces for the promotion of globalized capitalism. The work of the contemporary artists discussed in this chapter presents wide-ranging social commentary relevant to historical and contemporary social issues connected to football; however, unlike the avant-garde groups of the early twentieth century discussed by Przemysław Strożek in this collection, their art does not necessarily propose a direct solution to the problems and issues they raised.

Horizontal Comradeship to Social Breakdown As indicated above, the imagined community of a unified nation has been brilliantly captured in the work of Lowry, nowhere more so than in his cityscapes that show football as integral to modern society. His Going to the Match (1953, Figure  12.1),10 which shows scenes of fans flocking to Burnden Park, formally the home ground of Bolton Wanderers, is a good reflection of this. The painting reveals a partial view of the ground with the terracing behind the goal, shown as almost full to capacity, as well as the entrances to the grandstands and paddock areas of the ground. One assumes it is close to kick-off with fans rushing from all angles toward the turnstiles. Read in this way, one can deduce that the painting is just about football, but when viewing Lowry’s work, it is important to appreciate that his cityscapes are composites of how he saw industrial Lancashire. Although the painting was produced in 1953, it is important to note that Lowry’s vision of the world remained rooted in the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s. Commenting on this, Berger pointed out that

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Figure 12.1 L. S. Lowry, Going to the Match, 1953. Oil on canvas, 71 × 91.5 cm. The Lowry, on loan from the Professional Footballers’ Association. © The estate of L. S. Lowry. All rights reserved, DACS 2017. Photo credit: The L. S. Lowry Collection. Lowry’s pictures “suggest an essential changelessness” precisely at a time when society was being transformed by technology, change that was gathering pace at the time Lowry painted Going to the Match. For Berger, Lowry’s work reflects the decline of Britain as an industrial nation, while at the same time showing that people who live in the shadow of the mill are often alienated from those around them. Curiously, the alienation of people is often emphasized in the paintings that show people at leisure.11 In his work, Lowry often structures the city in a hierarchical way. The mill is usually in the background overarching the streets of terraced houses: streets are frequently interlaced with open-air places for leisure where sports, particularly football, are played. This is perhaps best displayed in Football Match (1949) a painting that offers a panoramic view of industrial society. The painting provides an insight into the major themes contained within Lowry’s cityscapes, which often encompass “the working man at play” in densely populated areas.12 Alongside this we see not only the places of work, but working-class people of all ages at play or attending to their everyday lives. According to Mullins, the Football Match provides an insight into working-class culture and community: An extensive panorama presents the onlooker with a cityscape peppered with rooftops; chimneys full of billowing smoke; spires; houses and street scenes with

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incidental domestic moments, including children at play, and mothers pushing prams, all held in thrall to the compulsion of the crowd who surge to catch the action of the game. This juxtaposition of the tension of the crowd watching the game, and the slow pace of the individuals who stroll around the multilayered streets and wastelands beyond, is captured by the artist who towers over the action pulling the viewer over the rooftops and beyond into the drama below.13

This was Lowry’s imagined state, a static unchanging society where people routinely go about life in an unquestioning manner. Indeed, it is an organic society that does not need to change, a society where people are mere “puppets” in this best of all possible worlds.14 Many of the artists depicting football in this period typically show aspects of the match, the run-down stadium or fans walking to the ground, but rarely do they provide an insight into the social and economic significance of football in capitalist society. In contrast to this broad-based work, an image by John Hewitt, Pretend Rifle (1984) concerns itself with the social breakdown of Britain’s declining industrial towns during the 1980s. The image shows three stereotypical football fans of the time, one is aiming a pretend shot, presumably at the system that it is criticizing. The image is an artistic attempt to represent the social breakdown that was occuring in many areas of Britain in the 1980s. In this instance, the artist is using the metaphor of football to get across his message. It was a time when many thought that football in Britain had deteriorated into “a slum sport played in slum stadiums.”15 Football, in effect, provided a mirror image for the economic and social decline of Britain, a decline that led to severe societal problems. Also in the 1980s, Chris Stevens, who was artist in-residence at Sunderland Football Club, produced a body of work that aimed to undermine opinion that often castigated the young football fan as a hooligan in waiting. The main focus of Stevens’ work was on the skinhead fan and the culture associated with skinheads in the 1980s. Typical of his work is Can Can, which shows a Sunderland fan standing on the terraces wearing a gas mask. In the foreground is a police officer who seems to be moving away from the scene. Another typical painting is Ignorance is Strength, which depicts an ignorantlooking skinhead looking rather mean. Stevens’ work, made during the miners’ strike of 1984–85, aimed to undermine the bigotry aimed at young football fans in this period who were often accused of gratuitous violence—as, of course, were the striking miners.16 The work of Hewitt and Stevens provides a reminder that football, while offering the illusion of horizontal comradeship, also provides an insight into the fragmentation of society. Their artwork anticipates the work produced during the English Premier League era, the juncture when football became integrated into the globalized economy.

Offside: Football as Critique The landmark exhibition, Offside, curated by John Gill of the Institute of International Visual Arts, was the first co-ordinated exhibition to show how football as an essential

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cog within the capitalist economy. Gill noted how modern football provided artists with a forum to ask challenging questions about the sport: Though football continues as a source of ideas and imagery for contemporary artists, few now choose to approach the subject in such a direct and unquestioning way. It is not simply that they seek to problematize their experience of football, but that they are aware of the multiplicity of debates which underscore the game, and that current visual arts practice frees them to approach the subject in new, inventive and perhaps more challenging ways.17

Freddy Contreras’ installation for the exhibition, Stud, fitted football studs to eleven pairs of Vivienne Westwood stiletto shoes, which were laid out in a mock-up of a football changing room. According to the artist, Stud was “a direct attempt to manipulate the relationships of sport and fashion, art and advertising, sexuality and gender divisions: using an ironic interplay of female and male macho associations.”18 Today football has even greater links with the fashion industry, a factor that reinforces football as an integral part of globalization and emphasizes the continuing relevance of the installation. Roddy Buchanan’s video installation for Offside played on the idea of football and community, particularly how the mass appeal of football can generate a perception of civic and national unity. The installation, entitled One in a Million, is based on the concept that communal football pitches are “havens of personal space,” hence his concern for the social provision for football. For Buchanan football provides a “universal language” suggesting that culture has “become more homogenized” in the modern day. One in a Million is a video of ten amateur football pitches in Manchester located “at the heart of parkland or wasteland, housing or industrial estates, demolition and building sites.” Buchanan makes the startling observation that “there may be 100 million such football parks in the world.”19 The thrust behind the piece is to show the universality of football and how it can also reflect upon wider issues in society: . . . the universal aspect of football culture, which seems to transcend differences of nationhood, social class and culture, was intriguing. Even if you don’t know anything about football it is possible to find a message in Buchanan’s work. Using football as a metaphor in his investigations of the value of community and difference, he visualizes the complexity of reality, dream and exclusion, and the universal nature of football. For Buchanan football is secondary to the idea he wants to explore. It becomes a way to see the world we live in.20

His work is a reminder that the universality of football can generate the perception that we live in a state of harmony. Buchanan’s videos, however, question such an observation and lead us ponder upon the role of culture in society. Developing the themes contained in Offside, Neville Gabie’s goalposts (ongoing since 1996, Figure 12.2) demonstrate why football is more important, and bigger, than any other team sport. They show that if you have a ball the prime aim of the game, to

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Figure 12.2 Neville Gabie, Goalposts: Belfast, Northern Ireland, ongoing since 1996. © Neville Gabie: http://www.nevillegabiegoalposts.co.uk/ [accessed: March 19, 2018].

score goals, can be achieved: “football can be played anywhere, at any time with any amount of people. A couple of lads with a ball and something to represent goalposts and you’ve got a game. It may just be three-and-in but it’s still football. Football at its purest.”21 In reality, in any urban environment, on a field or a piece of waste ground, the game can be played, even by a single person. How many boys and girls have played in this way and imagined themselves scoring the winning goal in an important match when, in reality, the goal is no more than a series of chalked or painted lines on a wall? For many generations, individuals or groups of players have played the game in this way, often in the shadow of a large football stadium. Gabie’s book features goalposts painted on walls in close proximity to both Anfield and Goodison Park, stadiums that are separated by an urban park, which also happens to be the birthplace of football in Liverpool. The painted goalpost on the urban wall, the open field, the urban park, and the football stadium are all places of social engagement where football is contested, debated, and celebrated. Gabie’s work, along with the work of Buchanan, encapsulates how the game of football has become ensconced in both the memory and imagination of the millions of people living in often very deprived areas of Britain: I became increasingly aware of the wooden goalposts, standing out like beacons of human endeavour in often vast, empty spaces. I was fascinated by the sheer inventiveness of their construction . . . As the project developed, I began to see how

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the posts mirrored the environment. Where there was no wood to hand, stones, string, metal, chalk or paint could be used. And without a field in which to play, a garage door, a street corner or a car park become reasonable substitutes. With minimal means these goalposts eloquently expressed much of what I was trying to achieve through making sculpture. They encapsulate our dreams and fantasies, and the uniqueness of “place,” in the language which is universally understood.22

Gabie’s work also shows that “football presents a communality of culture” even in areas of sectarian violence such as Northern Ireland. Despite the sectarian imagery that surrounds the goalposts photographed in the Province, “they do demonstrate that people from different cultural backgrounds do have things in common—the commonality of the football pitch. Although football has also been a place for extreme sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.”23 The work of Leo Fitzmaurice both amplifies and undermines the advertising techniques of multinational companies such as Nike and Adidas. His Post Match series of football shirts made out of found cigarette packets visually reinforces the “grubby business of smoking and football.”24 Fitzmaurice’s football jerseys are made in such a way that the manufacturer’s brand name appears across the chest area of the shirt. In this context, the kits make a statement that the football shirts of top-level clubs personify the ethos of big business. The flip-top pack, which form the arms of the shirts, often have symbols on them that are reminiscent of the chevrons and zig-zags used in modern designs of real football shirts. Fitzmaurice’s football jerseys symbolize the commercialization of the game and symbolize how big business is at the forefront in maximizing the commercial potential of football clubs. Historically, the kit was worn to distinguish one team from another: For a long time the football shirt was a simple thing. Its function was to distinguish one team from another, nothing more. First introduced in the 1870s, for the next hundred years it remained plain and unadorned . . . Yet, despite such developments, football shirts maintained a Corinthian integrity. The only thing that ever adorned them was the club badge, usually based on the town or city crest.25

Players may kiss the badge but the crest, once a symbol of civic and club pride, has now become of secondary importance to manufacturers’ stripe or chevron. The shirt now serves a necessary part of the big business package that dominates football; it is wrapped up with satellite TV coverage, the executive box, and the fashion industry, all of which have become crucial to the commercial success of clubs. The everyday fan has been incorporated into this commercial process but the match attendee, despite large increases in ticket prices, does not provide sufficient revenues to drive commercial expansion, hence the need for top-level clubs to have a worldwide presence thereby ensuring mass sales of the club shirt. This situation has led to a success-at-all-costs culture; where football reflects big business competing in a globalized economy. Fitzmaurice’s work shows that the football jersey has become a commodity “dominated by the laws of the market, for which an emblem is no more than a product that is

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saleable like any other.”26 It is a commodity worn by millions of football fans around the world, it has become a badge of identity, the symbol that associates the individual with a particular club.

This is Anfield: Christine Physick and the Global Superclub The work of Christine Physick, although focused upon a single English Premier League club, investigates the links between modern capitalism and sport more broadly than the artists discussed above. There are thirty pieces of work in the collection, including a three-by-two metre board that integrates both the Anfield stadium and its immediate environment prior to the demolition of neighboring family dwellings in the autumn of 2014. Before studying the collection, a brief overview of how Liverpool Football Club sees itself in the community and the views of some fans regarding this role will provide essential background and context to the work. For over a decade, Liverpool has wrestled with the problem of increasing the capacity of Anfield. In the modern context, clubs such as Liverpool need a global presence if they are to survive in the capitalist market of elite football. Although matchday revenues are now second to that received from multinational TV companies, they still provide significant financial streams. Moreover, increased capacity will enable the club to offer more seats to its overseas fan base, an important aspect if the club is to keep up with its rivals. Initially, the club sought planning permission to build a new stadium on Stanley Park but eventually decided to expand the footprint of the original stadium. The planning application to the city council conceded that delays in the relocation of the stadium had resulted in social and environmental blight: The original football ground comprised a local facility with small stands at the Anfield Road and Walton Breck Road ends. It was constructed in an area of, already, high-density terraced “workers” housing; the proximity of that housing has been a key factor affecting the ongoing growth and development of the Club over many years.27

The report also acknowledged that: The stadium is uninspiring in terms of its architecture and gives little in terms of its relationship with the surrounding context. It is completely out of scale with the adjoining high-density terraced housing and is an incongruous and dominant feature in the street scene and wider area.28

The solution to the problem was not to integrate the stadium in a creative way with the community but to demolish the terraced housing within the immediate vicinity of the stadium. This was first done in the 1990s when houses on Kemlyn Road were demolished to make way for the Centenary Stand built in 1992. Houses on the street were bought up over a period of time and left empty, while the remaining occupied

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houses went into decline. This left the club in the ignominious position of forcing two elderly sisters, Joan and Nora Mason, to leave the last occupied house in November 1990. This policy has been replicated to accommodate the present expansion, a policy that has left a bitter legacy within the community. The club would argue that extensive consultation has shown that over 80 percent of fans and local residents support the proposals to extend the stadium, the total footprint of which will increase from 3.6 ha to 6.9 ha, almost double its present size. The outcome will provide an additional 8,500 seats in the Main Stand plus 4,800 seats for the Anfield Road stand. There will also be extra space for wheelchair access.29 What the surveys do not reveal is the callous manner of the club with regard to those whose homes were marked for demolition. A brief survey of resident websites and documents would soon reveal that, as with the expansion of the Kemlyn Road Stand into what is now the Centenary Stand, the club has left a well of bitterness. This is reflected by the Anfield/Rockfield Triangle residents’ website which argues: “You just can’t force people out of their homes and businesses to suit a global brand—IT’s NOT RIGHT . . .!!”30 Moral questions aside, the global brand of Liverpool Football Club used its power to get what it wanted. The most recent planning document, dated May 2014, contains exhaustive detail linking stadium redevelopment to the regeneration of the Anfield/Breckfield areas of Liverpool. Clearly, the area has been neglected for decades and is in need of substantial investment, as its housing stock and local shops reflect. While regeneration of the area is to be welcomed, it is the way the club treated the tenants of Lothair Road and Alroy Road that has left a stain on its reputation. Compulsory purchase orders were used to remove the remaining tenants who stood in defiance to the end because the club would only pay the market value of the houses. The problem was that due to the rundown state of the streets, a consequence of club policy, the market value of the properties did not reflect the cost of relocating to a similar but better maintained area. As with Kemlyn Road, the club eventually got its way: Lothair Road, part of Rockfield Road, and the east side of Alroy Road have been demolished to make way for the redeveloped main stand. The attitude of the club stands in marked contrast to the mission statement of the club’s official charity the Liverpool FC Foundation, which states: We deliver a range of initiatives that inspire people from all walks of life to make positive change happen for themselves and their communities. / Why we do it— Being a part of Liverpool FC is like being part of a family, and that means looking out for each other—particularly those in need. We believe in bringing communities together and raising aspirations, because our family deserves health, happiness and the best opportunities in life.31

The planning application of 2014 stated that regeneration would be carried out “in a manner which does not compromise nearby heritage assets (Stanley Park, Anfield Cemetery, and nearby listed buildings).”32 It is as if the homes of people do not comprise any of these heritage assets, a factor brought to the fore in the artwork of Christine Physick whose work is concerned with:

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the breakdown in the relationship between the club and the immediate neighbourhood, as well as its relationship between the club and its supporters. The neighbourhood has clearly declined as the club has become more powerful which in turn reflects how big business is not interested in community. This has also impacted upon the game within the stadium and spilled out into the locality. This in turn has alienated the people who live in the area: a once tight community has become fragmented and rundown as properties have been left empty and have become derelict waiting for the club to make up its mind with regard to the stadium.33

Over a period of years, the residents fought a hard battle to keep their houses. One resident commented: “Anfield was a good area, nothing like it is today. The area started to decline in the early 1990s with the city’s economic problems. But LFC accelerated the decline by leaving good houses empty and boarded up.”34 When the residents realized that they would have to give up their homes for demolition, they sought compensation so that they could buy a similar house in an equivalent area but the club offered sums that did not reflect the real market. According to Christine Physick: “Most tenants were offered £30,000–£40,000—the market value of the properties but the offered price did not reflect the real housing market where the displaced residents have to go to find a home.”35 Another resident said: “I’m being forced out and they want the properties for a song. They could pay everyone up, properly, for less than one Liverpool player’s wage.”36 Despite what the club says, not all fans are happy with the direction of the club, many feel that the club places too much emphasis on attracting the overseas fan at the expense of the local one. Such fans are being increasingly forced out of the ground due to inflated ticket prices. This is the message behind Probably the Best Supporters in the World (2011, Figure  12.3), which shows a group of fans behind a goal net. The “No Entry” sign is a symbol that they are denied access to the ground because of the cost and restrictive nature of the ticket system employed by the club. Long-standing Liverpool fan Cathy Alderson commented that the collage: Symbolizes the way the fans are being crushed-in by the club as well as the residents’ experiences. I believe the club doesn’t care so much for the fans anymore. It just gave me that sensation of being crushed . . . I mean our souls are being crushed. We don’t count anymore; your loyalty to LFC now is measured in pound coins.37

The pitch at the bottom of the image makes the double point that street football, the typical training ground for generations of players is also denied to the young generation: Originally fans associated with the club lived and played in the type of streets that surround the stadium. These fans walked down the very streets to get to the match that are now strewn with boarded-up houses. Many of these fans are now excluded from match days because going to a match has gone beyond the wherewithal of such supporters.38

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Figure 12.3 Christine Physick, Probably the Best Supporters in the World, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 40 × 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist. The once-local fan is now a barrier to the growth of the commercial club. This is symbolized by the sponsors’ logos, which appear in many of the images. There is a certain irony here. The role of sponsorship, which on one level has enabled the club to have an expansionist policy, has at the same time placed the club at the mercy of finding ever-more lucrative sponsorship deals. Increasingly expensive ticket prices have alienated and disenfranchized the working-class fan base. A concern for business has led to a disinterest in the environment around the football ground. In effect the club has contributed to the social decline of a once-proud area. These features also appear in another collage, This Is Anfield (2011, Figure 12.4). The fans that line the roof of the stand show the pleasure that football brings to millions of fans but, in the Liverpool example, it has come at a cost to the locality. The fans lining the roof has a double meaning: Fans [also] look out to the community wondering what is happening to it—what is happening to the community mirrors what is happening inside the stadium both are being taken away from local people. The real story is being created off the pitch by big business.39

The image is also a comment upon the relationship that players have with fans in the modern era:

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Figure 12.4 Christine Physick, This Is Anfield, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 38 × 62 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The ground is gated, it is a reflection of the way players are no longer part of the everyday fans, they also live in gated houses far removed from the everyday life of professional footballers in previous decades.40

Initially, the establishment of the football club provided a focus for the area, even helped local businesses to flourish but now the “club has outgrown the area, has in effect turned against the community that once welcomed the club. The club has in effect been a crucial factor in the overall decline of the area.”41 Disenchantment among the fans is widespread, this is reflected within the grassroots movement of the Spirit of Shankly (SOS ) which has campaigned hard to hold the owners of the club to account. The ultimate aim of the group is for ownership of the club to be held by the supporters. This reflects the romanticism behind the ethos of the club during the 1960s. Indeed, SOS have the famous Shankly quote about football and socialism on its home page: “The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.”42 During the Shankly era the symbiotic relationship between the imagined community of the club, the fans, and the community created the impression that everyone associated with the club had a role: In the ’60s and ’70s, in the Shankly era, the fans were the heartbeat of the club—the twelfth man. Shankly used to say himself it’s a triangle, it’s the backroom staff, the players, and the fans. Someone once asked him about the directors and he said “Oh they’re just there to sign the cheques” but that is the most important thing now.43

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Figure 12.5 Christine Physick, On the Terraces: View from Lothair Road, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 49 × 56 cm. Courtesy of the artist. The viewpoint of the fans and the former residents is powerfully reflected in the work On the Terraces—View from Lothair Road (2011, Figure 12.5). The collage shows a section of the houses in the now demolished Lothair Road. The three-story houses have the faces of fans from the 1960s embedded across the tins that were used to seal the houses.44 The collage reveals “the pointless desolation that has been brought into the area by allowing the houses to rot . . . it also shows the pointless nature of the desolation . . . look at what has been done by football.”45 For Ronnie Hughes, a local housing campaigner, the image clearly shows the limitations of The Housing Market Renewal Initiative, a national program of house demolition and rebuilding. In the Anfield situation, the initiative shows it “was a scam that involved moving people out of their houses . . . at the age of 50 or 60 years they were forced to take out a mortgage to buy a new house . . .” Residents were given the “market price but of course once you have blighted an area . . . the market value of the houses drops like a stone.” In addition to the investment in expanding the stadium, the redevelopment program has attracted £40 million for the housing program, but given the past record of the club and city council it remains an open question as to what benefits will accrue to the area. Hughes is certainly skeptical and when asked whether redevelopment will bring greater prosperity to the area, he replied: The club argue that money will flow into Anfield but it will flow straight back out to the corporate shareholders of the club and the corporate builders and developers.

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/ The area is not just the houses but is also about the community of people and once you have destroyed the community you can’t just fill it up with new people and call it a community. If you destroy a community, you also destroy hundreds of years of complex relations, you throw away the stories . . . places need to change but change has to be organic. / The club after all is paying their footballers hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and they are going around quibbling with people about whether their house is worth £40,000 or £140,000. / It is viewed by local politicians as a success to bring in a big outside investor, but the trouble with the outside investor, they just want to come in, set up their business to make money and then pay their shareholders . . . it is not done for the sake of the people. / Because of the political turnaround where elections happen every three or five years, in local or national terms, politicians want to make an impact in those years in case that is the only time they have got, but in fact to grow and develop a city or a community takes more time and more care than that.46

In the new stand, completed August 2016, 7,000 of the 20,000 seats are reserved for corporate hospitality. Thus, the ethos of the club has departed even further from the notion of horizontal comradeship that was felt during the Shankly and Paisley eras. There were two communities in Anfield, the imagined one inside the ground, the one that the world looks toward, and the one that was left to rot and has now given way to the bulldozer.

Conclusion From its emergence in the last decades of the nineteenth century, professional football has become a powerful social and economic force. In its early development, big city football clubs such as Liverpool drew their support from the locality. Moreover, the finances of clubs were dependent on the revenue streams generated through the turnstile. In essence, clubs retained a local identity within a national context competing solely for domestic trophies. This period of football is classically captured in Lowry’s cityscapes, which show the three components of an urban society—the need for work, rest, and play. Lowry’s work shows an imagined, harmonious, organic society that is brought together via these key components. In an era of globalization, however, such certainties are no longer applicable. The powerful social and economic forces behind football have turned the once local club into a global brand. The clearest example of this can be found in the English Premier League, which secures huge revenues for its clubs from multinational satellite TV companies. Clubs such as Liverpool use this worldwide exposure to attract sponsorships from multinational corporations. Unlike in the years of their early development, such clubs are now dependent upon a range of revenue streams, among them the sale of merchandise to fans. Globalization implies a global fan base and it reflects that football is now an integral part of the global economy. Indeed, one could argue that football is a vector for the sale of merchandise produced by multinationals. Diverse sources of finance are crucial to elite football clubs such as Liverpool if they are

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to compete in this global market. The £260 million expansion of Anfield will enable the club not only to attract more fans but attract more support from abroad, particularly from Asia, an area where support for the Premier League club is growing fast. To paraphrase Anderson, the loyalty and love of a football club is often expressed culturally.47 The problem for elite football is that it now reflects the culture of big business. This situation is summed up by a former resident: “a lot of things are going on in football that kind of reflect our society at the moment.” Change is the order of the day but it is change that is leaving a sour taste in the once thriving community of Anfield. Another resident reflected: “I have always been a Liverpool fan. They play You’ll Never Walk Alone but they have left their neighbours to walk alone for years.”48 The work of Christine Physick, and other artists discussed above, highlights how football has a visible presence in all walks of life and that the work of artists is crucial in presenting football to the wider world. However, art in this period has not merely reflected the world of football or presented it as a simple cultural practice. More and more artists, and exhibitions dedicated to football, often use the game as a metaphor for wider cultural and social issues because it articulates “ideas about life and the world we live in” and this explains why “artists are using football . . . to open up other ideas like nationalism, commercialization, fanaticism . . . Football has a huge breadth of interest for the artist.”49 Football in the past served as an integral element in framing horizontal comradeship, but in an age of globalization this is being increasingly challenged through the cultural medium of art.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 143. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. Williams, Culture and Society. Hill, “Rite of Spring,” 107–8. Joyce, Visions of the People, 213. Berger, The Moment of Cubism and other Essays. Perelman, Barbaric Sport, 72. Klein, No Logo. The painting was entered in the Football and the Fine Arts competition in 1953. Berger, The Moment of Cubism and other Essays. Mullins, Notes to accompany the sale of Lowry’s The Football Match. Mullins, Notes to accompany the sale of Lowry’s The Football Match. In a conversation with David Carr, Lowry used the term puppets when describing the people he painted. See: Spalding, Lowry. The Sunday Times, May 19, 1985. Chris Stevens, e-mail messages to the author, May 18, 2012. Gill, Offside, 6. The artist’s brief submitted with application form for the exhibition. It is located in the Offside archive located in the Manchester Art Gallery.

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19 “Offside! Interview with Roderick Buchanan” (1997), Inviva: http://www.iniva.org/ library/digital_archive/people/b/buchanan_roderick/gallery/offside_interview_with_ roderick_buchanan [accessed: October 10, 2017; no longer accessible]. 20 Brandtzaeg, Glasgow: A Presentation of the Art Scene in the 90’s, 13. 21 Drummond, Postscript to Neville Gabie: Playing Away UK, n.p. 22 Neville Gabie, as quoted in Drummond, Postscript to Neville Gabie: Playing Away UK, n.p. 23 Neville Gabie, conversation with the author, October 2009. 24 Mark Wallinger, “Foreword” to Pearson and Wallinger, Leo Fitzmaurice: Post Match, 9. 25 Harry Pearson, “Introduction” to Pearson and Wallinger, Leo Fitzmaurice: Post Match, 11. 26 Amado, Em Jogo, 58. 27 Planning Statement submitted by Liverpool Football Club to Liverpool City Council, 2007. 28 Planning Statement submitted by Liverpool Football Club to Liverpool City Council, 2007. 29 Summary Guide to the Planning Statement submitted by Liverpool Football Club to Liverpool City Council, 2007, 3, 24. 30 http://anfieldsrockfieldtriangle.weebly.com/the-great-anfield-property-game.html. 31 http://foundation.liverpoolfc.com/vision. 32 Summary Guide to the Planning Statement submitted by Liverpool Football Club to Liverpool City Council, 2007, 10. 33 Christine Physick, conversation with the author, March 28, 2012. 34 Anfield resident interviewed by Christine Physick, PR 1 Gallery, Preston, 2014. 35 Christine Physick, conversation with the author, October 11, 2014. 36 Anfield resident interviewed by Christine Physick, PR 1 Gallery, Preston, 2014. 37 Cathy Alderson, conversation with the author, October 11, 2014. 38 Interview with the artist, March 28, 2012. The houses have since been demolished. 39 Christine Physick, conversation with the author, October 11, 2014. 40 Christine Physick, conversation with the author, October 11, 2014. 41 Christine Physick, conversation with the author, March 28, 2012. 42 http://www.spiritofshankly.com [accessed: March 19, 2018]. 43 Cathy Alderson, conversation with the author, October 11, 2014. 44 The barriers on the windows are known locally as tins—houses that have been tinned-up using an aluminium frame that covers the door entrances and the windows. 45 Ronnie Hughes, conversation with the author, October 11, 2014. 46 Ronnie Hughes, conversation with the author, October 11, 2014. 47 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 41. 48 Anfield resident interviewed by Christine Physick, PR 1 Gallery, Preston, 2014. 49 John Gill, as quoted in Leslie and Burgoyne, FC Football Graphics, 8.

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Index AC Forniture Sud 118–20 AC Milan 123, 127 Adams, Iain 4 Adidas 180–1, 219, 224, 226, 238 Adinkra 182–5 Adorno, Theodor 202 advertising 2, 10, 12, 89, 116, 125, 146, 157, 163, 175–6, 183, 185, 199, 200, 221–3, 225, 236, 238 Aeropainting 102–3 Africa Cup of Nations 172–3, 179, 186, 187 n.12 Aggrey, Joe 173 Ajax FC 78 Albert Park, Middlesbrough 79–81 Alderson, Cathy 241, 243 Aldridge, John 163–4 Almond, William Douglas 19–20, 24–7, 31 anarchism 130, 194–6 Anderlecht RSC 40 Anderson, Benedict 231–2, 246 Andrews, Geoff 195, 199 Anfield Stadium, Liverpool 13, 237, 239–46 Angerer, Nadine 140 Argentina, men’s national team 2, 59, 175, 215, 224, 226 Armitage, Kenneth 63 Arns, Inke 198 Arsenal FC 60, 150, 218 Artmarks 221, 227 Arts Council of Great Britain 58–60 Asante Kotoko FC 171, 180 Asian Football Confederation Cup 129 Association of Autonomous Astronauts 191, 196 Athletic Association Football 3 Columbia 200 Athletic Bilbao FC 199 Atkins, Guy 204 Atkinson, Eric N., Club Fans 60 Atomball 227

avant-garde 4, 11, 97–8, 115–16, 118, 233 Italian 98–104, 111–13 Russian 104–13 Ayazma FC 201 Ayresome Park, Middlesborough 5, 85 Bailey, John, The Crowd Roars 60 Baldessari, Iras, Football Players 99–100 ballet 55, 58–9, 137, 144 Ballon d’Or 174 Barad, Karen 203 Barcelona FC 78, 173, 232 Barlow, Martin 8 Barnouw, Erik 137 Barry, Gerald 58 Barthes, Roland 36–7, 40, 45–6 baseball 2, 69, 83, 127, 135, 175 Basel FC 10 Basque, men’s national team 110 Bass, Math 141–2, 147, 152 see also Marriage (artists) Batlle y Ordóñez, José 214 Baudelaire, Charles 115 Baudrillard, Jean 179–80 Bauer, Renate 185 Bayern Munich FC 42, 78 BBC 13 n.4, 150–1, 158, 223, 225 Beacon Arts Project 198 Beatlemania 163 Beckenbauer, Franz 126 Beckham, David 162 Beckham, Victoria 162 Bedford, Christopher 139 Benfica FC 78, 81, 174 Benson, Susan, Spectators at Stamford Bridge 60 Berger, John 48 n.39, 52–3, 63, 232–4 Berkley, Busby 126 Berlusconi, Silvio 123 Best, George 145

265

266

Index

Bew, Arthur 221 Bhabha, Homi 117–18 Bianconi, Giampaolo 38, 42 Bishop, Claire 202 Black Book of Deptford 204 Black Power Movement 69, 172, 174 Black Stars: see Ghana, men’s national team Błaszczykowski, Jakub 42 Blatter, Joseph 185 Blissett, Luther 193, 195, 198 see also Luther Blissett Deptford League, Luther Blissett Project, Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League Bloomer, Steve 83 Boccioni, Umberto 4, 98–104, 112, 115 Dynamism of a Cyclist 98 Dynamism of a Human Body 98 Dynamism of a Soccer Player 4, 98–101, 103, 112, 115 “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” 98 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space 101 Böhme, Jakob 192, 204 Bohr, Niels 193–4, 203 Bologna FC 103 Bolton Wanderers FC 156, 233 Book of Deptford 192 Borussia Dortmund FC 42 Bosold, Birgit 9 Boston Marathon 138 brands/branding 13, 85–6, 89, 116, 123, 126–8, 152 n.6, 181–2, 185, 199–200, 214, 221, 227, 232 Brands United (marketing firm) 185, 188 n.56 Brentford FC 156 Brighton and Hove Albion FC 77 Brimfield, Mel 198 Brown, Garret 137–8 Buchanan, Roderick 126–8, 233, 236–7 Coast to Coast Denistoun 127 Love/Hate/Celtic/Rangers 127 One in a Million 236 Tombez la Chemise 128 Turnaround 128 Work in Progress 127–8 Yankees 127

Bürger, Peter 202 Burke, Timothy 35 Burnden Park, Bolton 233 Burri, Alberto 225–7 Butler, Reg, Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner 63 Cains, Gerald Cup Fever 64–5 Saturday Taxpayers 60–5 Calderón, Miguel, Mexico vs. Brazil 135 Camatte, Jacques 202–3 Camden Town School 63 Cameroon, men’s national team 175–6, 226 Cangion, Pierre 144 capitalism 12–13, 39, 171, 174, 195, 231–3, 239 Carlos, John 69 Carneiro, Lisa 137 Carta della Sport 100 Carta di Viareggio 100 Carter, Neil 75, 89 Cashmore, Ellis, and Andrew Parker 162 Castello, Enrico Football Players 100 The Goalkeeper 100 Cattelan, Maurizio 117–23 Cesena 47 – A.C. Forniture Sud 12 120, 122 Stadium 120–3 Stand Abusivo 117, 119–23 Celtic FC 127–8 Cesena FC 120, 122 Cézanne, Paul 214 Chadwick, Lynn 63 Chamberlain, C., Chelsea Plays Arsenal 60 Chamberlain, Helen 160–1 charity 149, 221, 240 Charlton Athletic FC 163 chauvinism 5, 107, 122–3, 128 Channel Four 151 cheerleaders 155, 158, 160–1 Chelsea FC 60, 137 Chia, Sandro 119 Chou, Sabrina, HR 135 Churchill, Sir Winston 63–4 cinema 43–4, 55, 110, 136–7, 151, 161–2 cinephilia 43

Index Circulo de Bellas Artes 214 City Ground, Nottingham 85, 89 Clapton FC 156 Clark, Cosmo 56 Clarke, Stuart Roy, Homes of Football 10 class identity middle-class 55–6, 139 ruling class 202, 231 social class 3–5, 55, 62, 87, 149, 236 working-class 4, 19, 58, 61, 86–7, 97, 107, 129, 148, 150, 162, 196, 234, 242 classicism 55, 84, 116, 124, 227 Clemente, Francesco 119 Clough, Barbara 80, 89 Clough, Brian 11, 76–90 Clough Aid Concert 81 Clough Trail 81 Derby County statue 83–9 managerial career 76–9 Middlesbrough statue 79–81, 85–9 Nottingham statue 81–3, 85–9 Coetzee, Mark 186 collage 171, 173–8, 194, 225, 241–4 colonialism 3, 5, 59, 117–18, 172, 174, 176, 178, 182–3 Colosseum, Rome 125, 226 Combi, Gianpiero 103 communism 97, 107–8, 194, 199 community identity 70, 85–7, 123, 130, 165, 182, 196, 199, 203, 231–4, 236, 239–43, 245 Conekin, Becky E. 59 Confederation of African Football (CAF ) 172, 178 Constable, John 54 Constructivism 4, 11, 63, 97, 100, 104, 107–8, 110–12 consumerism 1, 36, 54, 60, 64–5, 123, 125–6, 143, 147, 155–6, 158, 212, 221, 223, 237 Contreras, Freddy 233 Stud 236 Cooky, Cheryl 136 Corinthians Paulista FC 174 Corona, Vittorio 101 Costard, Hellmuth, Football As Never Before 145

267

Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA ) 58 Coutaurd, Gil 151 Coventry City FC 145 cricket 19, 23, 26, 51, 57, 69, 98, 156 Cristo Redentor, Rio de Janeiro 176 Crystal Palace, building 19–20, 28–32 Crystal Palace FC 64 Cubism 100 Cucchi, Enzo 119 Culley, Richard 223 Cundall, Charles, Stamford Bridge 54 D’Anna, Giulio Football 101 Football Player 101 Dadd, Stephen T. 19–24, 26–7, 31 The Final for the Association Cup at Kennington Oval 19, 24, 26–7, 31 The Final Tie of the Challenge Cup 19–24 dal Monte, Mario Guido 101 Damasceno, J. Ney 218–19 Darby, Paul 172 Dassler, Adi 219 DAta Miners and Travailleurs Psychique (DAMTP ) 196–7, 201 Davies, Andrew 127 Davies, Cyril 163 Davies, Pete 150–1 de Coubertin, Pierre 57, 115 Ode to sport 115 Degas, Edgar 54 Deineka, Aleksandr, Footballer 110–12 Delaunay, Robert, The Cardiff Team 113 n.1, 115 Deleuze, Gilles 35 Denmark, men’s national team 59 Derby County FC 77, 83, 88, 91–2 n.38 see also Clough, Brian Desmé, Henri 216–17 détournement 193 Dick, Kerr’s Ladies FC 148 Dickens, Charles 56 Dinfdag, Habil Ibrahim 201 Disney, Walt 221 Dixon, Keith 70 Djan, Ohene 172

268 Doncaster Rovers FC 148 Doncaster Rover Belles FC 148–51 Donkor, Godfried 171, 173–8, 185–6 Santo Eusebio 174–5 Santo Oman 175–6 Santo Pogba 176–7 Trinity of the Saints 176–8 Dormidontov, Nicolai 110 Dottori, Gerardo 100–4, 112 Football Match 100–2 Sketches from the Stadium 100 Doyle, Jennifer 3, 12, 14 n.20, 185 Dressler, Iris 125 Dua al Set 225 Dumas, Marlene 185 Dunbar, Robert 204 Dunn, Carrie 3, 12 Dupré, Judith 69 Dyson, Mark 194–5, 197, 200–1 EA Sports FIFA (video game) 137, 143 NBA Live (video game) 146 Eakins, Thomas, Salutat 135 Early, John 10 Easton Cowboys 199, 206 n.39 Ebony (magazine) 175 Edwards, Andy 83–4 Ellis, Paul 81 Elsey, Brenda 220 Empire Stadium: see Wembley Stadium England Football Association: see Football Association Football League: see Football League hosts, 1966 World Cup 1, 12, 156, 213, 220–4 hosts, 1996 European Championship 1, 157 hosts, 2012 Olympics 8 men’s national team 59, 77–9, 128, 157, 193, 213, 222–4, 226 Premier League: see Premier League Eppink, Jason 38 Escobar, Andrés 180 ESPN 136, 147 Estadio Centenario, Montevideo 212, 214

Index European Cup 40, 78, 85, 88, 173–4 European Men’s Championship 1996 157, 232 2000 176 2004 232 Three-Sided 195–6 European Women’s Championship 1989 140 Eusebio (Eusebio da Silva Ferreira) 80, 174–5 exhibitions, sport and art Ball is Round (Der Ball ist rund) 8 Ballkünstler 8 Beyond Football: Shifting Interests and Identity 9 Em Jogo 232 First National Exhibition of Sporting Art 103 Football and the Fine Arts 1, 5, 11, 51–4, 57–60, 63–5, 232 Football in the Picture 1 Glamour and Globalization: Football, Media and Art 198 Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport in Contemporary Art 138–9 Moving into Space: Football and Art in West Africa 1, 8 Moving the Goalposts: the History of Women’s Football in Britain 1, 9 Offside! Contemporary Artists and Football 1, 4, 7, 232, 235–9 On the Other Hand: Artistic Throw-Ins about the 2011 Women’s Football World Cup 9, 140, 153 n.10 One Love: The Football Art Prize 64–5, 232 Rundlederwelten 8, 232 Sport in Art 57 XIVth Olympiad Sport in Art Exhibition 57, 66 n.35 exhibitions and festivals, art Alytus Art Strike Biennale 196–7, 206 n.36 Arte Fiera Bologna 118–20 Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon 199 Degenerate Art Exhibition 103

Index Edinburgh Fringe Festival 199 Istanbul Biennial 201 Looking Forward 52 Recent Trends in Realist Painting 63 Venice Biennale 63, 112, 130 Eyton, Anthony, Fog at St. James’ Park 54 FA Yearbook 58, 60 Fairbanks, Charles, Flexing Muscles 135 fan activism 81, 83 behavior 10, 12, 41, 55, 70, 77, 79, 116, 145, 162–5 171, 174, 178–80 communities 4, 64, 70, 85, 87–9, 123, 126–7, 130, 172, 232–3, 242–3, 246 culture 2, 13 experiences in art 11, 27, 60–1, 235, 244 female fans 12, 155–66 heritage 5, 42, 87 international fanbases 13, 127, 232–3, 239, 242, 245–6 perception 64, 75–6, 86, 90, 130, 173, 178–9, 239–44 unrest 3–5, 137, 180, 235 viewing habits 35, 39, 46, 65, 123, 157–62, 178 Farocki, Harun, Deep Play 135, 143 Fascism 11, 97, 100, 126, 216 Fatuous Times 192, 194 Federation Internationale Autonome des Situationnistes Contemporain (FIASC o) 197 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA ) 9, 58, 98, 172, 185–6, 201, 211, 213, 222–3, 227 Fenway Sports Group 233 Festival of Britain 58–60 fetishism 5, 8, 46, 178–9 FIFA Men’s World Cup 3, 5–7, 12, 103, 128, 140, 143, 173, 175, 185, 201, 211–14, 217, 219, 221, 223–8 1930 57, 97, 100, 108, 212–15 1934 97, 103, 213, 215–16 1938 97, 103, 212–12, 216–17 1950 212, 217–18 1954 212, 219 1958 212, 219–20

269

1962 212, 219–20 1966 1, 12, 156, 213, 220–2 1970 174, 224 1974 224 1978 224 1982 135, 224–5 1986 225 1990 175, 225 1994 180, 226 1998 3, 176, 227 2002 221, 227 2006 8, 143, 171, 185, 198, 227, 232 2010 3, 7, 10, 171, 173, 176, 185–6, 227 2014 2, 137, 174, 176, 185, 227 2018 13, 176, 228 2022 228 FIFA Official Art Poster Series 185–6 FIFA U-17 World Cup 173 FIFA U-20 World Cup 173 FIFA Women’s World Cup 139 2007 146 2011 8–10, 187 n.12 2015 140, 187 n.12 FIFA World Cup Trophy 224 see also Jules Rimet Trophy FIFA-Langton Collection 9–10 Filho, Castro 219 Finney, Sir Tom 75 First Quantum Flux Footballum Equinox Fest 197 Fitzmaurice, Leo 233 Post Match 238–9 Fizkultura 97, 112 Foot, John 216 Football Association (FA ), England 5, 23–4, 30–1, 51, 54, 57–60, 148–9, 151, 154 n.33, 157, 211, 213 Football Association Challenge Cup (FA Cup) 19–32, 64, 150, 231 1882 FA Cup 19–24 1891 FA Cup 24–7 1895 FA Cup 28–31 Football Heritage Complex, South Africa 9 Football League, England 76–8, 88, 156, 211, 213, 223 Forbes SportsMoney Index 116

270

Index

France, men’s national team 3, 59, 176, 212, 227 Fratton Park, Portsmouth 62 Freud, Sigmund 48 n.42, 161 Fried, Michael 144 Futbol 3 (F3C) 200 Futurism, Italian 11, 97–104, 107, 112, 215–16 Secondo Futurismo 100 Gabie, Neville 5, 233 Goalposts 236–8 Galleria comunale d’arte moderna, Bologna 120–2 Gambini, Ivanhoe 101 Garvey, Marcus 172 Gasometer, Oberhausen 8 Gaunt, William, Night Football in the East End 54 Gazzaniga, Silvio 224 Geers, Kendell 185 Gemmill, Archie 77 gender academic discussions of 3 biases 12 divisions 10, 212, 236 equality 4 and fandom 155–66 identity 1, 3, 5, 8–9, 117 representations via sport 135–52 Genkinger, Fritz 224 Genoa Cricket and Football Club 98 Géricault, Théodore 54 German Football Association 8 Germany, men’s national teams 2, 59, 219, 224, 226 Germany, women’s national team 142–3, 147 Ghana, men’s national team 171–3, 178–9, 183–6 Giacometti, Alberto 63 Gibson, Jeffrey, What We Want, What We Need 135 GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) 35–47 affective power of 40–2 authorship and 44–6 and Barthes’ Punctum 36–7

as fetish 43–4 as icon 42–3 as image 37–40 Gilbert & George (artists) 1 Gill, David 213, 221–2 Gill, John 1, 235–6 Giotto 45–6 Glanville, Brian 2 Glasgow Anarchist Summer School 194 Glasgow Architect’s Winterschool 194 Glick, Tom 83 Goal! (magazine) 196 Goldblatt, David 2, 86 The Ball is Round 2 Goodison Park, Liverpool 29, 237 Gordon, Douglas, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait 135, 143–6 Gordon, Robert 100 Gore, Spencer 63 Gorky, Maxim 108 Götze, Mario 42 Goya, Francisco 54 Grabner, Michelle I Work from Home 139 The Thing Quarterly 139–40 Great Exhibition of 1851 29, 58–9 Green, Geoffrey 55 Green, Vanalyne, The House That Ruth Built 135 Griffith, Pat 147 Grimshaw, John Atkinson 54 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 199 Gulf War (1990–91) 194 Gündoğan, İlkay 42 Gunning, Lucy Climbing Around my Room 117 Playing Football 117–18 Gursky, Andreas 185 Guttuso, Renato 123 Hackney, Arthur, Spectators Returning Home 60 Hackney Anarchist Week 196 Halberstam, Jack 141–2 Hammons, David 135 Hardwick, George 86 Hartlepool United FC 77

Index Hawley, Sally 60 Haxall, Daniel 5, 12 Heaney, Seamus 3 Hearts of Oak FC 171, 180 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 115 Henry, Thierry 160 Herberger, Sepp 219 heroes, athletes as 2, 4–5, 11, 15 n.27, 30, 46, 53, 69–70, 79, 83, 86–7, 97–101, 104, 108, 110, 112, 137, 155, 163–4, 167 n.28, 174, 180, 195, 233 Hewitt, John, Pretend Rifle 235 Hill, Jeffrey 231 Hillsborough disaster 79 Hirst, Damien 117 Hobsbawm, E. J. 231–2 Home, Stewart 194, 206 n.36 hooliganism 4–5, 122, 126, 129, 235 Hornby, Nick, Fever Pitch 156 horseracing 4, 108, 115 Housing Market Renewal Initiative 244 Housman, A. E. 56 Hoy, Reginald 223 Huggins, Mike 3 Hughes, George Afedzi 12, 171, 173 Catharsis 182 Crucifix 180 Golden Boot 178 Made in the Colonies 182 Masked Goalkeeper 179–80 Parallel 180–1 Rain Balls 181–2 Hughes, Ronnie 244 Hughes, Ted 3 Hughson, John 4, 213 Hurrey, Adam 35–6 hypermasculinity 155, 159 Ibrahimović, Zlatan 40–2, 44–6 Icarus 106, 111–12, 113 n.16 IFK Gothenburg 158 Ignatovich, Olga 109–10 Ça alors 110 Impressionism, French 54, 115 immigration 3, 5, 12, 120, 122–3, 171, 174, 176 Institute of International Visual Arts 1, 235

271

Inter Milan FC 78, 98, 127 Intergalactic Triolectical Football Cup 196 International Faculty of Arts 51 International Jorn Memorial Tournament 201 International Olympic Committee (IOC ) 57–8, 107, 112 International Red Stadium 107 International Three-Sided Federation 201 Internazionale Football Club Torino 98 iPro Stadium: see Pride Park Ipswich Town FC 164 Italian Football Federation 98 Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI ) 103 Italy, men’s national team 100–1, 103, 128, 157, 213, 216, 224, 226 Jacobs, Barbara 148 Jairzinho (Jair Venture Filho) 174 Johnson, Ken 139 Johnson, Les 81–2 Jones, Katharine W. 155, 159 Jones, Thomas 58 Jorn, Asger 12, 191, 193–6, 199–201, 203–4 Naturens Orden 193 Jules Rimet Trophy 219, 223–4 Julien, Isaac 151 Looking for Langston 151 Juventus FC 78, 176 Kentridge, William 185 Keynes, John Maynard 58 Kipper, Harry 195 Klopp, Jürgen 42 Klutsis, Gustav, Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada 108–9, 114 n.21, 115 Korzhev, Mikhail 107 Kruczenykh, Aleksiej 107 Kufour, John 173 Kuper, Simon 2 Laborde, Guillermo 212, 214, 215 Labour Party 79, 87, 199 Langton, Harry 9–10 Lassnig, Maria 8

272

Index

Lazarus, Julia 147 The Brittleness of the Player’s Body 142–3 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) 131 Le Gall, Nathalie 227 Leeds United FC 77, 158 Leese, Alexander 4, 11 Lega Nord 122 Leibowitz, Annie 225 Leiris, Michel 63 leisure 1, 4, 8, 15 n.27, 20, 29, 31–2, 40–1, 48 n.35, 66 n.35, 116, 234 Leitch, Archibald 61–2 Lek, K., Off to the Match 60 Lenin, Vladmir 108 Leupin, Herbert 219–20 Lewandowski, Robert 42, 44–5 Lissitzky, El 104–8, 110, 112 Footballers 107 New Man from The Victory Over the Sun 106–7 Prouns 104–8, 110 (Record) Runner in the City 107 Liverpool FC 78, 85, 163, 221, 233, 239–42, 245–6 Löbert, Jenny, No More 140 Locke, Jennifer, Match 135 London, John 100 London Psychogeographical Association (LPA ) 191, 194–6, 198 Louisiana Superdome 125 Lovell, Moira 147–50, 152 Stand Your Ground 147–9 Lowry, L. S. 4, 57, 60, 232–5, 245 Going to the Match 4, 60 Luther Blissett Deptford League 200–1 Luther Blissett Project 191 Luther Blissett Three-Sided Football League 192, 195 Lütticken, Sven, History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image 41, 48 n.35 Malevich, Kazimir 98, 104–7, 110, 112 Airplane Flying 104 Painterly Realism of a Football Player 104–5

Mallock, Vivien 80 manager, of football clubs 11, 70, 75–8, 80, 82–3, 85–90, 152, 224 Manchester Art Gallery 1 Manchester United FC 78, 85, 145 Mandela, Nelson 8 Mandela, Winnie 126 Mandela United FC 126 Manet, Édouard 54 Mannion, Wilf 86 Maracanã Stadium, Rio de Janeiro 218–19 Mariner, Paul 164 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 98–9, 101–2, 215–16 Marriage (artists) 141–2, 147, 152 Soccer 141–2, 147 Marx, Karl 10, 180, 194, 202 Mason, Joan and Nora 240 Mason, Tony 22, 27 Massey, Sian 137 Matiushin, Mikhail 107 Matthews, Stanley 56–7, 64 Maugham, Somerset 56 Max, Peter 226 McPartland, John 79 McWilliam, F. E. 52 Meazza, Giuseppe 103 Meisl, Hugo 217–18 memorabilia 5, 9, 12, 118, 156, 215, 228 memory 5, 11, 64, 75, 81, 83, 213, 237 Mercury, Freddie 141 Mesoamerican ballgames 1, 4 Messner, Michael 136 Middlesborough FC 5, 76–7, 79–80, 85–8 Middleton, M. H. 51–2 Milla, Roger 176 Miller, Toby 147 Million Dollar Baby (film) 138 Mills, John W. 60 Milton, John 55 miners’ strike (1984–85) 235 Miracle of Berne 219 Miró, Joan 224–5 Mitropa Cup 103

Index Möller, Andreas 140 montage 20, 24 Moore, Bobby 79 Morgan, William 115–16 Mori, Marisa 101 Morris, Barbra 136–7 Morris, Sarah 185 Morrison, Herbert 59 Mulvey, Laura 37, 43–4, 161–2 Death 24x a Second 37, 43–4 scopophilia 11, 43, 161 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 161–2 Mumford, Stephen 115 Munari, Bruno 101 Muños, José 142 Muntadas, Antoni, Stadium: Homage to the Audience 124–6 Mussolini, Benito 97, 100, 216 Musto, Michela 136 Nagel, Alexander, Anachronic Renaissance 44–5 Narteh, William 172 Nash, Paul 63 Nashe, Thomas 193 National Archives, England 151, 213 National Football Museum, England 1, 8–10, 15 n.48, 60–1, 213, 215–18, 220, 222–3, 225–6 nationalism 4, 8, 12, 102, 104, 171–2, 180, 185, 213, 216, 231, 246 Nevinson, C.R.V. 63 Any Wintry Afternoon in England 4 New Cross Triangle Psychogeographical Association (NXTPA ) 197 New Scientist (magazine) 204 New York Cosmos FC 126 New York Times 139, 180 Newkirk, Kori 135 Nike 181, 238 Nkrumah, Kwame 172–3, 186 Nochlin, Linda, Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists? 139 Notte, Emilio, Football Match 99–100 Nottingham Forest FC 78, 81, 88, 89, 91–2 n.38

Notts County FC 19, 24–5, 165 Novodevichy Convent, Moscow 110 Nyad, Diana 135 Nydahl, Joel 136–7 Observer (newspaper) 52, 196 October Group (artists) 109–10 Okai, Atukwei 171 Olaya, Fabio Cesar Fernandez 200 Old Market Square, Nottingham 81–2 Old Trafford, Manchester 85 Olympic Games 1896 57, 211 1908 57, 211 1912 1, 57, 97, 211 1920 97, 212 1924 97, 212 1928 97, 100, 212, 216 1932 57, 216 1936 57, 97, 103, 216 1948 1, 57 1952 110 1960 138 1968 69, 224 1972 125, 138 1992 173 2008 146 2012 8 2016 228 O’Mahony, Mike 3, 5, 11, 232 Sport in the USSR 4, 114 n.21 Omam-Biyik, Francois 175 Opie, Catherine 135 Ord, Ernie 77 O’Reilly, Sally 198–9 Orsi, Raimundo 103 O’Shea, John (curator) 60 Osman, Russell 164–5 Our Lady of Walsingham 44–5 Out on Tuesday (television show) 151 Owens, Jesse 181 Owusu-Ankomah 171, 173, 182–5 Go For It, Stars 184–5 Movement No. 27 183 On My Knees 183 Star Black-Star Bright 183–4

273

274 Paget, Henry Marriott 20, 31 The Football Association Cup: The Final Tie in the Crystal Palace Grounds 28–31 Paisley, Bob 245 Palmer, James, Playing on Cinders 54 Palmer, Samuel 54 Panini World Cup cards 140 Parati, Graziella 120 Paris Saint-Germain FC 40 Parker, John L., Once a Runner 138 Parreno, Philippe, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait 135, 143–5 Pavarotti, Luciano, Nessun Dorma 225 Pelé (Edson Arantes de Nascimento) 13 n.4, 126, 174, 220 People’s History Museum, Manchester 1, 9 Perryman, Mark 199 Petrić, Vlada 110 Pfeiffer, Paul Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 135 The Saints 135 Philosophy Football (team) 199–201 photography attributes as medium 36–7, 45 match photography 5, 8, 20, 24, 52–3, 56, 62, 143, 171 and performance 118, 122 portrait photography 10, 37, 127–8, 147–9 and punctum 36–7, 45 street photography 127, 237–8 as used by Italian and Russian avantgarde 97–8, 105–10, 112 as used in advertising posters 216, 225 and video 37 photomontage 56, 108, 110, 112, 114 n.21, 115, 145 Physick, Christine 233, 239–6 On the Terraces 244 Probably the Best Supporters in the World 241–2 This is Anfield 242–3 Physick, Ray 5, 13, 57, 66 n.6 Pied la Biche, 199, 201 Refait 135 Pierrot, Paul, The Belles 150

Index Pinochet, Augusto 126 planismo 214 Playing the Field (television show) 151 Pogba, Paul 176–7 Polo, Mario 219 Ponce, Galvarino 220 Pooley, Sir Ernest 59 Porter, Dilwyn 213 Porto FC 78 portraiture 10, 56, 135, 140, 143–5, 147–9, 150–2, 173–8, 180, 182, 186, 211, 225 Portsmouth FC 60, 156 Portugal, men’s national team 59, 174 Prampolini, Enrico 104, 112 Angels of the Earth 102–3 Premier League, England 90, 137, 176, 181–2, 199, 235, 239, 245–6 Preston North End FC 75, 156 Pride Park (stadium) 83–5, 91 n.38 Pro Vercelli FC 98 Professional Footballers Association 1, 234 professionalism in soccer 24, 149, 211 proletarianism 4, 107–8, 110, 117 Prouns (Project for the Affirmation of the New), El Lissitzky 104–8, 110 public art 70, 87, 198 PUMA 186 punctum (Roland Barthes) 36–7, 45–6 Queen Elizabeth II 211 racism and politics 120–2 in soccer 3, 176 soccer as antidote to 107 120 Rainbow FC : see Asante Kotoko FC Ramsey, Sir Alf 223 Rand, Erica 147 Rangers FC 127–8 Rankin-Smith, Fiona 8 Ravanelli, Frabrizio 157 Read, Herbert 77 Real Fettuciné FC 199 Real Madrid FC 42, 78, 145 Red and Black Bloc (RBB ) 129–30

Index Red Sport International (RSI ) 97, 107–8, 112 referee 8, 25–6, 70, 77, 108, 137, 147, 150, 194, 201 Renaissance art 1, 44–5, 54, 193 Reus, Marco 42 Revie, Don 77 Riefenstahl, Leni 126 Riverside Stadium, Middlesbrough 86 Rizzo, Pippo 101 Roberts, John 117 Robson, Bobby 78 Rocky (film) 137–8 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 108–10 Paths of Modern Photography 109 Political Football 108 Rogers, Claude 53 Ronaldo (Luis Nazário de Lima) 174 Ronaldo, Cristiano 153 n.23, 163 Rose, Tracey 185 Rotherham United FC 159 Rourke, Daniel 38 Rous, Sir Stanley 57 Rudolph, Wilma 69 rugby 57, 113 n.1, 115 Runge, Philipp Otto 192, 204 Runia, Eelco 69 Rushden, Max 158 Russell, Dave 75, 79 Sabsabi, Khaled, Wonderland 129–30 Salaman, Michael, Miners’ Game at Sundown 54 Salvio, Henrique 219 San Siro Stadium, Milan 85 sankofa, Adinkra symbol 185 Sargent, John Singer 4 Sarte, Jean-Paul 63 Being and Nothingness 116 Schmeltzer, Marcel 42 Schwules Museum 9, 140 scopophilia 11, 43, 161 Scotland, men’s national team 59 sectarianism 117, 127–8 Sedgwick, Eve 144 sexism in academe 3, 10, 12 in art history and criticism 139–40

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and the English Football Association 148–51 in exhibitions 8–9, 138–9 in running 138 in sport fandom 137, 155, 161–2, 165–6 in sports media 136, 138, 146–7, 150–1, 155, 159, 165–6 in video games 146 Shakespeare, William 56 Shankly, Bill 79, 85, 243, 245 Shaw, Joe 75 Sheffield United FC 75 Shield, Peter 194, 205 n.11 Shire, Ellen 137 Sickert, Walter 63 Silkeborg KFUM 201 Sims, Alberto 219 Sinclair, Andrew 58 Situationist International 12, 191–4, 196, 200–4 Soccer A.M. (television show) 12, 155–6, 158–61, 166 Slater, Richard E., Entering the Stands 60 Smith, Tommie 69 Smithard, Paula 117 Soccerettes 155, 158–60 social media 10, 35, 38, 42, 46, 135 Facebook 35, 48 n.35 Tumblr 38 Twitter 35, 39–41, 47 n.25 Vine 35 Social Realism 52, 63 socialism 79, 86, 98, 107–9, 111, 174, 243 Socialist Realism 110 Sócrates (footballer) 174 Sogen, Hirano 227 Sontag, Susan 126 Southampton FC 64 Soviet Union, men’s national team 110 Spanish Civil War 213 Spartak Moscow FC 110 Spartakiad 107–9, 114 n.21, 115 spectacle, sport as 1, 12, 36, 43–4, 53, 62, 65, 103, 112, 116, 118, 123–6, 129–31, 135–7, 142–7, 152, 192, 201–3, 212, 214, 222, 223, 226, 227

276 Speer, Albert 124 Spirit of Shankly (SOS ) 243 spirituality and Christian pilgrimage 44–5 and Ghanaian culture 178, 185 and Italian Futurism 102 and Russian Constructivism 113 n.14 St. Onofrio (team) 199 stadiums: see individual stadiums Stalin, Joseph 97, 108, 111 Stamford Bridge, London 53–4, 60, 64 Stanley Park, Liverpool 239–40 Stevens, Chris Can Can 235 Ignorance is Strength 235 Steyerl, Hito 39–40, 46 Strożek, Przemysław 4–5, 11, 115, 233 Suk, Byun Choo 227 The Sun (newspaper) 157, 160 Sunderland FC 77, 79 Suprematism 11, 97–8, 104, 106–7, 110, 113 n.14 Sutherland, Graham 54 Switzer, Katherine 138 Switzerland, men’s national team 59 Sylvester, David 52–4, 63 Tàpies, Antoni 224–5 Tarrini, Cesare 101 Tate Modern, London 197 Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) 101 Taylor, Ian 167 n.28 Taylor, Peter 77–7, 83–5, 87–9 television: see individual television shows Telstar football 224 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) 101 three-sided football 191–204 in art contexts 196–9 and corporate campaigns 200 history of 191–8 implications of 201–4 and public benefits 200 rules and format 192–3 World Cup 201 see also Blissett, Luther; Jorn, Asger tifos 2 The Times (newspaper) 21, 51–3

Index Tobias, James 145 Tompsett, Fabian 192, 194–6, 201, 203 totalitarianism 113, 116, 124 Touré, Yaya 176 Toynbee, L. L., Mid-Week at Stamford Bridge 54 tribalism 117, 123, 127 triolectics 191, 193, 196–8, 203–4 Trockel, Rosemarie 185 Tsang, Wu 141–2, 147, 152 see also Marriage (artists) Turner, J. M. W. 54 Ubermensch 116, 125 Udemba, Emeka 8–9 Umbro 181, 199, 222 United States Soccer Hall of Fame 9 urban landscapes 70, 232, 237 rejection of 195–6 societies 54, 245 urbanism 193 utopianism 11, 105, 107, 113, 115–17, 122, 141–2 van Warmerdam, Marijke 8 Velcom 199–200 Velten, Till 8 Venables, Terry 157 Vertov, Dziga, Man with a Movie Camera 110, 114 n.21 Victoria and Albert Museum 1, 57 Victoria Park, Hartlepool 85 Victorian era 4, 11, 20, 29, 31 Videla, Jorge Rafael 224 violence political 8, 216 representations of 5 sectarian 127, 238 in soccer 3, 64, 125–7, 129, 157, 180, 235 sporting 144 urban 200 viral videos 146–7, 153 n.23 Vollborn, Franziska, Untitled 139–40 voyeurism 157, 162 vuvuzela 8, 227

Index Wales, men’s national team 59 Wallis, Nevile 52–3 Walter Tuckwell and Associates, Ltd. 222–3 Warhol, Andy 145 Warner Brothers / Communications 126, 221, 227 Watford FC 158, 193, 195, 198, 205 n.28 Wembley Stadium, London 211, 221 Western Sydney Wanderers 129–30 Westwood, Vivienne 236 Wharton, Arthur 69 Whistler, James Abbot McNeill 54 Whitcher, Alec 55 White Hart Lane, London 53 Whitechapel Art Gallery 52, 199 Whittall, Richard 40–2, 44–6 Wiley, Kehinde 186 Williams, Jean 3, 5, 12, 22, 151, 185 Williams, Raymond 126 Wilson, Harold 221 Wilson, Jonathan Brian Clough 77–9 Inverting the Pyramid 2 Wilton, Iain 59 Winner, David 3 Wolverhampton Wanderers FC 55 Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA ) 146, 153 n.28 women’s soccer 1, 3, 8–10, 12, 117–18, 136–43, 146–52, 154 n.33, 187 n.12 see also Dick, Kerr’s Ladies FC ; Doncaster Rover Belles FC ;

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European Women’s Championship; FIFA Women’s World Cup Wood, Christopher, Anachronic Renaissance 44–5 Workshop for a Non-Linear Architecture (WNLA ) 194–6 World Cup: see FIFA Men’s and Women’s World Cups World Cup Willie 213, 220–3 World War I 4, 19, 63, 116, 156 World War II 1, 58, 110, 212, 217, 225 xenophobia 117, 119, 121, 123 Yates, Colin 9 Yates, Frances 193 Young, Iris Marion 147 Young, Percy M. 60, 64 The Appreciation of Football 55–7 Football Facts and Fancies: Or the Art of Spectatorship 55 Young, Roger 60 Young British Artists (YBA) 117–18 Younis, Ala, Plan for Greater Baghdad 130–1 YouTube 35, 38, 47 n.2, 145–7, 178 Za Rubezhom (magazine) 108 Zidane, Zinedine 5, 135, 143–6, 152, 227 Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait 135, 143–5 Zidane—The Emotional Movie (YouTube film) 145 Zola, Gianfranco 157

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