Reply to Dora Valkanova and Nyasha Mboti

Stelios Stylianou

Cyprus University of Technology

Thank you, dear Dora and dear Nyasha, for your comments. I am addressing your points below, trying to synthesize as much as possible. I am organizing the text thematically to include replies to your comments together rather than following the order in which the comments were presented.

Antagonism and protagonists

The concept of antagonism, as used in my analysis, is not related to an underlying power structure or hierarchy, as in drama genres and elsewhere. The opposing fans are analyzed as equal, they are both antagonists, in the same sense that two teams are equal at the beginning of the game. Superiority and dominance are sought, not given, and if/when they are attained, they must be constantly reaffirmed and defended. To use a parallel example from UEFA Champion's League, when we say that e.g., Real Madrid will try to "defend her crown" we do not imply that Real Madrid has a given structural advantage on the playing field.

Antagonistic fans' discourse refers to language and other symbols used by each side against a theoretically equal opponent. Yet, Nyasha's observations about how power differences are important in sustaining the opposition and, more so, making it worthwhile, hold. In Limassol, the second-largest city in Cyprus, AEL and Apollon are the top-tier teams and they often compete with good chances to win the League or the Cup or enter the European championships. The games between them are the most intense, both in the field and on the terraces. Aris, the other Limassolian team, is much weaker on the field and on the terraces, and games between Aris and AEL or Aris and Apollon are less intense. Nevertheless, the discursive landscape that unfolds during or around games involving Aris is still the same research object: fans' antagonistic discourse. (Interestingly, this season, Aris is the "pleasant surprise" in the First Division League, ranked 4th and entering the Europa Conference League qualification stage).

Nyasha further observes that if "one rival is not doing well over a long period, and ceases to be a threat, the nature of the antagonistic discourse [...] is less sharp." This is mostly true; but, note that a "long period" must be quite long. Sports journalists refer to well-established clubs as "historical clubs", "great teams," and "eternal enemies," even if such clubs do not do well for a while, say a few years, but even more. Consider Liverpool FC, for example, which was the "Queen of Europe" in the 1970s and 1980s and has only recently returned to the top ranks. When the club was not doing well for quite a while, it was still a "great team." In Cyprus, the recent example is Omonoia, who won her last title before 2020 in 2010. It has now returned to "where she belongs" but even when she was doing badly, for about a decade, while her "eternal enemy" APOEL was winning the championship every single season from 2012-13 to 2018-19, the game between them was always named a "derby."

Returning to the fans, a club's performance does stimulate specific discursive themes, depending on which team is doing well on the field (and in the bank!). During the aforementioned period, APOEL was being constantly accused by fans of most other top-tier clubs for being a "client" of the system, i.e., favored by the Football Federation authorities. At the same time, APOEL fans were trolling Omonoia for its failure to enter the European championships. So, there is a specialized discourse, yes, but the overall mode is the same: use any discursive means available to attack the opponent.

Nyasha points out that "winning over the opponent" may be contradictory in the sense that if you win over someone, the game is over, so "what next?" Perhaps the expression "winning over" is confusing. The way I use it, "winning over the opponent" means prevailing on the terraces during each game (operationally speaking, being louder, more visible, and more offensive). The goal is to prevail during the game and elsewhere and fans constantly attack their opponents sustaining the opposition, rather than resolving it. Envy is also part of the motivation. We talk about antipalon deos, in the sense that you need a worthwhile opponent, one that is a real threat, one that inspires awe, one that you can take seriously (Theodoropoulou, 2007). One interview participant told us that in the last few years, when Omonoia was not doing well, APOEL fans started feeling lonely!

Finally, can "antagonistic discourse be expanded to include beneficial acts as well, rather than just the negative and harmful?" In free-market economies, "antagonismos" indeed means competition, a struggle to be better than others and therefore more successful in selling your product or service, and it can be beneficial, assuming that the object of antagonism is a well-valued one, like healthier food, safer cars, faster computers, etc. In football, as a game, to struggle for victory or the league is in a sense beneficial, as the quality of the games is elevated, coaching techniques are developed, etc. There are good things that can come out of fans' activity as well, such as the development of the social and esthetic aspect of antagonism. There are instances where wonderful things happen, such as a beautiful coreo, a nicely performed non-insulting chant, social events around victories, etc. In our data, such positive elements are found under the category "praising the in-group" but they are much less prevalent, compared to those that I have focused on in the present exchange.

The prevalence of racist discourses

The question about the prevalence of any kind of content in football fans' antagonistic discourse is hard to answer at the European level. UEFA records and occasionally sanctions players, clubs, and national teams and this is evidence of the existence of the problem. In the last few years, various entities have been punished, e.g., Slavia Prague, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia. Locally too, there are incidences of racist behavior by players or fans which are occasionally sanctioned.

Yet, the frequency of these publicized incidences is a poor estimator of the prevalence of racist and supremacist discourses in football games in Europe or elsewhere. One reason for not including a quantitative discussion on this matter is that I have not studied the epidemiology of these discourses systematically. What I have mentioned is that, in the last few years, non-racial politics and sex are noticeably more prevalent in football fans' antagonistic discourse in Cyprus, compared to racism. This is the case in the physical field during football games, where my data come from. I can also mention a bachelor's thesis that I have recently supervised, in which very little content was found on race, ethnicity, or religion on football-related Facebook pages in Cyprus (Nikolaou, 2020). So, racism is not among the prevalent themes of the opposition discourse.

Nevertheless, the current discussion is not about prevalence; our concern about racism in football is always academically and socially legitimate and it is further fueled by the general presence of racism on the internet. Occasional events, spikes in social media, or reports by www.kickitout.org are enough to remind us that we are nowhere near the end of exclusion discourses and practices. We can refer to numerous examples, as Dora has already done in her comments. I would highlight one from the top level of European football, the recent social media racist abuse of England players Saka, Rashford, and Sancho, who missed penalties in the Euro 2020 final (July 2021). Studying racist, sexist, homophobic, and all other discriminatory and exclusion discourses in football is and will continue to be a big and challenging project. In my present work, I study these discourses in qualitative terms, within the theoretical framework that I call the cultural hypothesis. Dora's comments are mostly supportive of this idea and this is very encouraging.

The "seriousness" of football fans' antagonistic discourse

Nyasha's comment that my presentation "seems to regard antagonistic discourse as non-serious in that it merely seeks to annoy and irritate the other side, rather than to reflect or entrench a long-lived national schism" offers an opportunity to present a more elaborate explanation.

This discourse is always "serious," in two ways. The first lies in the historical dimension, where history and politics are enacted and reiterated as ends in themselves. This dimension, which is emphasized in my analysis, reflects the history of political conflicts. When fans orally or otherwise use political—in the narrow sense, e.g., related to political parties—slogans in football games, the soundscape is indeed political, sometimes reminding pre-election gatherings. Alternatively, when fans denounce political figures, such as the President of the Republic or Members of the Parliament, for their political actions, they are making political statements that are quite serious as well. All this concerns the surface structure of the content of football fans' antagonistic discourse.

The second way lies in the game dimension, where history and politics are used as means to pique the opponent, not enacted as ends in themselves. This communicative practice is serious too, precisely because, even though it is not explicitly focused on politics, it still is profoundly political. In Stylianou and Theodoropoulou (2019), we put it this way:

Our game dimension should not be interpreted as an ahistorical explanation or one that defies culture. By using historically and culturally specific elements as weapons in the symbols war, fans, without necessarily having an intention and without necessarily realizing that they do so, contribute to the sustaining of binary divisions and to the drawing of difference marking boundaries and inclusion-exclusion discourses. (p. 1986)

Extending this discussion to racism, to address Dora's question, let me first confirm that fans do use racist slurs to attack black players of opposing teams, when in fact there are black players in their own team as well. It is "bizarre" in a sense, as Nyasha notes; but, not so in my game dimension analysis. In this case, race becomes a selectively convenient attack weapon (like gender, sexuality, politics, and history) or, to quote Dora, "racist abuse becomes an instrument in the larger toolkit for abuse of players of the opposite team." Thus, the point here, which I try to address by investigating the deep structure of the content of this discourse, is that the instrumentalization of race is a manifestation of the racism that exists in wider society and, as such, it is very serious and it bears critical (i.e., political, in the broader sense) analysis. To quote Dora again "these 'instruments' have unintended consequences as well, namely—the very real dehumanization of nonwhite players." I also agree with Kassimeris (2021, p. 33) that "not every fan using racist language is a racist," adding that fans using racist language still represent and promote racism.

To return to politics and history, let me present one more example where reducing history to a game involves contempt for pain, victimihood, and suffering. The instance is a nostalgic chant about Anorthosis' home city, Famagusta, which is under Turkish occupation since 1974, sung by Anorthosis fans with love and devotion. Omonoia fans occasionally sing a parody of this chant, in which they blame Famagusta residents as traitors and/or cowards because they abandoned their city when the invaders were approaching. Blaming victims of war for cowardliness and/or accusing them of treason is certainly serious, morally, politically, and symbolically speaking, and it is as disturbing as the "say yes to racism" banner that Dora mentions.

Sex and politics in the game dimension

Is the sexual discourse a dimension of the political discourse? It certainly is, assuming that we refer to "political" in the broader sense, i.e., power structures and relations at all levels. In my analysis, I also refer to politics in the narrow sense, i.e., macro-political processes around the distribution of power at the level of political institutions and authorities, i.e., government, parliament, legal system, political parties, etc. This separation is analytical, not substantive.

Let me extend this discussion to address Nyasha's comment that "the game dimension which makes history and politics irrelevant might also end up making the [sexual] normative underlying structures irrelevant." Let me use two parallel real (from my data) examples of expression of binary opposition: (a) Displaying a banner with a picture of Che Guevara, to contrast the ingroup to the outgroup in terms of ideology, and (b) displaying a penis-shaped balloon, to contrast the ingroup to the outgroup in terms of masculinity. The content of the first banner is "irrelevant" in the sense that the manifest purpose of using it is to irritate the opponent, not the promotion of Che's ideology. But the display of the banner is not irrelevant as a political act: the instrumentalization of Che rests on the prerequisite that Che is a well-established figure of leftist ideology, one that you can conveniently use to compose your ideological superiority text. The same explanation can be applied to the second example: the penis-shaped balloon is "irrelevant" in the sense that the manifest purpose of using it is to irritate the opponent, not to degrade women or gay men. In this example too, the display of the balloon is not irrelevant as a political act: the instrumentalization of the penis rests on the prerequisite that it is a well-established symbol in the gender/sexuality discourse, again, one that you can conveniently use to compose your masculinist superiority text. This is a point that I was making from the early stages of my study. In Stylianou (2011), I stressed that we should not only study the surface structure of fans' antagonistic communication but the latent structure as well. Attacking with homophobic tools is a homophobic act, regardless of whether your purpose is to attack homosexuals or to attack fans of the opposite side.

Symbolic Contradictions

The observation about the use of swastikas (and other symbols of fascist, Nazi, or other extreme right ideologies) in the Bulgarian context confirms that this phenomenon is not unique to the Greek-Cypriot context. Football has been a vehicle for the promotion of worldviews, ideologies, political parties, regimes, and historical narratives. In Bulgaria, this has been the case with CSKA, a child and instrument of the Bulgarian Communist Party. This made me think that the CSKA case presents a contradiction: the recent/current use of swastikas and similar symbols by its fans is dissonant to communist or left-wing discourses (although, in political analysis, communist and fascist/Nazi regimes have both been classified as forms of authoritarian/totalitarian projects). This antithesis seems a prima facie negative case in my game dimension analysis.

Let me discuss this further with an example: in Cyprus, it has happened that fans of Omonoia, a left-oriented team, connected to the former communist and currently major left-wing political party (AKEL), displayed the flag of China in games against APOEL and other right-oriented teams. This has been a joking response to slogans directed against Omonoia fans, calling them "Chinese" (because they are "too many" and because they are "communists"). Displaying the flag of China sends the message that "yes, we are Chinese, as you want" which is annoying as it invalidates the original message but also because it makes any defeat by the "Chinese," for those who devalue the "Chinese," more painful. This explanation does not seem to hold in the case of CSKA fans displaying swastikas. If we consider CSKA's history, who are the fascists or Nazis?

But then, after receiving Dora's second set of comments, I am thinking that this negative case in my game dimension analysis, may be very useful. Using analytic induction, I can conceptually expand the game dimension analysis to include this case as an instance where the communicative function of language and other symbols can develop around contradictions, which make original or literal meanings less important (vis-à-vis the desired outcome), irrelevant, and even opposite. The example of CSKA fans displaying swastikas and that of the "racist pastry" that "upsets" the foreigners can be consistently interpreted as such within the game dimension analysis. The display of a symbol that stands for racism to defy UEFA or American culture or American imperialism, is a communicative act the purpose of which, on a manifest level, is to upset whomever the opponent or the enemy is. So, the answer to the question "who are the fascists or Nazis?" is that you do not need them, as long as their symbols are effectively irritating, when it comes to seeking ways to challenge the opponent.

Returning to the "seriousness" discussion, the very fact that such symbols are used as tools of opposition, even when their original meaning is irrelevant or opposite, is an indicator of a deeper culture of prejudice, disrespect, and contempt. The same applies to sex- and gender-related symbols.

Gates and Ultras

Gates and Ultras fans are central actors in football fans' antagonistic discourse. They are engaged in pre-game activities, including preparing banners, gathering in Clubs, marching or driving to the game together, making their presence visible and loud, sometimes blocking traffic, etc. During the game, they are typically clustered in the "horseshoe" stands (behind the goalkeepers) and they are significantly more active than the rest of the fans. They are the "fanatics," those who are more likely to also engage in physical violence and vandalism. They are the ones who will—to answer another question—throw objects and fireworks and set off smoke generators. In my research, they are the richest data sources. Still, football fans' antagonistic discourse is not limited to those fans. Participation in communicative acts during the game is typically massive in almost all discursive practices, including curses, offensive slurs, and body language. This massive involvement is one thing that impressed me from the beginning of the fieldwork and it is supportive of my cultural hypothesis.

Sex and violence

Finally, a word on the violence dimension of the sexual discourses. Τhe element of violence is always present in the sex-related themes in football fans' antagonistic discourse. The discursive "fucking" of the opponent, be it the opposite team, its agents, its fans, their family members, affiliated politicians, historical figures, etc. is always violent. Physical sexual violence (rape scenarios) is effectively degrading because the other party's body is being forcefully violated. Even when physical violence is not explicitly present (as in slogans and chants that imply that members of the opposite side are promiscuous or are enjoying sex) and not necessarily implied (as in the case of praising the ingroup members for being super-masculine in that they have consenting sex with many women), the penetrated party is always degraded and this is a form of symbolic violence. There is no positive vibe and certainly no "love-making" in any sense in our sex-related data.

References

Kassimeris, Christos. 2021. Discrimination in Football. Routledge

Nikolaou, Konstantinos. 2020. The Presence of Racist Language in Fandom Facebook in Cyprus and Greece. Bachelor's Thesis. Cyprus University of Technology. [in Greek].

Stylianou, Stelios. 2011. The Use of Political Symbols by Young People in the Public Sphere of Cypriot Society: Summary of Main Findings and Conclusions. Cyprus Center for European and International Affairs. Nicosia, Cyprus. [in Greek].

Stylianou, Stelios, and Vivi Theodoropoulou. 2019. Explaining the Presence of Political Content in Football Fans’ Antagonistic Communication in Cyprus. Sport in Society 22: 1975-1989.

Theodoropoulou, Vivi. 2007. The Anti-fan within the Fan: Awe and Envy in Sport Fandom. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 316–327. New York: New York University Press.