Politics and Sex in Football Fans' Antagonistic Discourse in Cyprus

I dedicated my blog last year to the Global Fandom Jamboree — a series of conversations amongst scholar from many different nations about fandom and fandom studies. I have been gratified by the level of interests this undertaking generated. We are already seeing unexpected collaborations — from conference sessions to co-authored papers — emerge from the match-making that was required to make this series work. But there were still some outstanding (in both senses of the term) conversations still to be completed when the blog shut down for the summer. So for the next few weeks, I will be sharing a bit more consideration of the topic.

Politics and Sex in Football Fans' Antagonistic Discourse in Cyprus

Stelios Stylianou

Cyprus University of Technology

About 12 years ago, two colleagues invited me to take part in the preparation of a grant proposal to study the use of political symbols by young people in the public sphere of Cyprus (area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus).  The idea was attractive as Cyprus has been a place of intense political struggle, including armed conflicts from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies and a public sphere of political antagonism that has been effervescent well into the decades that followed.  Public use of political symbols was part of the political process, both in elite and lay discourses.  As a sociologist, even though my specialization was in criminology, I gladly accepted, we luckily got the grant, and we dived into the field.  One major site of data collection was football (soccer) games.  Part of the curiosity that motivated our study was the readily observable fact that football fans are the most vocal and loud among young people in publicly, massively, and constantly communicating political messages, especially during and around football games, but also on city walls, school desks, their bodies, and on the internet.  Our study soon entered the area of football fandom and focused mainly on fan identities.  In the following years, I ended up continuing this project, as I had moved to a communications department, I met a colleague who studied football fandom, and I had the opportunity to do more field research, mostly observations of football games and in-depth interviews with fans.  The focus of my study shifted toward football fans' antagonistic discourse.

Football fans perform and reaffirm their collective identity as fans of their team, members of fan clubs, residents of the team's home city, etc.  One mode of doing this is by expressing their devotion to their fandom object during football games, as other fans express their devotion to other fandom objects during other occasions or rituals: citizens express their devotion to their country during parades, believers express their devotion to their God(s) during religious services, and music lovers express their devotion to their favorite musicians during concerts.  Similarly, football fans chant, dance, paint themselves and display banners in favor of their team.  

There is a second way in which football fans produce and take part in the antagonistic discourse: they apply the us vs. them model, whereby, what they are (what they claim to be, what they identify with) is defined in binary opposition to what they are not (what they detest, what they condemn).  The embodiment of this latter element (them) is the opposite team and its fans.  Thus, through antagonistic discursive practices, fans praise the superiority of the ingroup by exposing the inferiority of the outgroup.  During football games, this is enacted in a game-like mode, with informal goals and rules, winners and losers (who will be louder, who will be more offensive, who will be more "creative" in destroying the opponent's reputation).  This game runs simultaneously with the football game: while 22 players play football on the field, hundreds or thousands of fans play symbols on the terraces.  Regarding the content of this communication, there are two main cultural domains where the antagonistic discourse is located: politics and sex (interestingly, sport-related content, e.g., about the opposite team's poor performance is almost absent).

Beginning with the former domain, there is, plainly speaking, a lot of politics in football fans' antagonistic discourse, as it would (reasonably but not necessarily) be expected in an intensively public political setting like Cyprus.  Football fans present identity discourses that densely contain political messages, such as praising or condemning political ideologies, parties, and figures.  What we are finding in our ethnography is that there is a political-historical dimension that explains the political elements in football fans' antagonistic discourse.  The presence of such elements is expressive, yet rational: fans affirm their political identity as citizens and this identity correlates with football clubs' origins, histories, ideological orientations, and party affiliations.

On the other hand, we are finding that the political gravity of these messages is variable and often noticeably light.  During antagonistic communication, fans exchange curses, call names, and otherwise discursively attack their opponents in ways that transform politics into a playful game, where the sacred becomes profane, heroes become bastards, and victims of violence become objects of contempt and ridicule.  Indicatively, emblematic historical figures, like Che Guevara, or symbols representing extremist ideologies, like swastikas, are displayed with the prime or sole intention to irritate and pique the opposite team's fans (rather than to promote what these symbols historically or politically stand for).  We term this the game dimension.  Our conclusion is that in their struggle to win over the opponent, fans use political symbols in an auxiliary-instrumental mode, whereby the historically established meaning of such messages becomes irrelevant.  In other words, these messages are just convenient and effective means to attack the opponents.  This is the first idea/observation that I would like to share in this conversation, asking to what extent this happens elsewhere too.  Do football fans use historically and politically sensitive derogatory (perhaps anti-patriotic, extremist, vulgar, etc.) terms to pique their opponents in the course of a symbols game?

Turning to the second domain, sex, we must first note that sex-related themes are more widespread than politics in they manifestations in football fans' antagonistic discourse, both quantitatively as well as in terms of discursive structures.  Their content and intensity differ across societies but they follow a more or less common discursive form: to be a (serious, active, real, etc.) fan of a football team, you "must be" reputable, heterosexual, masculine, and you must (be able to and actually) penetrate others (interestingly, these formative "criteria" apply to female fans as well).  These identity elements are displayed in various ways, including what fans say and do during and around the game.  Various sex-related themes are found in our data, the most prevalent among which are those articulating us vs. them divisions concerning gender, sexuality, and family or descent reputation.  If I were given a word limit of just four words to present our thematic findings, those would be fags, pussies, sluts, and bastards.  These are the main claims against the outgroup, which simultaneously signify the superior qualities of the in-group; that is, we are heterosexuals (not fags like them), males (not pussies like them), reputable (not sluts like their mothers and sisters), and honorable (not bastards like them).

Why do fans choose to use these sex-related themes? Part of the answer comes from the nature of antagonistic sports, where a binary opposition (winner vs. loser) is native, more clearly so if winning is a function of scoring against an opponent. In football, scoring involves the physical violation of a designated territory, which conceptually invites penetrative metaphors. But such interpretation makes sense only if contextualized in a heteronormative sexist milieu, specifically one that promotes penetrative, hegemonic, or otherwise dominant masculinities. This necessary condition leads to a more sociological explanation, obtained by zooming out of the football game as an event to ask where these discursive elements come from. My answer is mainstream culture. The evidence, at least as I interpret it, is in favor of what I call the cultural hypothesis: what we see and hear in and around football games are manifestations of the underlying normative structures of sexism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. These structures are discursively manifested during football games, as, there, they more easily find their way out of mainstream normative barriers (this discourse is also found in mediated content, such as print newspapers and on the internet, albeit to a lesser degree, due to formal or informal censorship). I support this answer by juxtaposing it with an alternative explanation, namely the subcultural hypothesis. I argue that football fans are not a subculture, as they share with mainstream culture more than they oppose. They are significantly different only in behavioral terms: they depart from mainstream norms of communication and decency. To conclude, I quote one of our interview participants: "Just go to a football game to understand our society". So, the second question I would like to discuss is to what extent hegemonic or otherwise dominant masculinity (as expressed in my description above) persists or is declining in football fans' antagonistic discourse.

Stelios Stylianou (PhD in Sociology, University of Washington) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Internet Studies at the Cyprus University of Technology. He has taught courses in sociology, criminology and social research methodology at the University of Washington, the University of Cyprus, Intercollege, the University of Nicosia, and the Cyprus University of Technology. His research has focused on victimless deviance, crime seriousness, juvenile delinquency, drug use, rave parties, internet use, privacy concerns, television violence, and football fandom. He has published articles in international journals, a book on juvenile delinquency in Cyprus (University of Nicosia Press, 2007) and a book on television violence (Papazisi, 2018).\\

Dora Valkanova is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Critical Media Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is a film historian and practitioner whose research focuses on memory and nostalgia in film and media, mediated representations of Eastern Europe and Russia, film branding, and media fandom. Her most recent article: “White masculinity in the ‘New Cold War: reading Rocky IV and White Nights as multidirectional memories” was published in the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication in April, 2022.