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The diffused audience of football Ingar Mehus
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Department of Sociology and Political Science – Sport Science , Norwegian University of Science and Technology , Trondheim, Norway Published online: 01 Dec 2010.
To cite this article: Ingar Mehus (2010) The diffused audience of football, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24:6, 897-903 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2010.511707
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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 24, No. 6, December 2010, 897–903
The diffused audience of football Ingar Mehus*
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Department of Sociology and Political Science – Sport Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway Using European football as context, literature dividing spectators into authentic fans and inauthentic consumers is presented as an attempt at resisting the commercialization of sport, and the development towards football as pure entertainment. The main question is whether the resistance from fans and football writers is in danger of serving the opposite of its intention, thereby contributing towards football experienced as entertainment. Utilizing the theoretical framework of Abercrombie and Longhurst (Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, London: Sage, 1998), it is concluded that spectators and football writers are part of the diffused audience of football, and that focusing on marginal and extreme groups of spectators contributes to football becoming more similar to soap operas in expression.
Introduction Several authors have pointed to a development where sport in general, and soccer in particular, is presented as entertainment, becoming more and more similar to soap operas in expression (Lasch 1988; Kraugerud 2005; Blackshaw and Crabbe 2004). Both are presented as entertainment, stressing the importance of relaxation, humour, passion and empathy. In the context of European football the move towards entertainment is often regarded by academics as a negative development, linked to commercialization, bringing in new middle-class consumers and marginalizing the traditional fans (King 1997). Academic writing on football fans tends to use a model where ‘good’ supporters and their activities are contrasted with ‘bad’ consumers, with behaviour deemed inauthentic being largely dismissed: Fans who buy a large volume of merchandise, those who follow sport via the mass media, those who attend ‘live’ games in family units, or even those who do not conform to the ‘typical’ image of a ‘traditional’ fan (such as women or people with disabilities) are largely ignored in a large number of discussions of fan cultures. (Crawford 2004, 33)
King (2002), for example, notes how the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 marked a demand for a new relationship between clubs and fans involving the free-market principle for the reform of football. The renovation of stadiums into all-seated venues added to the thought of the spectator as a customer paying more in return for better services. Paying more for better services implied excluding the poor and attracting more affluent spectators: ‘According to free-market arguments, the renovation of football grounds was intended to replace the dangerous poor with “decent folk”; the respectable members of the whitecollar workforce and the professional middle classes’ (94). Turning the football fan into a
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[email protected] ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2010.511707 http://www.informaworld.com
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customer also involved encouraging women and family groups to attend matches, thereby solving football’s crises because the family was a disciplined social unit which would spend more money compared to groups of single male supporters. Bringing new groups of spectators to the arenas caused worries, since new consumer fans were perceived as inauthentic and less committed compared to the traditional fans. As Hills notes:
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This view of the consumer is an essentially negative one: consumers lack the developed forms of expertise and knowledge that fans, enthusiasts and cultists all possess in ever-increasing and ever-more-specialised forms. Consumers are at the bottom of the pile. (Hills 2002, 29)
And for writers like Christopher Lasch (1988) the move towards sport as entertainment is destroying the traditional function of sport by bringing more consumers to the game and excluding fans. From his perspective, sport has a more important function to serve than entertainment – it should be about a genuine ‘escape’ from everyday life. It should dramatize reality, not be entirely disconnected from it. He argues that sport should be connected to place and that – most importantly – it should really matter to people. His position is that by becoming mere entertainment, sport is losing that function. In becoming showbusiness, it is increasingly disconnected from everyday life. In this article I will argue a slightly different position. My belief is that the binary model which is used to make sense of the move towards entertainment in football – good fan/bad consumer – does not adequately account for the changes taking place in the consumption of this form of entertainment. Rather, I will argue that it is more useful to employ Abercrombie and Longhurst’s (1998) tripartite model – which includes traditional ‘simple’ audience, mass audience, and also new ‘diffused’ audiences – in order to understand the audiences of football as entertainment. And in making this move, I think it is possible to show – contra Lasch – that sport continues to do important social work, even as it functions as entertainment. A special kind of entertainment? In the first instance, I would argue that sport is a particular kind of entertainment, with specific features. Entertainment is about performances that provide the audience with the pleasurable experience of being able to achieve something better compared to daily life (Dyer 1981). Entertainment functions as an escape into wishes, hopes and possibilities not presented to us in daily life, but which can be imagined through the world of entertainment. In this world, sports have a special place: Unlike true entertainment, sport is true: for all its performative elements, with their aesthetics and affective dimensions, it is not a representational performance, it is itself; and while the quality and authenticity of all entertainment can be discussed, winning in sport is absolute. (Dyer 2002, 177)
Other forms of entertainment are often planned and directed by others, but in sports the element of uncertainty is profound. The equality of opportunity is of course essential in order to ensure fair competition and provide uncertainty of outcome, which is a defining characteristic of sport, and which creates its excitement (Goodger and Goodger 1989). Another defining feature of sport is the complementary relationship between spectators and athletes. Relying heavily on the work of Elias and Dunning (1986) and Guttmann (1986), the complementary relationship is captured by Mehus (2005) when defining the concept of entertainment sport ‘a professionalized event with athletes representing spectators, who in turn identify with athletes and consume sport in order to obtain
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satisfaction from the social contacts and arousal of affects’ (335). The strong identification sometimes erases lines of demarcation between fans and athletes. A recent example is the EURO 2008 qualifier between Denmark and Sweden on 2 June 2007. With the score being 3– 3 in the 89th minute, Herbert Fandel awarded Sweden a penalty and sent off Denmark defender Christian Poulsen. A spectator charged the field and launched an attack at the referee, but was intercepted by a Danish player. The match was called off, and Sweden was awarded a 3– 0 victory. Another example dates back to 15 September 2004. Anders Frisk was refereeing a football match between AS Roma and Dynamo Kiev in the group stage of the 2004/2005 Champions League. He had just sent off Roma defender Mexes and blown the half-time whistle, with Dynamo Kiev leading the match 1– 0, when he was hit on the head by a lighter thrown from the stands. Frisk abandoned the match, resulting in UEFA awarding the match to Dynamo Kiev as a 3– 0 forfeit. Sport spectators’ opportunity and ability to change the outcome of the competition adds to the uncertainty of outcome, and seem to differ from other cultural events. According to King (2002) the consumption of football by fans is radically different from that of the consumer of domestic goods, who will go to the cheapest, most convenient shop. An important difference between fans and ordinary consumers is the fact that fans are part of the product they are paying for: The commodity which fans buy is not confined to the players whom they watch; the fans also purchase the atmosphere which they themselves create in watching the match. Paradoxically, at the football match, the fans are asked to purchase what they themselves are actively and imaginatively create: the spectacle of support. (141)
The last defining feature mentioned here is the profound way in which sport is rooted in the local community (Lasch 1988). Participating in sport, either through school or voluntary organizations, is a major leisure activity for children and youth. First-hand participation and experience is not equally accessible for all types of entertainment. The logic of sport entails withdrawal from organized sport with increasing age, and relatively few adults take part. They can, however, relive their participation through consuming sport as spectators. Sport is a particular kind of entertainment: ‘No other form of popular culture engenders football’s large and participatory culture among its devotees’ (Giulianotti 1999 xi). And this must be borne in mind. Even as sport increasingly demonstrates the characteristics of entertainment, it continues to inspire intense emotional engagement. Identifying with athletes implies emotional involvement, which is of central importance when understanding fandom – as in Sandvoss’s definition: the regular, emotionally, involved, consumption of a given popular narrative or text in the form of books, television shows, films or music, as well as popular texts in a broader sense such as sports teams and popular icons and stars ranging from athletes and musicians to actors. (Sandvoss 2005, 8)
Thus, athletes and teams function as objects of fandom, with the emotional involvement being central in several concepts that aim at describing the depth of interest displayed by spectators, such as loyalty (Mahony, Madrigal, and Howard 2000), sport involvement (Lascu et al. 1995), and identification with a team (Sutton et al. 1997; Trail and James 2001; Wann and Branscombe 1993). Fans in popular culture The question underlying much writing on football is how to categorize these fans. Does the move to entertainment lead to the wrong kinds of fans coming to the sport? Within the
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literature there are several typologies or categories of spectators available: social, focused, and vested fans (Sutton et al. 1997), supporters, followers, fans and flaˆneurs (Giulianotti 2002), customers and fans (King 1997), partisans and purists (Dixon 2001), fans and tourists (Goksøyr 1998), to mention a few. What strikes me in these discussions is the continued reliance, even in the more complex typologies, of an underlying binary – between fans (who are seen to be authentic) and consumers (who fail to be authentic – although see Crawford 2004, 4, who argues that all fans are, by definition, also consumers of the sport). I suspect that the way in which fan studies has conceptualized fans has helped to keep this binary in play. Tracking fan literature over the past two decades, Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington (2007) distinguish between three generations of fan scholarship. In the first tradition, fandom is described as part of a power struggle where fans are those disadvantaged in society, as described by Fiske (1992): ‘associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race’ (30). In this tradition fan scholars side with fans in their struggle against dominant ideologies and defend fans from being ridiculed in the mass media. Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington (2007) refer to this tradition as the ‘Fandom is beautiful’ phase, and go on to mention two central critiques of the underlying duality of power following this particular tradition. First, there is the tendency of fan scholars attempting to redeem fan activities as creative and productive, focusing on a small part of fan practices and excluding common forms of fandom from academic study. This approach may have contributed to keeping the fan/non-fan binary alive. Second, following the deregulation of media markets and new technologies, the public recognition of fans has changed: ‘Rather than ridiculed, fan audiences are now wooed and championed by cultural industries, at least as long as their activities do not divert from principles of capitalist exchange and recognize industries’ legal ownership of the object of fandom’ (4). The changing cultural status of fans has shifted the attention from the state of being a fan to the choice of fan object, leading us to the second tradition. In the second wave of fan studies, the social hierarchy of fan cultures is highlighted. The sociology of consumption, developed by Bourdieu (1984), is of central importance. This tradition is also occupied with fandom as part of power relations. However, instead of fandom being considered a tool of empowerment, fandom is now described as embedded in existing structures: ‘fans are seen not as a counterforce to existing social hierarchies and structures but, in sharp contrast, as agents of maintaining social and cultural systems of classification and thus existing hierarchies’ (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2007, 6). Both the first and second waves of fan studies focus on a small subset of fan groups. With the media strongly contributing to fandom becoming more common and part of our everyday life, recent academic work has taken interest in a wider spectrum of different audiences. Spanning from motivations and identity of fans on the micro level, to overarching social, cultural and economic transformations on the macro level, are features of a third wave. The work of Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) on the rise of spectacle and performance in fan consumption is part of this wave. Their thinking offers a useful way of breaking out of the fan/non-fan binary – and, I would suggest, a more useful model for thinking about the changes to the function of sport that have been brought about by its increasing visibility as entertainment. The diffused audience Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) distinguish between three types of audiences: the simple audience, mass audience and the diffused audience. The simple audience is characterized
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by direct communication between performers and audience, who are physically co-located – and is exemplified by live football matches (45). Mass audiences, by contrast, are mediatized:
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mass audience events do not involve spatial localization, the communication is not so direct, the experience is more of an everyday one and is not invested in quite the same way with ceremony, less attention is paid to the performance, which is typically received in private rather than public, and there is even greater social and physical distance between performers and audience. (58)
The authors point out that simple and mass audiences have much in common – that they flow into one another, and that mass audiences in no way have made simple audiences obsolete or unimportant. Up to this point the model is familiar – and could even be made to map neatly on the fan/consumer, authentic/inauthentic models that have been used to describe the changing audiences of football. Traditional, good, fans could be seen to correspond with the simple audience, actually attending football matches, whereas the consumers, who are less emotionally involved, often consume football through mass media and correspond to the mass audience. Obviously, there is a great deal of overlap, with fans watching matches on television and consumers attending live matches. However, mass audiences are characterized by greater social and physical distance to the athletes and require less knowledge and attention directed at the match. But Abercrombie and Longhurst’s model goes further – and it is here that it becomes most useful for rethinking sport’s new audiences. They point out that the time spent in consuming media, together with the close interweaving of media and everyday life, have made media constitutive of everyday life. In this context everyday interaction has increasingly turned into performances, creating the diffused audience, where ‘Life is a constant performance; we are audience and performer at the same time; everybody is an audience all the time’ (73). Media presentations of sport are so integrated in everyday life that spectators themselves are performers and becoming part of the spectacle. Clearly, several writers of football fandom could be said to be both audience and performers at the same time. It is not uncommon to flag their interest in football, meaning that they are football fans. However, they are also performers with their own audience of academics and football fans reading and debating their work. And clearly the media are also fascinated by the aficionados of football. Storylines and private lives of spectators are part of the show. Fans are portrayed as ‘deviant’, shouting, fighting, throwing objects onto the field, and even attacking the referee. In the logic of soap opera, spectators are performers, with ‘real’ fans often made into heroes compared with the consumers. They are deviants of sport, and balance on the edge between hero and villain. Football spectators and football writers are part of the diffused audience of football. Categories of fans and consumers are easily utilized as storylines necessary to present the next chapter in the soap opera of football. On another point, being both performer and consumer in a media-satiated society has led to inventing new ways of consumption, with virtual sports and online message boards demanding interactive consumption (Spinda and Haridakis 2008; Watts 2008; Hjelseth 2006). The work of Abercrombie and Longhurst, then, offers us a new way of conceptualizing the changing audiences of sport. The model employed by much writing on football – the binary of fan/consumer, authentic/inauthentic – seems to rely on early waves of fan studies research, where fans are understood to be a discrete group of people, whose practices and identities are rigidly circumscribed and cut off from the rest of culture. But Abercrombie and Longhurst’s model of the ‘diffused audience’ lets us think of the changing audiences of sport-as-entertainment in a new way. Those who are traditional fans
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and those who have recently come to the sport; those who watch live and those who watch at home; those who cheer for their favourite team, those who write about them, and those who merely watch the occasional game are all part of a diffused audience who together constitute the system of sport as entertainment.
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Is sport disintegrating? This then returns me to the question raised by Lasch, and with which I opened this paper. Does the increasing visibility of sport-as-entertainment – and the change this has made to its audience – represent a form of degradation? Lasch (1988) argues that turning sport into entertainment will isolate sport from everyday life, thereby degrading the content and meaning of sport. Following this argument, the important question is whether the diffused audience of football contributes to the degradation of the sport they love. The increasing social and physical distance between spectators and athletes following the regulation of spectators (King 2002; Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998) could be interpreted in support of a trend where the celebrities of sport are isolated from everyday life. But I would suggest that the diffused audience demonstrates exactly the opposite tendency. Sport-as-entertainment has become increasingly connected with the everyday lives of its consumers. In many European countries football is the largest spectator sport, the largest organized sport for children and youth, and has the brightest stars receiving the highest salaries. As I noted above, although sport is entertainment it is a very particular kind of entertainment, with specific characteristics. The excitement provided by the uncertainty of outcome within the absolute format of competition (Dyer 2002; Goodger and Goodger 1989), the complementary relationship between athletes and spectators (Guttmann 1986; Mehus 2005), spectators being a part of the product they consume (King 2002), and the role played by sport in local communities (Lasch 1988) are factors that might be said to distinguish sport from other types of entertainment. Sport is the perfect form of entertainment for developing this diffused audience, where the consumers become performers, and entertainment is part of everyday life. There is little sense here of the ‘disconnectedness’ that Lasch fears. Maybe we should put greater effort into describing and figuring out the mechanisms of such changes, instead of being caught up in a normative debate trying to decide whether the changes are good or bad. Because let there be no doubt, sport is constantly changing, and so is the consumption of sport. Notes on contributor Ingar Mehus is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Political Science – Sport Science, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research interests include sport spectatorship, sport participation among young people, exercise enjoyment and physical activity level in general.
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