Back from a year as a Fulbright scholar in the Kilimanjaro
Region of Tanzania, it’s time for a long awaited (mostly awaited by me) follow-up
to an
old post on fields and soccer spaces in Iceland. The cultural geography of Tanzanian
fields is not-surprisingly different, an inevitable contrast between
a country with 357,000 people and a GDP per capita of $73k per year (Iceland)
vs a country with 57.3 million people and a GDP per capita of $1.1k per year.
Ah, global inequality.
What the countries do share is a landscape full of fields.
In Iceland the fields seemed part of massive public investment in healthy
recreational spaces; in Tanzania the fields seemed driven by a massive popular
interest in soccer as a necessary part of life for kids (mostly – but not
exclusively – boys), schools, and communities. As per much of sub-Saharan
Africa, every reasonably open and flat space not used for agriculture seemed to
soon grow goal-posts and at least rough edges. There were plenty of the iconic,
if stereotypical, scenes of youngsters improvising fields for impromptu pick-up
soccer. But if the fields of Iceland were characterized by a Nordic pragmatism
and planned recreation, the fields of Tanzania were characterized by an
impressive East African entrepreneurial spirit, an improvisational creativity,
and a love for play. All the pictures here were taken by me sometime in
2019-2020 (please don’t re-use without permission!).
Here’s one of the iconic improvised fields, the photo capturing
a rare pick-up penalty kick, from a village on the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro on
a random Sunday:
And here’s another improvised field sitting unused in Moshi
town – the medium-sized city where I lived for the year:
And another, more tropical scene, from a rural village on
the island of Zanzibar:
And one more from the slopes of Kilimanjaro, where you have
to look hard for the goal posts and not as hard for a couple of cows taking a
break from their grounds keeping / grazing duties:
I love these types of fields. Their improvised and improbable
nature conveys something about a raw love of the game that feels powerful and
connective. But that feeling is also pandering a bit to a romanticized version
of poverty and homogeneity in African soccer. The reality is much more
multi-faceted.
Here, for example, is a shot from Ushirika Stadium in Moshi
where Polisi Tanzania FC (PTFC!) played home games in the Tanzanian Premier
League (Ligi Kuu Bara) in front of a tidy, fun crowd of several thousand:
Here’s a week-end casual game at the field just outside the
University where I was based (Mwenge Catholic University – that’s the church in
the background!):
Here’s a rare artificial turf mini-pitch in Iringa, a
charitable legacy of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa that was getting a
surprising amount of use the day I visited (I’ve
been critical of the ’20 centres for 2010’ project, and stand by those criticisms
– but it was interesting to see a centre offering robust programming).
And here’s the scene at a youth tournament in Arusha – where
a local business had sent up a tent full of big screen tv’s set up for kids to
play FIFA ’19 during breaks between (on-field) games. Not something I expected
to find at a youth tournament in East Africa, but a reminder that soccer always
ends up mixing the global and the local.
Then there were the school fields, part of what I was
actually trying to research. Nearly every school had a pitch set up somewhere
on the grounds, often used by students during breaks, for intramural tournaments
(the most common type of competition), and for occasional interscholastic games
– usually friendlies. Some of these fields were pretty nice, such as this one
from a secondary school in Moshi:
Some were a bit overgrown from a year of heavy rains, and
interspersed with some brutal termite holes, such as this one from rural Kilimanjaro
near the Kenya border:
Some came with odd angles, such as this one up the hill (and
continuing up the hill!) from my University:
Some had been commandeered for construction projects, such
as this one on the way to Marangu gate:
And many had worn paths that made for what seemed to be a
difficult playing surface, such as this one on the Mkuu side of Kilimanjaro:
Then, aside from the fields themselves, there were a number
of ancillary services around the game that reinforced Tanzania’s
entrepreneurial ethos. The local second-hand clothing market in Moshi, for example,
had a few booths devoted specifically to used football boots – suggesting that
neon was going out of style in Europe or North America:
Most shopping areas also included small ‘soccer huts’ or ‘soccer
centers’ where people could pay a few Shillings to watch satellite feeds of games
from Europe or from Tanzania’s big league. Here’s the outside of the Kuvuuni Soccer
Center near my University:
And the inside with a board advertising a match-up between
two Tanzanian teams: Yanga vs Coastal:
And, of course, the big brewers also got into the game – schlepping
beer with generic wishes of good luck when the national team was getting ready
to play Sudan in a second tier African confederation tournament:
And, finally, there were youth academies using soccer to schlep
something a bit more optimistic that makes for a nice final note: happiness.
[Here’s something I wrote over eight years ago in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup; many of the names have changed, but the story is (basically) the same…]
Why do we care? Why will hundreds of millions of fans watch the World Cup this summer and hinge their lives around game results? Why does it matter whether the millionaire players, coaches, and owners of Inter Milan beat the millionaire players, coaches, and owners of Bayern Munich in the Champions League final? Why does anybody, no matter how few, bother going to watch FC Dallas play?
Presumably at some level most soccer fans invest ourselves in what, after all, is twenty-two men or women in short pants chasing a ball because we enjoy it. Somehow the game makes us happy. But why?
As it happens, studying happiness is hot right now in the social sciences. Psychologists have realized they spent way too long focused primarily on pathology and dysfunction, failing to learn about the other side of human experience. Economists have realized that people are as motivated by irrational emotions as they are by rational cost-benefit analyses. And soccer, it seems to me, can be a pretty interesting place to apply some of their ideas.
The explosion of scholarly interest in happiness does not, unfortunately, make for easy answers. Happiness is tough to define and measure. Most research tends to operate with the assumption that it’s best to just trust people and simply ask: On a scale of __ to __, how happy are you? The problem is that when the question is that blunt and superficial, most people say they are happy. It misses the proverbial ‘masses who lead lives of quiet desperation.’ It misses those FC Dallas fans.
The alternative is to try and measure the things scholars think associate with happiness. Though those things include a wide range of characteristics from autonomy to environmental mastery, in my read of the literature they boil down to that old Freudian formulation: what matters is a combination of ‘love and work’, people and purpose. We tend to be happiest when we balance engaging social relationships with a sense that what we do matters, be that a job, raising a family, contributing to a community, or maybe even supporting a team.
But focusing just on people and purpose also fails to tell the whole story because it doesn’t address the classic social science problem of causality—do good social networks and success in one’s endeavors cause happiness, or are happy people more likely to have good social networks and succeed? In fact, it turns out that statistically, when dealing with large data sets, the single best predictor of happiness is something we don’t have much control over: personality. Optimists with a sunny disposition are happier than pessimists ridden by anxiety almost regardless of the circumstances of their lives. A sanguine Aussie will consistently out-happy a dour Englishman no matter their relative fortunes in South Africa this summer.
While this may not be revolutionary stuff, the science of happiness does highlight some ways that our fandom can lead us astray. One recent PR company survey, for example, found that 93 percent of England fans would “give up food for a week to see England win.” This makes news because it seems to say something about how much the game matters to people—because it seems to say how happy it would make them to see their team win. But they are wrong.
Predicting Happiness
Say hypothetically I want to predict how happy English football fans will be one year from today. And say I have to make that predication for two potential scenarios: 1) England wins the 2010 World Cup; 2) England is knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina in a game where Carlos Tevez scores with a balled fist, Wayne Rooney gets dismissed on a second yellow for diving in the box, and Diego Maradona celebrates by belly sliding across Frank Lampard’s bow wearing a t-shirt saying ‘the Queen can stuff it.’ Here’s my prediction: in either case, English fans will be exactly as happy as they are today.
My prediction is based on a famous study in the science of happiness that evaluated the ‘real life’ equivalents of that English soccer dream/nightmare: in 1978 a group of psychologists compared two groups at the extremes of what we imagine to define our well-being—people had won the lottery, and people who had been paralyzed for life. Immediately after their respective fateful events, there reported dramatic differences in their emotions—the lottery winners were ecstatic, the paraplegics were devastated. Of course.
But over time a funny thing happened: they adapted. The lottery winners started to realize that they still couldn’t afford everything they wanted, that they couldn’t trust people who had been good friends, that money changes but does not eliminate the stresses of everyday life. Those who had been paralyzed came to realize that they could still engage in fulfilling relationships, that it could be rewarding to make little bits of progress in dealing with new challenges, that their physical limitations changed but did not eliminate the meaning of their lives. After six months or a year, each group (along with a control group who had experienced no dramatic life events) expected to be back to the exact same level of happiness they’d reported before fate intervened. Extending the results of that study to virtually any life events, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (of Stumbling on Happiness fame) goes so far as to say “If it happened over three months ago, with a few exceptions, it has no impact on our happiness.”*[see end note]
Granted, objective events and circumstances do make a difference in the short-term; the night of England’s World Cup win/loss will undoubtedly be an alcohol-lubricated orgy of joy/woe. And great games do offer aesthetic pleasures, along with the types of emotional highs (and lows) that constitute the immeasurable part of human experience. But even in the short term an interesting range of variables mediate between events, between the win or the loss, and our emotional response.
The Social Relativity of Happiness
One key mediator between events and happiness is our relative perspective on what could have been—what academics call “counterfactuals.” While competitive sports are alluring precisely because they delineate clear winners and losers, feelings of ‘success’ are relative to our expectations and our imaginations.
A famous research example here drew on the Barcelona Olympics to compare the emotional responses of silver and bronze medal winners. As Victoria Husted Medvec and colleagues reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, objective raters consistently found bronze medal winners to be happier than silver medal winners. In a follow-up study with amateur athletes they confirmed that this inversion of objective results was because people were thinking about what could have been: the bronze medal winners were comparing themselves to those who came in fourth, while the silver medal winners were comparing themselves to those who won it all.
In soccer terms, this suggests that fans’ happiness at the World Cup depends less on where they finish and more on where people think their team could have finished. Subjective perceptions of what could have been matter more than objective results. In fact, I’d hypothesize that on average English fans would be happier with a second round exit than a loss in the final—because they wouldn’t have to torment themselves with how close they came to winning it all.
This subjectivity of fans’ emotional reactions is further compounded by that other key variable in our happiness equation: people. Both in the short term and in the long term we tend to be happier when we are engaged in healthy relating with others. One relevant study here was done by María-Angeles Ruiz-Belda and colleagues in Spain, who video-taped soccer fans watching televised games from the World Cup and from La Liga. The best predictor of whether or not the fans seemed happy during the game had nothing to do with goals being scored or favorable results; what mattered was the presence of other people. Although Ruiz-Belda and colleagues use these findings to question the relationship between smiling and emotional experience, from a soccer perspective the results suggest that the full glory of the game only happens when shared.
The social essence of happy fandom also shows up in theoretical efforts to explain our irrational attachments to our teams. Why do we identify with players we don’t know and franchises that use us for our money? Probably the most common theoretical explanation is called the BIRG effect: Basking In Reflected Glory. The idea is that we unconsciously use teams to orient our social identities in a way that tells us something about whether we are good or bad: when the US was up 2-0 at the half against Brazil in last summer’s Confederations Cup I was irrationally happy because of a vague sense that the score line reflected well on me. When the US proceeded to lose 3-2 I was irrationally miserable because of a vague sense that I myself, sitting dazed in front of a pub TV 10,000 miles from the actual game, had failed. But while BIRGing makes some sense I’ve never accepted it to be the full story—there are too many people willing to stick with their teams through too many lean years (think again about the English and the World Cup) to make BIRGing the only thing that matters.
So I was pleased recently to stumble across some scholarship from a psychologist named Daniel Wann who has offered Team Identification-Social Psychological Health Model as a complement to the BIRG effect. Ok, the name is not as catchy, but the idea fits with everything else I know about happiness: Wann has good evidence that fandom facilitates happiness because it offers us the types of real, imagined, temporary, and enduring connections to others that our human nature craves.
Ultimately, as many others have noted, where else other than the sports arena can grown men cry, hug, sing, and dance in a way that enhances both their masculinity and their social networks? Where else can people of all stripes engage in loud, desperate, eccentric yet culturally endorsed expressions of our full emotional range? We often think soccer makes us happy when our team wins, but the evidence suggests it actually makes us happy by offering rare opportunities—real or perceived—to connect amidst the penetrating anomie of modern life. So, if the science of happiness is right, the England fan screaming ‘God Save the Queen’ with arms around mates after a second round loss may actually end up happier than the fan sitting alone on a tropical island watching Rio Ferdinand raise the Jules Rimet trophy. Or at least, if that isn’t any consolation, know that a year later winning or losing probably won’t make one bit of difference. Right?
*Note: Oddly, one of the exceptions to Gilbert’s claim may be soccer related: in their recent book Soccernomics Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski present some provocative data suggesting that hosting a World Cup does increase happiness in a country even several years after the event—though they also find that hosting other major games does not influence national happiness. They present further data suggesting that the idea of losing in major competitions as a cause of fan suicide is a myth—in fact, they argue, sports events tend to bring people together in a way that prevents suicide. So while the whole picture is certainly a bit more complicated than I’m making out, the basic argument holds—major events by themselves don’t matter as much as we expect them to over the long term.
[As a more meta note: Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South
Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site:
pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word
something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that
level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the
most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a
corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable – the site
has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling
bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to
pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t
think that’s a good idea anymore. So I occasionally insert a
few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really
to lose…]
In
November 2013 a capacity crowd of nearly 40,000 fans at the Maksimir Stadium in
Zagreb, Croatia celebrated one of the great moments for any team competing in
international soccer: by defeating Iceland 2-0, the Croatian national team was
among the last of 32 countries to qualify for the 2014 World Cup finals in
Brazil. Amidst the ecstasy, someone made the fateful mistake of handing a
microphone to Josip Šimunić.
Šimunić played as a hard-tackling defender
for Croatia, and at the age of 35 this was almost certainly his last chance to
play in a World Cup. Alone on the field but for a cameraman tracking his every
move, Šimunić moved with a manic and youthful energy that belied his gangly
6’5” frame, his receding hairline, and his perpetual five o’clock shadow. As he
dramatically gesticulated with the microphone and a jersey in hand, he screamed
to the crowd in a call-and-respond repeat “Za
dom spremni” – “For the homeland!” In perfect and immediate synchrony, a
large portion of the crowd responded “Ready!”
The stadium was pulsating with the raw energy
and symbolism that soccer – as the sport with the most genuine claim to being a
global game – has a distinctively universal capacity to produce. Unfortunately,
Šimunić’s chant was also a clear local reference to a hateful nationalist cry
used by the fascist Ustase pro-Nazi
regime that ruled Croatia during World War II. Šimunić himself has protested
innocence, relying on a defense of simple patriotism and claiming “some people
have to learn some history.” Global soccer authorities disagreed; he was
suspended through the 2014 World Cup for his “discriminatory” act and never
played for the Croatian national team again.
To make Šimunić’s story even more
intriguing from a social science perspective, it turns out his moment of
nationalist frenzy followed on a lifetime spent mostly nowhere near “the
homeland.” Though Šimunić’s parents were Croatian, he was born and raised in
Canberra Australia and developed into a world class soccer player at the
Australian Institute for Sport – a famous talent factory for Australian
Olympians. Professionally, Šimunić spent the majority of his career playing in
Germany with teams in Hamburg, Berlin, and Hoffenheim, and in his personal life
he married a “Canadian-Croat.” Though he ended his career with the Croatian
professional team Dinamo Zagreb and spent several recent years as an assistant
coach for the Croatian National Team, it is plausible to suggest that Šimunić’s
emotional nationalism was not at all “for the homeland.” Instead, it may have
been a way to make sense of splintered and imagined identities – types that powerfully
shape our 21st century lives.
Šimunić’s story thus becomes less a
morality tale and more a prompt for broader thinking about soccer, and the
upcoming World Cup to be hosted by Russia, as a mirror and a lens – reflecting
and refracting our social world in ways that both illuminate and distort how we
understand our selves and others. Though a growing number of scholars use
soccer for that type of thinking on a wide range of social science topics, it
is obviously not the reason most people watch, play, and love soccer. Mostly we
enjoy the game because it is fun. I get that. As someone who has played and
coached soccer at all levels from recreational to professional, I love few
things more than the simple pleasure of a beautiful game on a sun-drenched
summer day.
But as someone who has spent several
decades teaching and researching soccer as a cultural form, I also see events such
as the World Cup as an opportunity to better understand people and society. It provides
a rare combination of global attention and emotionally engaging spectacle, a
combination that offers a unique perspective on critical issues including, but
not limited to, nationalism and development. So, if we watch the World Cup as
both a mirror and a lens, what might we see?
Global sports mega-events, most
notably the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup, derive at least some of their
popularity from the rare opportunity to put nations on display. Though United
Nations meetings may be more consequential, they don’t make for particularly
good television. The World Cup final, in contrast, draws enough viewers to make
it the globe’s most broadly shared cultural experience.
Though American marketers occasionally
like to claim that the Super Bowl is the world’s most watched sporting event,
the statistics suggest that’s not even close to true. Where just under 300
million people tune into a typical modern Super Bowl, estimates suggest nearly
a billion people watched the 2014 World Cup final played in Brazil between
Argentina and Germany. 26.5 million of those were watching on American
televisions – 17.3 million watching English commentary on ABC, and 9.2 million
watching Spanish commentary on Univision.
This kind of mass appeal, both
across and within nations, has made global soccer an increasingly legitimate
area of study for academics. Though still sometimes caught between the stereotypical
disdain of academic-types for sports and of sports-types for academics, recent
decades have seen a burgeoning of what some jokingly call ‘futbology.’
The academic study of soccer (or futbol,
or football – the question of what to call the game has a contentious history
that has been the subject of its own academic inquiry) is often quite
interdisciplinary, with a healthy mix of social history, area studies,
international studies, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. In the English
speaking world academics with a shared interest in the global game regularly
fill academic journals such as Soccer in Society,
have formed scholarly communities such as the UK-based Football Collective and
the US-based Football Scholars Forum, and offer classes on topics ranging from the
general sociology of soccer to a University of British Columbia offering on the
“Sociology of Cristiano Ronaldo: Futebol, Identity, and Representation.”
For these types of scholars, each World
Cup generates social and cultural narratives that are ripe for interpretation.
To just cite recent examples, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, as the first
World Cup hosted in the Global South, became a forum for discussions about
development and division – soccer’s global governing body FIFA trademarked the
phrase “Celebrate Africa’s Humanity” as if there was something singular and
unified about the humanity of that diverse continent. The 2014 World Cup in
Brazil, particularly after massive 2013 street protests surrounding the
Confederations Cup warm-up tournament, became about corruption and inequality.
There are still regular news briefs about ‘white elephant’ sporting facilities
from both Brazil’s World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics – emblems of bread,
circus, and massive profits for well-positioned elites. The 2018 World Cup is
gestating narratives about cultures of hooliganism and racism that pervade an
unfortunate proportion of the soccer landscape in Russia, while the 2022 World
Cup in Qatar is already rife with attention to worker’s rights and religious
tolerance.
While each of these types of cultural
narratives garners thoughtful analysis from scholars and opportunities for the
application of social theory around each four-year World Cup cycle, during the month-long
tournament itself attention most often shifts to narratives about nations and nationalism.
As the British cultural historian Eric Hobsbawn famously (among futbologists)
noted, “the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven
named people.” The start of a World Cup game, with eleven men from each side
donning national colors and saluting their flag, is a powerful visual image of nationhood.
It is also often inaccurate. For one, the
simple fact that the players who get the most global attention are men, despite
the athletic accomplishments on display in the women’s World Cup, only starts
to hint at the many questions about gender, masculinity, and sexuality embedded
in global soccer. In addition, World Cup teams often visually present complex
stories about race, class, and ethnicity – stories that vary by nation from the
relative homogeneity of the Russian national team to the sometimes surprising
diversity of teams such as Belgium.
Yet for many the World Cup offers crude
representations of nationalism otherwise only available at the most fevered of
political rallies. My own experiences of World Cup watching with American fans are
colored by ostentatious displays of red, white, and blue – often in the form of
Uncle Sam, Wonder Woman, or Captain America. The soundtrack is full of chanting
and singing, sometimes creative, sometimes crude, and almost always infused
with the emphatic repetition of U-S-A. The emotional climate is a conflicted
mix of unity and enmity: we share a pride that depends at least partially on
derogating the other – other teams, other fans, other places and people. There
is, as many scholars and commentators have noted, a fine line between
patriotism and jingoism.
There may, in fact, be no better example
of social identity theory in action than the emotional nationalism of a World
Cup. The mix of externally defined in-groups and out-groups, visual markers of
identification, and competitive social comparison primes the human mind to
invest deeply in shallow group memberships.
I experienced it in person at the 2010
World Cup in South Africa, watching among a tightly packed crowd of US fans in
the corner of Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Tshwane/Pretoria while the US and
Algerian teams traded futile surges in a high-stakes game that would determine
who advanced to the next stage of the tournament. Each shift in the game’s
flow, and each missed chance, brought a visible and visceral tightening of fan
bodies – we coiled and reeled as 90 minutes ticked away. Then, after one surprisingly
fluid move of the ball from the US goalkeeper’s hands to a winger’s feet to a
striker’s deflection, US star Landon Donovan slotted home a winning goal that
unleashed in me, and in nearly all my neighbors, a screaming abandon familiar
only from the deep recesses of childhood. A massive American flag unfurled over
us as if dropped from the sky, and all I could see was red, white, and blue. That
moment, though it said nothing rational about my country, may be the single
moment where I felt most intensely
and irrationally American. It was a World Cup version of collective
effervescence; a feeling that immersed me in the moment, and then begged for
interpretation.
In my own efforts to interpret the feelings
evoked by a World Cup, I’ve found it useful to analyze what the teams actually
represent. Where did the players come from, and what are the social forces that
shape soccer talent? What does the World Cup tell us about how soccer itself assumes
meaning in different places and communities?
Take, as just one example, the players
involved in that affecting US goal against Algeria during the 2010 World Cup. Tim
Howard, the New Jersey bred US goalkeeper who started the move towards the
Algerian goal with a long throw from his own goalmouth, is the child of a
Hungarian immigrant mother and an African-American father who spent much of his
professional career representing Everton FC in Liverpool England. Jozy
Altidore, the player who crossed the ball into the box and forced the Algerian goalkeeper
out of position, is the child of Haitian immigrants who plays professionally in
Toronto after representing teams in Spain, Turkey, Holland, England, and New
York. Clint Dempsey, the player whose initial shot rebounded into Landon
Donovan’s path for the final strike, grew up in a Nacogdoches Texas trailer
park playing the game mostly with Mexican immigrants until he was shuttled off
to an elite Dallas youth soccer club and the blue-blooded Furman University in
South Carolina before a professional career based in Boston, London, and
Seattle. Donovan, California-bred but born of a Canadian father, never went to
college, substituting a brief and somewhat dismal apprenticeship in the German Bundesliga before eventually settling
back into a wildly successful professional career in California – with
occasional breaks that included a soul-searching ‘sabbatical’ backpacking in
Cambodia and time off to manage depression.
The stories of nearly any World Cup team viewed
in this way offer a lens, however fractured, on modern societies. The US men’s team,
despite failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup due at least in part to
systemic failures to integrate diverse American soccer cultures, often offers a
genuinely eclectic mix of ethnicity and personality. In fact, according to an
analysis of the rosters for all 32 teams in the 2014 World Cup finals by
sociologist David Keyes for Pacific
Standard, 19 of 30 players in the final US player pool were ‘dual
nationals’ – players holding either multiple citizenship or having a parent or
a grandparent from another country. This was tied with the teams from Switzerland
and Australia for third most dual nationals in the 2014 World Cup, behind only teams
from Argentina (with 24 of 30) and Algeria (with 22 of 30). While both the
Ecuador and South Korea teams had no dual nationals, Keyes found that overall
30% of 958 World Cup roster players were dual nationals – numbers greater than
one would expect based on broader international migration statistics.
World Cup teams may therefore be less
representative of national character and more indicative of global hybridity. Part
of the beauty of soccer as the one truly global game is that the players come
from everywhere. The World Cup has players who learned the game on the streets
of South America, in the community sports clubs of northern Europe, in
professional team academy outposts in west Africa, and in the elite government
sports schools of east Asia. But as player development has become a significant
global business for professional teams, the labor flows of global development and
inequality have often reproduced themselves on the soccer field.
The biggest money professional soccer
leagues are primarily in Europe, with the English, Spanish, German, Italian,
and French top divisions usually identified as the ‘big five.’ In fact, a Pew
Research Center analysis of 2014 World Cup rosters found that over half of all
players were professionals in one of those five countries. The English league was
a professional home to the most 2014 World Cup players with 15% of the global
total, figures that have combined with a rapidly declining proportion of
English players in their own Premier League (and the mediocre performance of
the English national team) to raise concern in the English Football Association.
A report they commissioned in 2014 begins: “In twenty years the number of
English players playing in the top division of English football has fallen by
more than a half and the trend remains downwards. Our Commission was set up to
ask what, if anything, could be done about this.”
The English are essentially asking whether
we can’t just stop this globalization thing. The answer is likely no. And while
that might potentially be bad news for English national team players who can’t
get a game in their own nation’s top league, in the way of globalization it is
also a challenge for developing countries who end up exporting much of their
top talent. The World Cup teams from talent rich nations such as Nigeria and Colombia
will only have two or three players who suit up professionally in their home
nation, most having been “bought” by European professional clubs at young ages.
The 2014 Pew Research Center analysis found that 93% of players on the five
African teams in the World Cup played elsewhere professionally.
In 2015 FIFA felt compelled to start
vigorously enforcing a rule to prevent players from being “transferred” (ie, bought)
away from their home countries before they turn 18 to counter the potential and
real exploitation of young players from poor countries. Whatever the rules,
through a social science lens the exportation of labor as a raw material from
poor counties for the manufactured pleasure of soccer fans in rich countries
looks uncomfortably neocolonial.
Partially as a minor salve for this
discomfort, another version of ‘development’ has gained popularity around World
Cup soccer in the form of charitable efforts to use the nearly universal appeal
of the game as a hook for community development programming. These types of
programs, along with the broader endeavor of what is often called Sport for
Development and Peace (SDP), have proliferated in recent decades alongside the
general move in international development from large government initiatives to
the decentralized work of non-governmental organizations. FIFA itself has
regularly integrated “corporate social responsibility” initiatives with World
Cup hosting, though these are easy to critique as greenwashing for the big
business of sporting mega-events and the notorious corruption of FIFA as an
organization.
The appeal of soccer as a development
tool, however, derives at least partially from a version of the same emotional
pull that makes the World Cup itself such a powerful spectacle. The international
development trope of the barefoot child joyfully kicking a handmade ball in a
destitute patch of dirt is affecting because it symbolizes joy and potential overcoming
hardship and poverty. But, as sociologists Douglas Hartmann and Christina Kwauk
articulated in their 2011 “overview, critique, and reconstruction” of sports
and development more broadly, sports and development programs that swoop in to
the Global South from the Global North with a belief in “sport’s ability to
resocialize and recalibrate individual youth and young people” actually serve
to “maintain power and hierarchy, cultural hegemony, and the
institutionalization of poverty and privilege.” Poor communities in the
developing world rarely need additional soccer games as much as they need
decent health care, living wage jobs, functioning schools, and safe places to
live. And, as Hartmann and Kwauk suggest, sports may best contribute to those
types of goals through consciousness raising more than through rolling out a
ball.
The World Cup as a whole is a good test of
whether soccer can genuinely serve to raise a critical consciousness, or
whether it serves primarily to reproduce dominant structures. When the US beats
Mexico in a World Cup knock-out game, as happened in 2002 during the US men’s team’s
best ever World Cup performance, does that reinforce the idea of separation and
distinction in an era of mass migration? Or do the many contributions of
Mexican-Americans to the US national team help to challenge visions of what it
means to be “American”? When France lost to its former colony Senegal in that
same World Cup, with Senegal fielding a team where only the two back-up
goalkeepers did not play professionally in France, was that a further example
of colonial resource extraction? Or was that a statement of shifting global
power dynamics?
The answer to all these questions may be
yes: global soccer is open for multiple interpretations. Watching the World Cup
like a social scientist offers an opportunity to see the game in a way that
raises consciousness about the dynamics of global society, recognizing ways the
raw emotion and global appeal of the World Cup make soccer itself a distinct mirror
and lens.
The appeal of interpreting the World Cup
is also reflected in a final addendum to the Josip Šimunić story. Since his
banishment from the 2014 World Cup, and in a quest for exoneration, Šimunić collaborated
on a documentary film titled Moja Vlojena
Hrvatska – My Beloved Croatia – that argues his moment of nationalist
fervor was an embodiment of noble pride rather than a hateful screed. The
English language trailer for the film begins with the claim “Soccer, to Croats,
is much more than just a game” and segues into interviews with Croatian World
Cup players talking wistfully about the patriotic emotions of playing for their
national team. Even Šimunić’s father, the Australian emigree, makes a tearful
appearance describing his pride at seeing Josip in the distinctive red checked
uniform of the Croatian national team.
Viewing the whole
story as both a soccer fan and a social scientist ultimately leaves me
conflicted and curious for more. I don’t know for sure what motivated Šimunić
that fateful day, but I do know the way a World Cup game can capture one’s
emotions and distort one’s intellect. The complexities of the World Cup, both Šimunić
and futbologists seem to say, is something you have to really watch to
understand.
I recently stumbled across a new (2016) edition of The Soccer Tribe by Desmond Morris, the peculiar
tome originally published in 1981 with a mix of text and illustrations making a
case for what amounts to an evolutionary socio-biology of soccer.
Morris, most famous for The Naked Ape,
explains that he was motivated by anthropological curiosity:
“Hardly anyone seems to query the importance attached to the
game. For those who do the kicking and those who watch it so avidly, the whole
matter is taken for granted. Football is football, and of course it is
fascinating, so what is there to question? For those who ignore it, it is
plainly a stupid waste of time, so why bother with it? It is not worth
discussing. Both sides overlook the fact that, viewed objectively, it is one of
the strangest patterns of human behaviour to be seen in the whole of modern
society.”
(Original 1981 cover on left, 2016 edition on right)
In seven sections and 44 chapters full of pictures, illustrations,
and quirky charts, Morris then lays out an analysis of soccer in its ‘tribal’
dimensions: roots, rituals, heroes, trappings, elders, followers, and tongue.
The whole thing is amazingly odd; in its scope, it compares to nothing else I’ve
seen or read about soccer. In analyzing uniforms as tribal costumes, referees
as tribal judges, or fan songs as tribal chants the book exhibits an
imagination and ambition that I love (and have cited before here).
But since initially stumbling upon the first 1981 edition a
decade ago something has always felt just a bit off about the book. It took
this new edition, which seems to have been updated mostly in its illustrations
(along with a few minor segments of text), to make me dig into that feeling.
The couple hundred words José Mourinho ‘wrote’ as a foreword
to the new edition sets the tone:
“Total football has led to global football—on
and off the field. And whoever fails to realize it doesn’t understand anything.
Those who only know football know nothing about football.”
This blustering certainty
is familiar from Mourinho, but it is also fundamental to the underlying premise
of The Soccer Tribe – that all the
patterns and rituals of modern soccer, and modern society, are a direct
inheritance from humanity’s hunter-gatherer past. If Mourinho would have gone
the academic route, I realized, he would have been a socio-biologist.
To be fair, Mourinho goes onto say something more
interesting:
“Those who only see twenty-two men chasing after a ball fail to
understand its geometry, its ballet, its psychological depth, its true nature.
It is the most faithful representation of human nature and its may faces. It is
a tribe where the rationale of tactics, emotion, and the fun of the game all
prevail.”
Though still a bit grandiose (and not overly convincing as to the question
of whether Mourinho actually read the book), the basic idea of their being more
to the see than ‘chasing after a ball’ is the real value of The Soccer Tribe.
The Soccer Tribe
and socio-biology, in other words, present a totalizing account of human
behavior that ignores the dynamism of culture. Women’s soccer is a key counter-example.
If soccer is a male warrior ritual to satisfy our hunting and fighting brain
modules, what to make of women’s soccer and women fans? Taylor phrases it
nicely (if academically):
“The empirical display of soccer as a natural form,
spanning all cultures and time, masks the specificity of the game’s
significance in particular social formations.”
The game itself, in the phrasing
I tend to prefer, is mostly just an empty cultural form.
And, speaking of empty, the other substantive review of the
original 1981 Soccer Tribe book that
I could find was by the novelist Martin Amis for the London Review of Books. Amis,
after a strange and extended prattling on about the English national team’s
performance in qualifiers for the 1986 World Cup, dismisses Morris in two
withering paragraphs, starting by noting that a soccer manager left alone with
the book might “die of inanition”:
“In The Soccer Tribe Morris
maps out the connection between ‘ancient blood sports’ and ‘the modern ball
game’. Nowadays, the goalmouth is ‘the prey’, the ball ‘the weapon’, and the
attempt to score ‘a ritual aim at a pseudo-prey’. Is this true? Or, more
important, is this interesting? Morris goes on to say that ‘in England, there
are four “divisions”, presenting a parody of the social class system.’ He then
traces the analogies between football and religion: ‘Star players are
“worshipped” by their adoring fans and looked upon as “young gods”.’ Later on,
he develops a far more compelling thesis, arguing that …
Ah, but the sands of space are
running out. That’s enough football for today. I only have time to add that
Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill
etc, and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the
obvious and the obviously false.”
Amis’s point, beyond being arrogant and
dismissive, seems to be that it is hard to be an intellectual interested in football—and
Morris fails unreservedly.
But I think that is too harsh. The Soccer Tribe is like much socio-biology (and
contemporary evolutionary psychology): simultaneously problematically reductionist
and thought-provoking in a challenging way. I find it interesting, for example, that The Soccer Tribe shows up as ‘cited by’
250 academic works in Google Scholar – though a crude marker, it is clear from
browsing those citing works that the book inspired some academics to new ways to think about the
game.
But it doesn’t yet seem to have inspired another similar
effort–I’ve yet to see another book that takes on the totality of soccer culture in an intentional way. The 2016 ‘new edition’ of The Soccer Tribe thus doesn’t need much updating beyond the pictures
both because the analysis freezes culture as permanently set by evolution, and because not enough of significance
has come out since 1981 to offer a more dynamic theory of the game as a whole.
That may no longer be the way of academic work on soccer – which has indeed
done much to chip away at understanding pieces of the game – but it sure would be fun to see.
“At times, sports leads social change. Other times, sports
stymies social change.”
That deceptively simple formulation is one of the four ‘main
messages’ listed for the ‘Sports: Leveling the Playing Field’ exhibit at the
National Museum of African American History & Culture in
Washington DC. I had the luck and pleasure of visiting the Museum this summer
while on a family vacation in DC. I’d read some of the positive reviews, and
was glad to find it lived up to the hype – the whole Museum was powerful, and
the sports exhibit was as thoughtful and well-executed as any I’ve ever seen.
The excellence of the sports exhibit was partially about
what they had compiled: sharp videos offering brief social histories of major
sports; interesting memorabilia representing critical moments in sports
history; visually appealing photos and statues conveying the vibrancy of sport.
(Photo by author from the start of the exhibit)
But, for me, the best thing about the museum was what was notthere: the usual pabulum about sports
as a great equalizer that directly builds character and community. Instead, the
exhibit presented sports as what it is: a rich social and cultural space,
always political either implicitly or explicitly, that takes on a variety of
meanings depending on the context and actors. “At times, sports leads social
change. Other times, sports stymies social change.”
I was actually surprised at the degree to which relatively
progressive political ideologies, usually suppressed in sports spaces, were
featured at a national museum that is part of the Smithsonian. The basketball
exhibit gave prominent space to “I can’t breathe” shirts;
(photo by author from the ‘basketball’ room wall)
The football exhibit
included a picture of Rams players entering the field using a ‘hand up, don’t
shoot’ gesture;
(photo by author from the ‘football’ room wall)
The commentators in almost all the videos the accompanied
exhibits were full of powerful progressive sports voices such as Dr. Harry Edwards
and Dave Zirin – along with other thoughtful, if more mildly progressive,
commentators such as Jemele Hill and Michael Smtih (thankfully absent are more blustery
and, unfortunately, conventional sports voices such as Stephen A. Smith and
Jason Whitlock).
(Photo by author shot from one of several videos with rich commentary from Dr. Edwards and others)
And, as has been much publicized, the whole exhibit starts
with a statue commemorating Tommie Smith and John Carlos (along with Australian
Peter Norman) raising their gloved fists on the medal stand at the 1968
Olympics. By making the relationship between sport and social change a core
feature of sport history, the exhibit itself becomes a reminder that sports is
always political. The exhibit articulates sports as a space where
African-Americans, and all Americans, express individuality while also
negotiating social rules that constrain that expression. The exhibit ends up
putting the conservative instincts of sport (towards segregation, bias, inequality,
and stasis) on display, and highlights how often those instincts end up being
wrong when viewed as part of a historical arc. Though Muhammad Ali may be the
most visible, and he gets much merited space in the exhibit, he is not the only
example of how sports positioning can oscillate between villain and hero.
Being an academic, I do have a few minor critiques. It was
cool to see prominent sports figures such as Michael Jordan and LeBron James as
major donors. For those types of sports stars to leverage their wealth towards
this type of exhibit felt right.
(Photo by author)
It was less cool to see tributes to major
corporate sponsors such as Nike. Allowing shoe companies to put in claims to
African-American sports history felt like another way of privileging corporate
sport as a business endeavor over participatory sport as a human endeavor. But,
of course, I realize that is just the way the world works.
(Photo by author)
I also thought the displays were a little light on gender
issues. There was a small display about Title IX, strangely positioned next to
the gloves Brianna Scurry wore during the penalty kick shoot-out final of the
1999 Women’s World Cup.
(Photo by author)
And the Williams sisters got some decent
coverage—including one of six statues in the exhibit. But all the other statues
were men (Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Peter Norman at the 1968 Olympics;
Jackie Robinson sliding into base; Jesse Owens running at the 1936 Olympics;
Shani Davis speed skating at the Winter Olympics; and Michael Jordan’s last
shot as a member of the Chicago Bulls). And the major quadrants of the exhibit
were devoted to baseball, football, basketball, and boxing – meaning, aside from
a few mentions in the basketball display, male sports were predominant. Looking
carefully back at all the pieces, there is plenty about women’s sports. But the
overall layout felt very male.
I am, however, nitpicking. I should reemphasize that this
was as good a sports exhibit as I’ve ever seen, and I’d highly recommend it.
The curator, Dr. Damion Thomas (who has a PhD in history from UCLA and looks to
have been a prof briefly at U of Maryland), would seem to deserve a ton of
credit. As he explained to the NY Times: “I very rarely give a sports statistic
during these tours…[instead, the gallery] focuses on sports in the larger
African-American struggle and fight for greater rights.”
That focus then also lends itself to a broader focus for
those lucky enough to visit: a focus on sports itself as less about
statistics and more about creating cultural spaces for personal and collective
engagement with the social world. That engagement is most often passive, reinforcing the status quo, but
the museum might just help ensure a few more are inspired to do (and think) something more.
To coincide with the NWSL final today (Sunday October 9th), and to dull the dejection from the Thorns losing in the semis (intellectualization is such a useful defense mechanism!), I collaborated with a student to put together a mix of some general observations and some academic lit on why women’s professional teams don’t tend to get much popular attention. The argument in a nutshell: sports is still a hegemoncially male space, and it’s not usually welcoming to alternative models of fandom. Which is a bummer, and limiting to the potential of sports culture more broadly. But there are some signs of progress, and like any hegemonic culture the norms are constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated. Find the allrounder.co post here.
Why
Portland? Why, when the average team in the Women’s Bundesliga team draws only
1,000 fans per game, when most NWSL teams draw between 2,000 and 4,000 fans per
game, and when the WNBA averages around 7,500 fans per game, do the Portland
Thorns average over 16,000 fans per game (even when an uncooperative schedule
takes away many of the star players for large chunks of the season)? This
question lingers in many recent discussions of women’s professional soccer, and
is of interest to any women’s sports advocate or any fan of historically
marginalized sports. And while several goodpieces of journalismhave made
efforts to find an answer, they often primarily feature
perspectives from players and management. This makes some sense; the team does,
after all, have a PR department with a vested interest in the question. But it
also strikes me as one of those odd ways that we expect people who are good at
sports to know lots about stuff that ultimately has little to do with tactics
and technique. If I want to know about tactics I’d ask the coaches and players;
if I want to hear about business plans I’ll ask management; but if I want to
know about fans why not ask the fans? So I did.
A
few months back (in May of 2016) I asked for some help from the Rose City Riveters and Portland
Thorns fans with a summer research project I was undertaking with one of my
University of Portland students (Anne Luijten) to consider why the Portland
Thorns are – by the metric of average attendance – the most popular
professional women’s sports team in the world. And help you all did. I was
initially thinking if we were able to get survey responses from 50 or so fans,
and interview another 10 then, combined with general observations at Thorns
games and events, we’d have enough to write our academic paper (for a special
issue of the academic journal Sport in
Society on women’s soccer in the United States). Instead, within a few days
of putting out a brief request with the help of Lexi Stern and the Rose City
Riveters social media, we had well over 200 completed surveys, 20 people
participating in in-depth interviews, and more rich and thoughtful perspectives
on Portland Thorns fandom than I ever imagined to be possible. Befitting the
inclusive and informed fan culture that I think is so central to the relative
success of the Portland Thorns, you all offered diverse and sophisticated
perspectives on the basic question: why Portland?
So
I’m writing now both to thank everyone, and to share a bit about what we
learned. Our full academic paper is currently undergoing peer review with the
journal; since academic publishing mostly still works at the glacial pace of a 19th century medium, I don’t
know when it might actually come out (and I don’t know what revisions we’ll
have to make). But if and when it does come out I’d be happy to send it along
to anyone curious for a more detailed, data-heavy, and jargon filled version.
I’d also be interested if people have constructive quibbles with how we’ve
interpreted the data. Just send me an email. And if you just want the really
short version, here’s a summary: We found that the phenomenon of Thorns fandom
is best explained as a combination of relatively equal parts good soccer in a
professional environment; a stadium that allows diverse fan types to happily
co-exist; a Portland fan community that historically and intentionally
emphasizes community and inclusion in a way that appeals to non-traditional
sports fans (ie, fans put-off by hegemonically masculine and
hyper-commercialized professional sports); and opportunities for creative and
values-based fandom that fits well with the generally progressive political
ethos of Portland. Now, if you are curious for the somewhat longer and more
nuanced version, read on…
One
thing an academic take on women’s soccer fandom has to offer beyond what you
might get in a journalistic account, other than really talking to the fans, is
a connection to other theory and research about sports fans. It turns out that
the vast majority of this literature comes from a sports business and sports
marketing standpoint. It’s not really about why fans care about particular teams
or sports so much as how to commoditize that care. I blame this literature
partially for the history of women’s professional soccer teams in the US trying
to sell themselves primarily as a provider of “role models” for young girls.
This approach offers the possibility of a relatively safe business niche where
players can be marketed using conventional celebrity tactics emphasizing
superficial traits. A major problem, of course, is that this has never really
worked to create a sustainable fan base (see the previous two failed women’s
soccer professional leagues in the US). In our research we did hear from Thorns
fans who liked the idea of the players as “role models,” and there may indeed
be some social value there. But those fans were a significant minority (about
9% emphasized particularly appreciating the players as “role models”), and we
also heard from fans who have kids in the “role model” target demographic and
find that an impediment to fandom – for a parent who spends much of their week
carting kids around to organized sports practices, the last thing they want to
do on a Friday night is go to another soccer game.
One
of the other most popular theoretical takes on fandom is often called “BIRGing”
– or basking in reflected glory. The idea is that people like following sports
teams because when the team does well it reflects well on them personally. And
while it is generally true that better performing teams tend to draw more fans,
I think the explanatory value here is also limited. First, let’s be honest: in
their brief history the Thorns haven’t always been all that good at actually
winning games (in their first three seasons they won 27 of 66 games). In fact,
when we asked our Thorns survey respondents to rank order 10 possible reasons
for fandom, “vicarious achievement” came in dead last (next to last was “role
models”). But I do think there is something about reflected glory for Thorns
fans – primarily because of an evident self-awareness that Portland does
support women’s soccer unlike any other city in the world. In our forced
ranking task, “Supporting women’s opportunities in sports” was number one, and
“Community pride” was number three (with “Interest in soccer” inserting itself
between as number two). In a self-perpetuating loop, we like the fact that we
like to support women’s soccer.
The
fact that a desire to support women’s sports was, on average, the top response
to our survey’s forced ranking task is also significant. In our interviews this
was rarely mentioned first – most fans liked to start by just talking about how
much they enjoyed Thorns soccer. But soon thereafter fans of all gender
identities commonly expressed the importance of gender equity as a value. Many
of the older female fans, having lived through eras where women’s professional
sports were barely an imagined possibility, expressed deep emotional
satisfaction at seeing a women’s professional team get the kind of support
historically reserved for men. Many of the younger female fans identify with a
feminist politics that makes promoting strong women an important priority. And
many of the male fans also felt a vaguely political impulse towards a more
egalitarian sports culture. As one fan explained in a survey response “I love
that our excellent support of women’s soccer in Portland helps attract amazing
international players and it’s really cool when they end up loving Portland and
wanting to stay here. It also feels good – as a person, but especially as a
woman – to live in a city where so many men support women’s soccer. It makes me
feel like I live somewhere where women are respected in general.”
Building
on this feeling of civic pride and community, the theoretical perspective from
academic work that I actually most like is called the “team
identification—social psychological health model.” The idea here is that people
like being sports fans because it gives them the types of community connections
that we know are key ingredients for a good life. Sports teams offer easy ways
to bond with others, to feel part of something beyond the self, and to
sometimes make genuine personal connections to new people. This, I think,
offers important leverage on understanding the phenomenon Thorns fandom. When
we asked our survey respondents an open ended question about “what you personally
most enjoy/appreciate about being a Thorns fan” and then coded responses into
categories we could count, the “atmosphere and supporters culture” at games was
the most popular response and the only one mentioned by over half of the fans
we surveyed. Another 30 percent separately mentioned “community and comradery”
with a surprisingly large number using exactly that latter word – I think the
choice of “comradery” signifies a feeling of being part of something that has
meaning beyond just the sociality of a group.
So
what is that “something” that Thorns fans feel part of? For that piece I think
it’s useful to have a bit of what I think of as the social history of Portland
soccer supporters culture. We talked to fans who connected their fandom all the
way back to the 1970’s iteration of the Timbers, and to almost every other
major local soccer team and event since. Most Portland soccer fans know that
many of the ‘original’ Timbers from the 70’s NASL team were Brits who stuck
around and became integral to the local coaching scene. But what had never
struck me before undertaking this project was how often this meant coaching
girls as well as boys at a time when women’s soccer had almost no traction in
the UK (women’s soccer was formally banned in
England
from 1921 to 1971!). For soccer to be viable in Portland, women’s soccer had to
be viable in Portland.
The
most visible influence of the original Timbers on women’s soccer in Portland
was Clive Charles – the legendary UP coach who was one of those Brits who
probably surprised themselves with how much he liked the women’s game. He laid
the foundation for UP teams in the 2000’s that consistently led the NCAA in attendance
for women’s soccer, and that helped make watching women’s soccer a fun and
legitimate way to be a sports fan in Portland.
Around
that same time in the mid-aughts, there was an eclectic and merry band of
Portlanders who started building a supporters culture around another iterations
of the Timbers and who started calling themselves the Timbers Army. While a
reasonable amount of ink has been spilled around the Timbers Army phenomenon,
and while Thorns fans and the Rose City Riveters deserve their own independent
credit, I also think a full social history of the Timbers Army would make for a
great academic study in organic community organizing (maybe someday!). Even the
brief version I undertook for this project was fascinating. And the critical piece
that I think is most relevant to the Thorns is various ways the Timbers Army
decided to emphasize inclusion. The idea “if you want to be Timbers Army, then
you already are” is so well-known to Portland fans that we may take it for
granted – but the idea of a comprehensive and highly organized fan group that
puts a primary philosophical emphasis on inclusion (which, admittedly, doesn’t
always manifest perfectly) is very rare in world soccer.
To
some of the fans I talked to, the seminal moment of inclusion for the Timbers
Army was the “football fans against homophobia” tifo display in 2013. While
being visibly against homophobia shouldn’t be a radical gesture in the 21st
century, in the historically and hegemonically masculine world of most
professional sports it is still rare. As one fan explained in an interview
“when that rainbow flag and football fans against homophobia display went up,
there were people that were like: I don’t come to soccer for politics. And I was
like, this isn’t politics this is human rights, and don’t let the fucking door
hit you on the way out.” Thorns fans and the Rose City Riveters seem to have
taken this ethos to another level: whether in the form of rainbow flags, tifo,
or simple visibility the Thorns have always celebrated a diversity of gender
and sexual identities.
The
most obvious thing this does for Thorns fandom is create a space where fans of
all sexual identities feel free to enjoy soccer. As one fan explained “I love the fan culture,
the opportunity to see world class soccer for $13, the inclusive and welcoming
atmosphere in the north end. Even at Timbers games my boyfriend and I hear
homophobic remarks, get called fags, etc. NOT at Thorns games.” That matters –
the LGBTQA fanbase is a vibrant source of support for the Thorns (in our survey
sample about 32% identified as LGBTQA, while about 68% identified as
heterosexual), and a fanbase that is not well-served by many other professional
sports cultures. But it also matters in a less obvious way: the ethos of
including fans irrespective of sexual identity who don’t always feel
comfortable at other professional sports events allows Thorns games to be a
rich mix of traditional and non-traditional sports fans. There may always be a
large market for hegemonically masculine and hyper-commercialized professional
sports (which in the soccer world many women’s soccer fans refer to as “BroSo”),
but there is also clearly a market for fans turned off by that version of the
games we love.
Obviously
most fans aren’t going to Thorns games actively thinking about an ethos of
inclusion and the wonders of counter-hegemonic sport cultures. We mostly go
thinking that Thorns games are a fun place to watch great athletes play good
soccer. But those pieces may dovetail more efficiently than it first seems. And
here, for me, is where the stadium comes into play. Many casual observers
attribute the Thorns success to sharing ownership and facilities with the
Timbers. This does matter – we heard many fans appreciate how much more
professional and legitimate the Thorns operation seems when compared to many of
the other NWSL teams. And fans also just like going to Civic Stadium /
Providence Park. It’s a chance to go out in a nice part of town and enjoy a game
in a stadium (re) designed for soccer.
The
more subtle importance of the stadium, however, is what I’ve come to think of
as the stadium’s social geography. Providence Park is not so big to be
overwhelming, but not so small as to end up cramming different types of fans
into one space. Intentionally watching Thorns games from different parts of the
stadium made it clear to me that each draws a slightly different crowd. The north
end and the Rose City Riveters sections are for fans who want to sing, stand,
and feel some agency in their fandom – or who enjoy being with those that do.
The west side and the Key Bank Club are for the fans who are willing to pay a
little extra for their comforts – nicer seats, easier access to food and
bathrooms, an easier view of the game. The east side is a mix of serious fans
who want to be able to focus on the game, and (most often in the 200 level)
soccer families who come in on promotional deals and often spend much of the
game socializing. The spatial lay-out goes a long way to allowing these
disparate groups to peacefully co-exist. I was actually somewhat surprised by
how many of the fans we talked to who don’t sit with the Riveters have mixed
feelings about the more hardcore fans –we heard more than a few muted
complaints about language, noise, and goal-celebration smoke. In equal and
opposite measure, we heard from more than a few hardcore fans annoyed at
“screaming Alex Morgan fan girls” and the expectation that women’s soccer
should be sanitized and family-friendly. One of the beauties of Providence Park
during a Thorns game is that those different contingents can mostly do their
own thing in a way that would be much more difficult in a stadium where
disparate types of fans are packed in a single grandstand (see, for example,
Seattle’s Memorial Stadium).
So
in the end, what strikes me most about Thorns fandom is it’s hybridity and
complexity – the mix of the traditional and the progressive, the professional
and the personal. One of the articulations I found most powerful was from a
survey response asking what people enjoy and appreciate about being a Thorns
fan: “My
daughter came out a few months before the 1st season. While our relationship
was good there was stress. I bought season tickets for us both as something we
could do together. My most enjoyable times have been in the front row behind
the goal, chanting with my daughter- beer in hand.” Perhaps I appreciate this
quote so much because of my own status as a middle-aged dad, but I also think
it distills much of what is great about Thorns fandom. The sentiment depends
upon the existence of a viable supporters culture and professional environment:
the team needs to be good enough to cheer and the setting has to make that
enjoyable. It’s also rooted in traditional sports stories: a father bonding
with his child through sports, the emotional release of singing for one’s team,
and beer as a social lubricant. But it is also founded on dynamics that have
historically been marginalized in popular spectator sports: soothing generational
tensions around sexuality, gender, and diversity. This combination of good
soccer in a special place, the emotional power and pride in spectator sports,
and the opening for new and creative ways of being a sports fan that reinforce
personal values all seems to me to make Thorns fandom an extraordinary thing
indeed.
- Andrew
Guest [drewguest (at) outlook.com; @sportsandideas]
[Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site: pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable – the site has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. So I’m thinking I’ve been inserting a few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really to lose. Since the Timbers are playing the Sounders today in a rivalry game, I was reminded of this oldy but goody…]
A Mental Game: Us versus Them and the Social Psychology of Fandom
Andrew Guest offers some psychological perspectives on fan allegiance and rivalry, looking at Seattle vs. Portland with an eye on social identity theory.
MARCH 29, 2010
Why, with intense and organic feelings of affiliation to our teams, does it so rarely seem to matter that the teams themselves are obviously artificial constructions? Why, in the midst of a fan revolt against an ownership group that is foreign and detached, do Manchester United fans not seem too bothered that most of their players are also ‘foreign’ (beyond Mancunians Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, United’s 18 on Saturday included 15 non-English players)? Why, amidst the admirable growth of genuine American supporters groups, do MLS teams not seem to put much emphasis on employing local players with roots in their communities? I’d like to suggest that the emotional intensity of fan affiliation, and the fact that it persists and even grows amidst the globalization and commercialization of the game, is less about our teams and more about our minds.
I’ve been intrigued by the noble irrationality of fan allegiance for years, with recent events in my small corner of the soccer world further piquing my curiosity—as a current Portlander who grew up in Seattle, the MLS-fed intensification of a lingering fan rivalry has been most curious to watch. The recent tenuous claim of ‘hooliganism’ when a Portland fan was apparently choked with his Timbers scarf by Seattle fans after a pre-season ‘friendly’ was only one marker in an ongoing Pacific Northwest rivalry.
Any American reader of soccer blogs that mention the Sounders or the Timbers is certainly familiar with the phenomenon—comment threads will inevitably end up with angry references to ‘S**ttle’ and ‘Portscum,’ often including exaggerated claims as to the differences between the cities. Likewise, at games themselves chants, songs, and signs regularly transition into personal attacks that are often demonstrably irrational. I was particularly struck at a US Open Cup match in Portland last year where a large double posted sign on parade in front of the sold-out crowd had a stark black and white illustration of a large rifle captioned with “KELLER—DO THE COBAIN.”
Really? Suggesting Kasey Keller should commit suicide because he had at that point played 12 games for the Sounders (about one tenth as many games as he has played for the United States—of which, despite occasional efforts to declare its own people’s republic, Portland is still a part)? What’s more, Kasey Keller has more connections to the city of Portland than any single player on the field for the Timbers that day. Keller was an all-American at the University of Portland, and is widely credited as the key player that allowed Clive Charles to make UP a legitimate soccer power—something the city’s soccer fans often note with pride. Keller even played 10 games for a previous incarnation of the Timbers in 1989. In contrast, the Timbers starting eleven that day had exactly zero players with any childhood or college roots in Portland—and at least one player on the roster who had not even heard of Portland Oregon until signing a contract.
Of course the vast majority fans, even in Portland and Seattle, don’t choke people with scarves or promote suicide—there are crazy people everywhere. And the edginess and intensity of passionate fan allegiance is often a crucial element of what makes a great match so much fun for everyone involved. But that doesn’t make our emotional allegiance to professional teams, which are mostly artificial ‘clubs’ oriented to making money for rich people, any more rational.
What does explain the engaging irrationality of the sports fan?
A few weeks ago I wrote about sports psychology, and the fact that in my experience it has proven less useful for enhancing performance than explaining how the game works. So this week I’m returning to that theme and suggesting that while many factors contribute to our emotional connections to sports teams, one of the best explanations comes from social psychology.
The basic idea, drawing off social identity theory, is that for various evolutionary reasons one of our most fundamental psychological instincts is to identify and divide the world into two groups: us and them. Us is good; them is bad. In our ancestral past this instinct may have been oriented by clans, but now it is up for grabs—we are constantly, unconsciously, affiliating with cities, countries, schools, political parties, genders, ethnicities, musicians, companies, teams, and whatever else becomes salient in our daily lives. What’s fascinating about this basic ‘us versus them’ instinct is how quickly, and irrationally, it activates. For a Portlander at a Timbers-Sounders game Kasey Keller should rationally be one of us. But instinctively he is one of them.
There are a couple fun examples of the automaticity of ‘us versus them’ thinking that might be familiar to anyone who has ever taken Psychology 101. The classic is Muzafer Sherif’s 1954 “Robbers Cave Experiment.” Sherif was a social psychologist at the University of Oklahoma who was interested in group behavior, and devised a classic experiment elegant for its simplicity. He basically just took a group of normal boys to summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park. The trick was that the boys were randomly assigned to two separate groups and isolated from each other—adopting group names “The Rattlers” and “The Eagles” (no relation, I presume, to theScreaming Eagles “standing up for DC” United). After an initial period of bonding, the boys learned of the other group, and the researchers began arranging for competitions on a ball field. There was almost immediate animosity; name calling, efforts to self-segregate, raids of group camps, and, in fine supporters group tradition, the exchange of derogatory songs. The researchers added a final phase where they created situations in which the groups had to work together, and suddenly everyone started to get along again. It was a simple study making a profound point: there was no difference between the two groups of boys until they became groups. Any of the “Rattlers” could just as easily have been “Eagles” in exactly the same way as, I suspect, many Manchester United supporters could just as easily have been for Arsenal or Liverpool with a few small twists of fate.
Another favorite example comes from several decades ago when an Iowa school teacher named Jane Elliot created a brilliant demonstration of the power of us versus them as a way to address racial discrimination with her elementary school students in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. One morning she simply told the students that they were going to do a little demonstration where they would be divided up for a few days by the color of their eyes. First the blue eyed kids got the privileges, while the brown eyed kids put on colored scarves marking their out-group status (and the next day it was reversed). By recess time that same morning the kids were brawling on the playground because us started mocking them for having brown eyes. In Jane Elliot’s words: “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.” Substitute “sports fans” for “children,” along with “ninety” for “fifty,” and the quote still works quite well.
Further, in the classroom situation, not only did simple and substantively meaningless group distinctions based on eye color create anger, the kids let their group membership shape their performance on school work—on a flash card task the same kids either excelled or flailed depending on whether their group was assigned superiority for the day. Our ‘us versus them’ instinct can make kids seem stupid, and I suspect it can also allow ostensibly intelligent and educated soccer fans to end up choking people with scarves.
A laboratory for groupness
It turns out that soccer and supporters groups are nearly perfect laboratories for stimulating ‘us versus them’ instincts. According to Judith Harris’s accessible, if controversial, summary of the scholarly research, some of the key ingredients for making group membership psychologically significant include:
Socially defined membership that necessitates more of an internal than external commitment, along with shared experiences and an emphasis on commonalities within the group (according to the Timbers Army web-site, to be a member “If you like your sports passionate instead of passive – if you’re proud of the Rose City — if you appreciate the Beautiful Game – YOU are Timbers Army. No membership, no initiation, no rules, no fuss. Just wander into the North End of PGE Park and join the fun!”)
Competition and an emphasis on points of contrast from other groups (when the European Football Weekends site waded into explaining the Sounders-Timbers rivalry across the pond, the comments were inundated with defensive comparisons from both sides: a relatively tame example from an anonymous Sounders fan, “you may wonder why Timbers fans are commenting on an article about the Sounders. They are a funny lot whose entire supporter culture revolves around jealousy of and irrevocable obsession with the Sounders. They rarely know the names of their own players, but they will mark their calendars months in advance for a match against us. If you spend time in person with a Timbers fan, you will hear more talk about the Sounders than their own team.”).
Proximity (it is no coincidence that many supporters groups mark themselves explicitly by the section of the stadium where they sit—the “The 107 Independent Supporters’ Trust is the machinery behind the Timbers Army” and is named after the stadium section where they sit during games, while the Sounders group Emerald City Supporters have their numerical sections (121-123) and their street (“Brougham Faithful”) featured on their logo.)
Group goals and/or a common enemy (at the Sounders-Timbers match at least one Vancouver Whitecaps correction: San Jose Earthquakes supporter came to Portland bearing a sign with the message “The enemy of my enemy is my friend!”).
Explicit markers of group identity (scarves are virtually ubiquitous across the soccer world because they are such an efficient marker of group identity—one of the Sounders’ marketing coups was to provide ‘free’ scarves to season ticket holders, automatically cementing a social identity while also bearing an eerie resemblance to the scarves Jane Elliot used to mark the “inferior” group in her classroom).
Implicit norms and expectations (some Sounders supporters groups, such as Gorilla FC, distinguish themselves by trying to explicitly avoid the stereotypes of “ultra” groups: “One more belief of Gorilla FC, besides the love of the party, is that this group will share the same spirit as the fans of FC ST. PAULI!! WE ARE ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-FACIST, ANTI-SEXIST, AND ANTI-HOMOPHOBIC, BUT PRO-PARTY!! It seems bizarre to have to post that, however we want to establish that our friends are dedicated to building a love of the Sounders free from ignorance. A thinking ethic! We also will be active in supporting various community organizations. Gorilla FC is more than just a supporters club!!”)
As that last example makes clear, creating a sense of ‘groupness’ is not necessarily a bad thing—however artficial, the social identities of sports fans have just as much potential to influence pro-social as anti-social norms. In fact, the Timbers’ 107ist Supporters Trust includes not just tifo and game travel but also charitable works among its ‘basic purposes.’ Likewise, when social marketing campaigns such as ‘Show Racism the Red Card’ work it is likely due largely to re-framing social identities—remaking the group identity to include ‘soccer fans fight [rather than endorse] racism.’
But what team rivalries and fan allegiances all over the world illustrate most of all is that the ‘us versus them’ instinct plays fast and easy on our minds. As much as FIFA folks like to spin platitudes about the game bringing people together, it can just as easily tear people apart. As much as the World Cup presents opportunities to display national identities, our local allegiances and teams (so often composed entirely of outsiders) display how contrived all our social identities can be. And, at the same time, how meaningful.
As an American soccer fan it has long been a point of frustration when more casual American sports fans assume the Olympics must be the pinnacle of the soccer world. No, has long been my gut reaction, that would be the World Cup. But as Americans have become more World Cup savvy, I’ve had fewer chances to be that kind of snooty. And, humbly, I’ve realized that while I know that the Olympics and soccer have an odd relationship I’ve never exactly understood why. So here’s a somewhat shallow dive (with references to the deeper stuff) into two oddities of Olympic soccer: why the Olympics are full internationals for women but a hybrid U-23 competition for men; and why Great Britain doesn’t send teams (though on NBC they have tons of British announcers).
Why full internationals for women and a hybrid U-23 for men?
Despite the World Cup snobbery of many serious soccer fans, the first “official multi-national competitive soccer event” was part of the Olympic Games (as explained in a very interesting 2007 article in the Journal of Olympic History available here) . The first “modern” Olympics in Greece in 1896 had a small tournament with men’s teams from Denmark, Greece and Turkey. The World Cup didn’t start until 1930.
After 1896, men’s soccer was a demonstration sport in both 1900 and 1904 – with the St Louis 1904 version just involving local men’s teams and one from Ontario. In London in 1908 things got a bit more real with representation from Denmark, England, Sweden, Holland, and France – though each country could send 2-4 teams (France ‘A’ lost to Denmark 17-1!). The key there seems to have been that the English FA
got to be in charge at a time when governance of the sport was still contested (FIFA had only been founded in 1904). In 1920 in Antwerp Egypt became the first non-European country to participate, and then in Paris in 1924 the Uruguayans came and won gold - though Great Britain stayed away because of objections to the use of professionals.
In essence, Olympic soccer was becoming the thing until that pesky issue that has subtly shaped so much of Olympic history reared its head: amateurism. The powers that be, including the English FA, wanted Olympic soccer to only involve amateurs, and that fit the general emphasis on amateurism in Olympic Sport. As David Goldblatt convincingly argues in his social history The Games, ‘amateurism’ was really a canard for class exclusion – the aristocrats who ran the Olympics really wanted to keep out the riff-raff who might actually need to be paid for their talents. But plenty of national football associations disagreed – as professional soccer became a big deal in Europe and South America during the first half of the 20th century, most wanted the best players involved regardless of amateur or professional status.
So in the 1920′s FIFA started thinking about organizing its own tournament – what became the World Cup. Allowing for professionals and allowing for more global representation, the first World Cup was organized in Uruguay in 1930. FIFA then skipped having soccer at the 1932 Olympics, held a second World Cup in Italy in 1934, and men’s Olympic soccer has ever since been an afterthought. The Olympics tried to keep the men’s tournament an “amateur” affair through to 1984 – by which point Eastern Bloc countries had won 7 gold medals in a row (largely because their version of amateurism was really more like professional training). So in 1984 professionals could play, as long as they had never played in a World Cup. In essence, FIFA was trying to protect it’s World Cup brand, and making rules up as it went – culminating in the decision to make the men’s tournament an under-23 year old tournament, but with an allowance for three over-age players. Why three? Why not? The whole point was really just to maintain a sheen of amateurism (which was originally about class exclusion) and to protect the World Cup brand.
The history of the women’s Olympic tournament, though much more recent, is also a bit harder to track down. So some of this is a big speculative. I do know that the first appearance of women’s soccer in the Olympics came in 1996 in Atlanta – five years after the first women’s World Cup in 1991. That 1991 tournament, however, was officially called the
“1st FIFA World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&M’s Cup” – FIFA was still trying to protect the “World Cup” brand just for the big men’s tournament. Regardless, it was now clear that women’s soccer was becoming a viable international sport and it was also clear that the Olympics needed more female participants – the 1996 games were still overwhelmingly male (”At that [Atlanta] Olympic Games there were only 40 events for women and double the amount of men participants as there were women”).
It probably also helped that the games were in Atlanta, and the US was pretty good at women’s soccer. And that by this point in Olympic history the IOC had largely given up a vision of pure amateurism. And that FIFA didn’t care too much about protecting the women’s World Cup as a brand. So full national teams were allowed to participate. And it was a hit – the gold medal game in 1996 between the US and China drew 76,481 fans, which at that time was likely the most ever for a women’s international. At the same time, George Vecsey in the NYTimes noted with disdain that women’s soccer received essentially no TV coverage by NBC. In a clear historical pattern with women’s sports, despite obvious popular interest the media still wasn’t on board. But over time that pendulum, at least for the Olympics, has swung – the ratings for the relatively mediocre performance of the this 2016 US Women’s National Team Olympic games have been excellent (3.6 million vs Colombia – more than any men’s game in Copa America, and about five times the audience for the Arsenal v Liverpool Premier League opener).
So why do we get to see full internationals for women at the Olympics while men’s Olympic soccer is a weird hybrid of youth plus three that means barely anything in the soccer world? In a backhanded way, the simple explanation is the institutional sexism of FIFA and the IOC, with the historical pretension of amateurism (designed mostly for class exclusion) also getting a hat-tip.
Why are the British only at Olympic soccer as announcers for the US network?
Back in the early days of the Olympics, as noted above, the British did participate in Olympic soccer as they wrestled with FIFA and the IOC for control of the game and for a particular definition of amateurism. But they bailed out in 1924 and 1928 because FIFA was willing to allow some compensation for professional players in the Olympics who had to miss time at their regular jobs. As Rookwood and Buckley explain in their 2007 article “As a consequence the British federations departed
from FIFA “in fits of principle” (ibid): “When FIFA
agreed with the IOC that footballers receiving broken
time payments could play in the Olympics, the
FA believed this would destroy the basis of amateur
sport” (Huggins and Williams, 2006: 116).”
There was no soccer at the 1932 games, but Britain did compete in 1936 and then after World War II from 1948 to 1972 when the idea was to have only amateurs play (though the British team actually only qualified in 1948, 1952, 1956 - after other teams withdrew, and 1960 - then failing to qualify in ‘64, ‘68, and ‘72). In 1974 the FA stopped distinguishing amateurs and professionals and the team disappeared until 2012 – when having another Olympics in London made having British teams seem imperative. But it wasn’t easy.
The “home nations” exemption that allows Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England to all compete independently in international soccer (as explained by Slate, basically because each of their independent Football Assocations had such a head start by the time FIFA was started in 1904 that they couldn’t be split up and got an essentially permanent exemption for international soccer) had to be delicately negotiated. “Team Great Britain” basically got FIFA’s word that a combined team for the 2012 Olympics wouldn’t compromise the independence of each FA. Team GB in 2012 on both the men’s and women’s side was basically English, but with a few token players from Wales on the men’s side and from Scotland on the women’s side.
But mostly by 2012 soccer had come to be too symbolically important to claims of independent national identity in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. On the men’s side losing Team GB from the Olympics wasn’t that big a deal for 2016 – men’s soccer has plenty of opportunities for its best players to compete. But on the women’s side it was more of a shame – the English team was quite good in the 2015 World Cup in Canada, and those players hoped for a chance to build on their success. But the FA’s couldn’t come to an agreement – too much nationhood is at stake (though, as this interesting ESPNW article points out, other sports such as Rugby have been able to work this out).
The best single symbol for all this is David Goldblatt’s observation that up through as late as 1990, the English men’s national team was still mostly supported by fans flying the Union Jack British flag. But in the 90′s and ever since it has only been the English St. George’s Cross. British identity has splintered in tandem with the rise of Olympic women’s soccer.
Now, this still leaves the question of why NBC, the American network covering the Olympics, still uses a preponderance of British announcers for broadcasts of both men’s and women’s soccer. The thread through this whole discussion, after all, is that the British haven’t really been much involved in Olympic soccer – particularly on the women’s side. In fact, the British there also have to answer for that pesky 50 year ban up through 1971 on women playing the game at all. On this question, I only have my own conjecture - but given the heavy use of British announcers for a competition in which Americans really have the expertise (the US Women’s National Team has, after all, won 4 of 6 Olympic tournaments, where team GB has only even competed once) the only reasonable explanation is a combination of sexism and eurosnobbery. But eurosnobbery in American soccer is a story for another day…
[Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South
Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site:
pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word
something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that
level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the
most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a
corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable – the site
has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling
bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to
pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t
think that’s a good idea anymore. So I’m inserting a
few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really
to lose. This one I started thinking about as I prep to teach another semester of a class on the psychology of sport…]
A Mental Game: Sports Psychology is the Future (and Always Will Be?)
Andrew Guest considers the promise and problems of sports psychology in the game.
MARCH 1, 2010
Why, after several failed attempts at European glory, has Landon Donovan with Everton finally performed at a level appropriate to one of the top leagues in the world (barring the occasional ‘horror miss’)? Is he a different player physically from his depressing stints with Bayer Leverkusen in 2000 and 2005? Maybe a little bit—but probably not much. If anything he was likely a bit more spry back in 2000 and 2005. The most dramatic difference is his confidence, composure, and attitude. Donovan is not a very different physical player, but he seems very different psychologically.
Even on a game by game basis, what makes the difference for a player between brilliance and uselessness? What, to continue the hypothetical example, was the difference between Donovan against Manchester United and Donovan against Sporting Lisbon? If you ask quality players, and make them choose between the percentage of difference that is down to the physical side and the percentage that is down to the psychological side many will tell you the difference is mostly psychological. As Yogi Berra proclaimed in one of his fabled sports malapropisms “Ninety percent of this game is half-mental.”
But if you ask those same players the percentage of their training time that they spend preparing physically and the percentage of time they spend preparing psychologically, it is usually somewhere in the 90% physical range. That logical inconsistency has been the basis of many claims that in modern sports and with elite teams players need sports psychology. Claims that, despite their seeming sensibility, have gone largely unheeded. As far as I can tell, clubs such as Everton often have sports psychology as part of diverse programs for performance enhancement but they rarely have individual sports psychologists in prominent roles with the first team.
Yet for several decades smart people have maintained that sports psychology is the future, that any good team, club, or program will eventually employ full time sports psychologists. But with a few exceptions (perhaps most notably, British sports psychologist Bill Beswick who has had prominent roles with the likes of Manchester United and the English National Team) sports psychology still operates at the margins of the modern game. Most top level teams (including MLS teams and American college athletic departments) now have full-time fitness trainers or strength and conditioning coaches, but if the psychological side is given any attention at all it is usually on an ad-hoc basis.
So why hasn’t sport psychology really taken off? My suspicion is that it has to do with an intriguing combination of broader social attitudes towards psychology as a discipline and the culture of modern sports. And that suspicion is biased by personal experience—years ago, when I finished my liberal arts bachelor’s in psychology (an intellectually great but practically useless degree), I thought I’d give sports psychology a try. I did a Master’s Degree in ‘Sport Studies’ in combination with some playing, coaching, and teaching, and found myself surprisingly disaffected with the performance enhancement side of sports psychology. I liked it in concept, never quite bought it practice, and continue to be fascinated by what it can and can’t do.
Sports psychology may also be on my mind at the moment because it received a fair bit of hype around the Vancouver Winter Olympics—garnering some of the credit for various medal counts. But the prominence of the Olympic examples has also prompted noteworthy push-back: as a Christian Science Monitor article reported, in Scandinavia the fact that the Norwegian team brought four full-time sports psychologists to Vancouver prompted ridicule from columnists: “There are only losers who use sports psychologists. My God, when athletes start to scream for psychologists is when we know that they have already lost.”
And then there was the ongoing satire by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert who, in exchange for helping fundraise for the US Speed Skating team, was named as an “Assistant Sports Psychologist” for the Olympics. He proceeded to put together a number of typically amusing segments lampooning sports psychology—complete with references to “Freud rage,” Rorschach ink-blot tests, pointless repetitive questions of “how does that make you feel,” and inane advice about the need for speed skaters to get around the rink faster than their opponents—maybe with the benefit of imagining that their skate suit had been stuffed with meat and they are being chased by ravenous dogs.
One of the “real” sports psychologists working with the US Olympic team claimed the satire was legitimating: “It is an indication that the field has made it when Stephen Colbert is able to mock it.” But I’m not so sure. Certainly much of Colbert’s mockery comes with a degree of respect, but as any good psychologist will tell you it is also true that most jokes are funny because they convey a degree of truth.
Reactions to the aforementioned Bill Beswick’s work with the English National Team may be illustrative here. Originally a basketball coach, Beswick began working with Steve McClaren at Derby, moved along to Manchester United, Middlesbrough, and eventually became McClaren’s assistant with England. But as he himself noted “The players recoiled in horror at the idea of working with a shrink” (though, in fairness, he also noted that they quickly warmed to the endeavor, and that the continental players were always more interested than the Brits at taking “every possible advantage to get the most out of their game”).
Comments on a post about Beswick’s role with England, however, highlight the challenges to integrating sports psychology with the game. One noted “England players have been performing as though they have a shrink on their backs. Duh – They HAVE! Doesn’t seem to work, just like it didn’t work at Boro. Not really rocket science is it? Dump the shrink and let the players be free to play!” Another dismissed the need for a specialist: “The best Sports Psychologist that ever was involved in Football was Bill Shankly.”
In the meantime, after McClaren’s ouster as manager of England, Beswick continues to be a sought-after consultant—even making a visit to FC Dallas last year that drew similar reactions in the MLS blogosphere: one commenter noted “One thing comes to mind; the scene in ‘The Natural’ where the psychologist is talking to the team and Redford rolls his eyes and leaves. This is what losers do.” Another claimed “Sports psychologists are in general a bunch of shysters. And isn’t part of being a head coach getting the players to be mentally tough? This is so Mickey Mouse.”
Of course these comments are not entirely representative—Beswick has been successful because he offers something worthwhile, and many players value sports psychology (FC Dallas and sometimes US forward Jeff Cunningham responded to Beswick’s visit by repeating the claim that “Sports are 10 percent physical and 90 percent mental”). But the criticisms do seem to me to offer a few reasons why sports psychology may not quite fit with the culture of the game:
The primary techniques of sports psychology are not magic: The types of things sports psychologists actually do with players are fairly commonsensical: goal setting, visualization, relaxation, self-talk, etc.. Some of these techniques work better than others, and it is worth being guided through systematic practices that have been validated by research. But sometimes it just seems like common sense. On one team I was associated with, for example, one of the best players had a serious problem with anger management—he’d get distracted by the referees, by opponents, by his teammates. So after talking with the team’s sports psychology consultant, they devised a system where the player would wear a rubber band on his wrist and snap it whenever he found himself losing his temper as a reminder to focus on what mattered. It helped. But, as the commenter above noted: “Not really rocket science is it?”
(above photo from the US Army ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program)
Players vary dramatically in their attitudes towards sports psychology: For sports psychology to do any good the players have to buy in. Some do. But many don’t. Unlike fitness training—which not everyone likes, but most everyone agrees is necessary—mental training is easy to write off as “mumbo jumbo.” And, as the above comments suggest, it is also easy to write off as a sign of weakness—antithetical to the toughness required of elite athletes.
Sports psychology may not make sense as its own specialty: Idealizing an individualized “toughness” in sports also means that players often feel unable to admit they might need help with the types of psychological challenges many of us face at various points in our lives—an issue tragically illustrated by the recent suicide of Robert Enke. Soccer players have no special immunity to psychological distress. So while there is a special (and fairly rigorous) process for becoming a ‘certified sports psychologist’ (along with some uncertified hucksters willing to promise miracles), some psychological issues are probably best dealt with by general mental health clinicians (clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.). But these services are very different from the types of performance enhancement work that would be most analogous to fitness training.
Some of the best intuitive sports psychologists are coaches: Any good coach knows well that a significant part of their work is down to creating the right psychological environment for their players to thrive. Managers win and lose their jobs based on what they get out of the talent given to them—with an emphasis on the fact that at the highest levels of the game the talent is already there. A David Moyes or a Bruce Arena doesn’t change much about Landon Donovan’s physical abilities, but each manager does contribute much to creating an atmosphere where Donovan’s abilities work.
The idea that great managers have an intuitive grasp of sports psychology was reinforced for me by a recent analysis of Fabio Capello’s relative success with England. Written by a “leading sports psychologist” the article argues that Capello has focused on “four key areas of mental toughness,” and while the specifics are a bit axiomatic (“Belonging,” “Feeling in control,” “Feeling valued,” and “Safety”) they also offer a decent analytic breakdown of what matters to high level performance. In my reading, the article suggests that the value of sports psychology is not in its application with individual players but in its usefulness for framing how the game works.
As such, for me the best uses for sports psychology are in contexts such as coach training programs—where bodies of accumulated knowledge can provide coaches the chance to think through what matters for performance in a sophisticated and systematic way. Where, ultimately, you can take it or leave it. And so that is what I’ve tried to do with my own training in the field; to use sports psychology primarily as a tool kit that is available when needed (and which may also lead me to write some future posts about the ‘mental game’ with an emphasis on interpreting specific phenomena that psychology as a social science can help explain).
So could a sports psychologist have made a difference for Donovan during his earlier European forays? Could a sports psychologist make a difference for the next young prodigy that comes on the scene? Maybe. But I suspect we’ll never really know.
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