Social Identities

Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

ISSN: 1350-4630 (Print) 1363-0296 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csid20

(Dis)locating nations in the World Cup: football

fandom and the global geopolitics of affect

Mel Stanfill & Angharad N. Valdivia

To cite this article: Mel Stanfill & Angharad N. Valdivia (2016): (Dis)locating nations in the
World Cup: football fandom and the global geopolitics of affect, Social Identities, DOI:
10.1080/13504630.2016.1157466

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2016.1157466

Published online: 17 Mar 2016.

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 SOCIAL IDENTITIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2016.1157466

(Dis)locating nations in the World Cup: football fandom and

the global geopolitics of affect
Mel Stanfilla and Angharad N. Valdiviab
a
American Studies, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA; bInstitute of Communications Research,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The World Cup, as a tournament that pits national teams against one Received 27 November 2015
another, initially seems to be a site where support for sports is tied Accepted 19 February 2016
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to nations. However, situating this sporting event at the intersection

KEYWORDS
of discourses of globalization, transnational circulation of capital and Transnational media; identity;
populations, and theories of fandom, our examination of diasporic diaspora; sports media; sports
populations found that the choice is not a simple one between fandom
‘origin nation’ and ‘residence nation.’ Instead, the decision of
which team to support relies much more on an attenuated,
complex notion that we call transnational affinity. We examine this
concept in relation to the context of transnational flow of players,
media, spectators, and capital, contending that locating nations or
national preference in the World Cup requires understanding the
contemporary de- or trans-nationalization of not only sports but
identity itself beyond the binary of national and global.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; in English, International Fed-

eration of Association Football) World Cup is a massive economic and cultural event. Every
four years, 32 teams representing nations on six continents compete in a month-long foot-
ball tournament, with billions of fans and dollars riding on this culmination of year-round
behind-the-scenes activities and qualifying matches.1 At Brazil 2014, total live attendance
was 3.42 million (FIFA, 2014). FIFA reported a billion fans across its official digital platforms
and 40 billion impressions of their contents (FIFA.com, 2014). This enormous media use
indicates the attention paid to the Cup. Nielsen reported a US audience of 26.5 million
for the final (Bauder, 2014). FIFA deemed its official app ‘the biggest sports event app
of all time with a record 28 million downloads’ (FIFA.com, 2014). Beyond official sites,
‘the month-long World Cup also was responsible for more than 3 billion interactions on
Facebook and 672 million messages on Twitter’ (Bauder, 2014), the sheer volume of con-
versation during the final game breaking records on both platforms (McHenry, 2014).
Indeed, as a massive global cultural event, the Cup attracts the attention even of those
who are not ‘normally’ football fans.2 It is therefore unsurprising that the World Cup is
big business. ESPNFC reported that 2014 was the ‘most lucrative’ tournament ever, bring-
ing in revenues of around US$4 billion, and FIFA said they had sold more tickets than ever

CONTACT Mel Stanfill mstanfill@gmail.com

© 2016 Taylor & Francis
 2 M. STANFILL AND A. N. VALDIVIA

(Associated Press, 2014). May 2015 headlines about corruption investigations suggest that
the incentive to profit from the World Cup is huge, and the range of economic actors
involved illustrates major global capital interest in all things FIFA.
That FIFA termed its official digital platforms the ‘global stadium’ is telling; the World
Cup is one of very few events consumed simultaneously and collectively worldwide.
However, the Cup both exceeds the nation-state and is structured around nations. The
tournament is hosted by a nation (or two, with South Korea and Japan co-hosting in
2002), and qualifying teams represent nations. The nation is therefore integral, and the
Cup becomes global through concatenation of nations. As Black and Van Der Westhuizen
(2004, p. 1195) note, sport helps produce and reinforce a sense of nation:
We are all familiar with the images of high drama, unadulterated joy and sorrow, unbridled
patriotism, and a powerful sense of history in the making to which events like the Olympics,
the Soccer World Cup and other major sporting events give licence … In the age of global tel-
evision, moreover, their capacity to shape and project images of the host, both domestically
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and globally, make[s] them a highly attractive instrument for political and economic elites.

Both nations and sport fandoms have been described as imagined communities, in which
people think of themselves as sharing membership without necessarily meeting each
other, facilitated by media (Anderson, 2006; Crawford, 2004).
The World Cup structurally assumes that the imagined community of the nation and
that of sports fandom coincide, but scholars have long argued that national identity is
far more complex than simple spatial location or citizenship (Bourn, 2008; Dolby & Rizvi,
2008; Sassen, 1999; Tomlinson, 1999). Here we investigate the processes of identification
in the specific context of a global sporting event framed as competition between nations.
Within globalized or globalizing sport, then, how can we locate supporters? When and
how do nations matter in football? We argue that how nations articulate to global
dynamics through sport is as much about transnational capital and globalized media as
other drivers of affect, fandom, and identification.
The question of who supported which nations garnered much attention during the
2014 World Cup. Facebook’s data science team analyzed its traffic for shifts from nation
to nation over the course of the rounds, including which countries’ populations supported
which other teams (Diuk & Filiz, 2014). FiveThirtyEight.com asked US residents for their
second and subsequent choices of teams and tracked Google searches for nations
(Flowers, 2014). The New York Times reported on both projects with voluminous graphics
(Carter & Quealy, 2014). While large-scale quantitative approaches can show who fans from
different nations supported, at least in the aggregate, we ask why this is the case.
This project draws on interviews with 16 fans during the 2014 World Cup, tracking
teams they supported, why, and how they followed the tournament at every stage. Begin-
ning from our personal networks at a large research university that attracts people from all
over the world, we conducted a snowball sample, our recruitment materials seeking
‘people in diaspora who are interested in football/soccer in general and/or the World
Cup in particular.’ With this purposive sample, we recruited people self-identified as
living outside their country of origin. Interviews were semi-structured and open-ended,
conducted over email at each stage of the tournament (six times). Our respondents
were: eight women, seven men, and one respondent whose gender was not identified;
five from South America, four from Europe, three from Asia, two from North America,
 SOCIAL IDENTITIES 3

and one each from Africa and the Middle East. We let respondents frame their viewing of
the World Cup in their own terms rather than determining categories in advance, letting
them tell us what was enticing or off-putting about particular teams. This core interview
data was supplemented with generally circulating Facebook posts commenting on shift-
ing allegiances over the tournament as well as a brief case study of Spain in the 2010
World Cup. These additional sources improved our ability to triangulate responses and
see the contours of team choice. The data were first read holistically and then coded in
the tradition of Grounded Theory for the emergent common threads between responses
(e.g., rivalries and grudges, geopolitics). The themes were then read alongside each other
to determine both the broader categories animating preferences (e.g. nation matters,
media matter) and how themes relate to each other (grudges as continental rivalry
differs from the Argentina–Brazil rivalry). The research was thus guided at every step by
our respondents’ own conceptualizations.
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One nation, one team

Why people support a particular team has been examined by branding researchers inter-
ested in improving financial returns and psychologists and sociologists investigating
mechanisms of identification. Some even argue that sporting identification can illuminate
national and transnational identification more broadly (Burdsey, 2006; Giulianotti &
Robertson, 2007; Millward, 2006). Guschwan (2011) contends that as other forms of
fandom globalize, sport tends to remain tied to place. As Rowe (2013, p. 20) notes, the
fact that ‘global spectacles’ like the World Cup or the Olympics ‘are organized around
sporting nations indicates that even here the nation is not overridden by the global.’
Under the nation-based logic FIFA uses to manage the tournament, which team to
support would seem simple: support your nation (if it qualifies and until it is eliminated).
Nation or locality is indeed a major influence in which team one supports generally (Craw-
ford, 2004; Kerr & Emery, 2011). Half our respondents reported this sort of direct link, iden-
tifying their national heritage as the most important factor, as when one participant told
us, ‘I have always and will always support Brazil at the World Cup. I was born in Brazil and I
love football.’
Research on local teams has shown that this relation of team to place is why team
success can bring communities together (Pope & Williams, 2010), or – running the relation-
ship the other direction – the community’s desire to see the home team win can affect
how sports are represented to create a sense of success (Quinn, 2009). That teams are
seen as central to a location’s identity is why a municipality in Spain bought its local foot-
ball team when it went bankrupt (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2012). More broadly, if sports are
key means by which people identify – or disidentify (Muñoz, 1999) – with places of origin,
sports can be a connection to the place of origin for diasporic populations. Partially, this is
because sport teams have historically been tightly articulated to nations (Burdsey, 2006;
Crawford, 2004). Some scholars contend that sport is one of the few acceptable sites for
nationalism not associated with the far-right (Burdsey, 2006; Isgro, Stehle, & Weber,
2013). In our study, by contrast, a few respondents disclaimed nationalism or felt uncom-
fortable calling themselves ‘nationalist.’ Furthermore, there is enduring concern about
Germany, nationalism, and conservatism, which, given that Germany is a major football
power – indeed, the current World Cup champion – cannot be ignored. Certainly, the
 4 M. STANFILL AND A. N. VALDIVIA

antifandom (Gray, 2003) that is so prevalent in sports due to the prevalence of rivalry
(Theodoropoulou, 2007) can take on additional urgency and even violence when articu-
lated to intra- and international conflict (Brentin, 2013).
One possible stance, then, is to narrowly support one’s nation: ‘If my country is out I
shall no longer be interested in the tournament.’ Indeed, one participant said more or
less just that: ‘I only root for Brazil in the World Cup. If they end up being eliminated, I
will be devastated and that will be the end of the World Cup for me.’ Judging from the
size of the global audience and the fact that it grows rather than shrinks as the Cup pro-
gresses, however, this option is obviously not dominant. Moreover, the need to decide
who to root for beyond one’s team multiplies to encompass almost everyone; even if
they fervently support their national side, all but two countries’ fans eventually have to
shift allegiance as teams are eliminated. Clearly, nation is not the entire story in the
World Cup.
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The transnational, de-national, or pluri-national nation

Though teams are tightly articulated to places, which place attracts someone’s allegiance is
considerably more complicated. Crawford (2004) notes that teams may represent only
aspects of a place, and Kraszewski (2008) points out that people need not stay geographi-
cally close to a team to have ties to it. National teams are often imagined to represent ‘the
people’ (Brentin, 2013; Crawford, 2004), though not without dispute around who or what
that means (Burdsey, 2006; Gibbons, 2011). Indeed, players are often imagined or
expected to represent the nations of their birth or citizenship even when playing for
non-national teams (Gardiner & Welch, 2011; Kerr & Emery, 2011). Teams can also rep-
resent nations without states (Brentin, 2013; Gibbons, 2011; Rommel, 2011) or ethnic
groups disarticulated from states (Brentin, 2013; Crawford, 2004; Rommel, 2011). In turn,
these flows continue to include imperial elements (Clarke & Thomas, 2006; Melamed,
2011) whose contours are partly represented by World Cup fandoms. International com-
munications scholarship documents the imperial networks of news and communications
flows (also called ‘feudal’ by Galtung, 1971), in which raw materials flow out of the periph-
ery to the core for the core’s benefit and inter-peripheral communication and flow have to
flow to the core and back. While we cannot say that football players flow from the former
colonies to ‘motherland’ teams, former colonial powers enjoy a privileged position vis-à-vis
recruitment from former colonies. Moreover, global news and sports coverage – which
influences fandom – is still routed through former colonial powers and thus tinged with
imperial elements. Thus, while the nation-based structure of the Cup implies that
‘nation’ is simple, flows of people and media complicate sports allegiances.
The assumption that one cheers for one’s nation only works if the nation, as FIFA under-
stands it, matches the identifications of the people living there, which often it does not.
The so-called national audience, famously parsed by David Morley (1980) and long a
staple of television logic in the pre-global era, was always more ideological than actual,
but with increased mobility of populations and media it becomes extremely tenuous. In
a similar way at a smaller scale, NFL broadcasting in the US assumes that audiences for
games are the participating teams’ hometowns, but Kraszewski (2008) notes that fans
retain team allegiances even after leaving their city of origin. Such displaced fans use
 SOCIAL IDENTITIES 5

television to keep up and need to find ways around these geographical assumptions,
demonstrating struggles of fan displacement even intra-nationally.

A Spanish case study

Extrapolating from Hall’s (2001 [1980]) concept of a ‘dominant meaning’ as the reading of
least resistance, we can conceive of a ‘dominant audience.’ In this case, the dominant audi-
ence position is the national-identified citizen within the physical nation-space – the
archetypical Spaniard in Spain who roots for the Spanish team. However, there are
immediately two pseudo-dominant possibilities: expatriate Spaniards who root for Spain
wherever they are located, and those within Spain who are not Spanish and may be
rooting for another successful team such as Brazil, Germany, or the Netherlands. Both of
these positions are different again from those within Spain who do not identify with
the nation of Spain and favor regional, sometimes separatist, options. Many Galicians or
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Catalans who favor autonomous states do not cheer for Spain. One of us was in Á
Coruña in Galicia during one of the 2010 play-off games and witnessed the locals actually
cheering for the team playing against Spain. This already brings us to four positions just
with respect to Spain.
However, in an era of flexible citizenship and flexible sovereignty (Ong, 1999, 2006), it is
only logical to theorize flexible audience positions. Accordingly, despite its deep internal
divisions, the closer Spain got to the final in 2010, the more everyone, at least momentarily,
was a proud Spaniard. That the national team was composed of players from the many
autonomous regions of the country helped; their teamwork could metaphorically rep-
resent the country coming together to succeed. By the time Iniesta scored the last
minute goal against the Netherlands that led to Spain clinching the title, ‘Yo soy
Español, Español, Español!’ (I am Spanish, Spanish, Spanish) was one of the main chants
as people rushed to the Cibeles fountain in Madrid. In the Chueca district of Madrid, the
gay district, men were singing ‘Yo soy maricón Español, Español’ (I am a gay Spanish,
Spanish)3 thus articulating sexual orientation to national identity in the public sphere
through an event whose association with a heteronormative brand of masculinity
would ordinarily exclude the gay male. In that delirious and exuberant moment of
victory, everyone in Spain was Spanish.
In the heady days following the victory, the team was not only met by the President and
the King and Queen but also over a million fans lining the streets of Madrid. However, this
national unity was temporary, as all articulations are; immediately afterward, many Cata-
lans argued that the best players were Catalan, including Puyol and Iniesta who scored
goals in the semi-final and final games. In fact, Catalans argued, Spain could not have
won without the Catalan players, so the victory really belonged to the region of Catalunya
rather than the country of Spain. These divided and shifting loyalties within Spain demon-
strate how the regional, ethnic, and political tensions that trouble the nation-state as the
Cup’s privileged category are contextual and in flux.

Transnational flow of populations and affect

Moving to extra-national factors, transnational migration raises the possibility of changing
allegiances. Complex migration trajectories mean that many migrants are likely to be
 6 M. STANFILL AND A. N. VALDIVIA

either still in a process of mobility or not in their first location outside of their country of
origin. Depending on how long migrants have spent away from ‘home’ and the experience
they have had living outside their birth nation, they might have complicated allegiances.
For instance, one respondent cheered on the ‘USA, my country of residence.’ Another
rooted ‘in second place for Belgium where I lived as a student and the second place I
encountered true soccer fervor.’
Alternately, sport can be a way to negotiate identification, selecting some aspects of the
‘new’ home and retaining some of the ‘old’ one. Burdsey (2006, p. 17) describes a particu-
larly powerful example with diasporic South Asian populations in England supporting their
heritage country in cricket but England in football to both participate in being English and
‘distance themselves from those elements of “Englishness” with which they feel uncomfor-
table.’ Giulianotti and Robertson (2007) theorize displaced fans through glocalization,
arguing that Scottish football fans living in North America tend to intentionally maintain
original-country practices, though they may also selectively take from the culture of the
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new country within the old country framework (such as rooting for teams with similar
colors to their Scottish team), create new hybrid cultures distinct from both countries,
or change their practices fundamentally.
Thus, the hybridity of much of the global population suggests (at least the possibility of)
multiple affinities for many World Cup fans. For example, half-brothers Prince Boateng and
Jerome Boateng have Ghanaian and German citizenship, respectively, with Jerome having
played for first UK and then German leagues. In the 2014 World Cup, the brothers played
against each other in a game that ended up in a 2-2 tie. Who, then, did Ghanaians support?
Transnational movement of populations is thus a source of complex nation-state fan alle-
giance. Several respondents used attenuated, intergenerational notions of origin; one
rooted for the Netherlands and Mexico ‘because of my heritage: my paternal origins are
Mexico/Mexican American, and my mother’s family (great grandmother) was Van
Soeten, changed to Sutton when they immigrated from Holland three generations ago.’
In this way, while we intentionally sought respondents who might have a conflict
between locations, the set of considerations we found was far more extensive and
complex than ‘new home’/‘old home.’

The regional or geopolitical nation

Moreover, national teams come to have meaning relationally. Qualification for the World
Cup is conducted by region, engaging histories of intra-regional competition and rivalries
dating back at least to the beginning of World Cup history and sometimes back to the
establishment of nation-states in that region. For a fan whose team has been eliminated,
there are a number of possibilities. Is the team that went on in place of one’s own a long-
term rival, who should be rooted against? Or does one want the team that beat theirs to do
well, because it means one’s own team lost to one of the best? Alternatively, one could
express regional solidarity, cheering on representatives of the region against other
regions. Several respondents identified their region of origin as a substantial factor in
deciding who to support. One had a list of her order of preference, with other countries
from her region second only to her country of origin.
Interviewees made recurring mention of regional rivalry. One, from Latin America,
expressed irritation with ‘European claims that soccer is a “European sport” after all. I
 SOCIAL IDENTITIES 7

wish a Latin American team could have “showed them”[;] maybe next time.’ Similarly, one
respondent said, ‘I usually prefer the American team over the European one,’ clarifying that
‘it is a matter of American Hemisphere loyalty.’ Another fan took a more reflective stance:
The best footballing nations over the years – i.e., World Cup winners – have come from either
Europe or South America. So far Brazil have won a World Cup in Europe as well as in other
continents like North America and Asia, whereas European teams have never succeeded in
a World Cup in South America. In fact, until Spain’s triumph in the last World Cup in South
Africa a European team had never won outside Europe. So there’s an inter-continental
rivalry going on and this would be a chance for Germany to make history as the first successful
European team on South American soil.

The region, then, can supplement or supplant the nation as the unit of interest. Strong
World Cup regions such as Europe and South America – with their powerhouse teams
such as Spain, Italy, and Germany and Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, respectively –
tend toward rivalry. In particular, several respondents discussed the Argentina–Brazil
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rivalry. One Brazilian respondent put it bluntly, ‘no Brazilian wants Argentina to win!’
Another participant explained, ‘Argentina and Brazil are next-door neighbors, football
superpowers, and rivals.’ A third described the rivalry in depth, noting that:
There’s a longstanding argument about whether Pelé or Maradona is the greatest player ever
seen, and in this World Cup there’s been a similar debate over Messi and Neymar, their teams’
respective talismen [sic]. The Argentinian fans have also been poking fun at their Brazilian
counterparts, and there’s a sense that they would take great pleasure in crashing the host
nation’s party, so to speak, and win football’s biggest prize in the home of their biggest rivals.

In such ways, choosing a nation to support sometimes happens against the other nations
relevant in that particular moment.
Allegiances work differently in weaker regions where the one regional Cinderella team,
if any, is likely to meaningfully capture support. This regional solidarity is particularly
notable in Africa, where in each of the last three tournaments, Ghana quickly became
the continental hope. This Pan-Africanism took on a more specific form in the 2010
World Cup in South Africa. The 2010 tournament was the first held on the African conti-
nent, and there was widespread anticipation for this milestone as well as trepidation
that the country could deliver on its promises of preparedness (Cornelissen & Swart,
2006; Lepp & Gibson, 2011).4 The 2010 tournament was accompanied by an Afrocentric
discourse foregrounding this milestone and implicitly recruiting worldwide support for
teams from the region and the region itself. This was exemplified by Shakira’s catchy
World Cup anthem, ‘Waka, Waka,’ proclaiming ‘for this is Africa’ or ‘porque esto es
Africa’ in Spanish.5 Through ‘Waka, Waka’ and other symbolic markers, audiences were
repeatedly reminded of the location and shown local support for the host team and
other African teams. Thus, there was encouragement to cheer for African teams instead
of or in addition to others. This call to support African nations was somewhat successful,
demonstrating that a nation could supersede other regional and national allegiances if it
was more broadly symbolic. For example, the opening game between South Africa and
Mexico delivered a tied 1-1 result, a relief for a global audience that did not want South
Africa to suffer the humiliation of being the first home team to lose their first round
game.6 The South African team represented the hopes of the continent, and fans through-
out the world saw this tournament location as politically significant.
 8 M. STANFILL AND A. N. VALDIVIA

Such geopolitical factors appear frequently. Brazil, for example, represents the Third
World and all its hope as a global underdog, with its mostly Afro-Brazilian stars dating
back to Pelé. Some respondents specifically identified global inequality as an influence,
saying things like ‘I typically support so-called developing world nations’ or declaring
support for teams with ‘non-European cultural and political traits.’ On the other hand,
with five FIFA titles, Brazil is a fútbol superpower (embarrassing 2014 loss to Germany not-
withstanding), producing a tension between its ‘third world’ and people of color status and
its global sporting status. Moreover, Brazil is one of the rising economies of the world. Can
we, then, keep treating Brazil as an underdog in World Cup competitions? Is it comeup-
pance when they play and summarily defeat their former colonizer Portugal?
What about when they play Ghana or Chile? Global power maps of North–South, East–
West, and Developed–Underdeveloped can thus be ill-fitting for the world’s most
popular sport.
Global inequality was nevertheless a factor that respondents mentioned, with one par-
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ticipant identifying ‘countries that were not colonizers’ as a category that she would cheer.
More dramatically, one interviewee told us that
I think that sport is a space that creates a quasi-egalitarian moment where (yes, referencing
2010) Ghana can trounce the US on the field and even though this has little economic
meaning or social capital, it does something interesting for the psyche.

When such teams can defeat Europe or the United States, it’s tiny revenge for centuries of
colonization and decades of World Bank and IMF policies. Cricket is similarly often under-
stood as a way for the empire to strike back at England (Burdsey, 2006; Crawford, 2004).
Such issues also informed one fan being opposed to Uruguay due to events in the 2010
tournament:
I am sure Uruguayans love Suarez, but basically he blocked a goal by Asamoh Gyan by block-
ing with his hand and that meant that the [Ghana] Blackstars who were at their best in years
were sent home … and even more importantly they had defeated the US in an earlier game

indicating that undoing the ‘striking back’ defeat of the US was prominent in her resent-
ment of Suarez. Another fan noted,
The thing is the world is so unfair, that sometimes we hope that sports – in this case fútbol –
will bring us something like social justice. So at the end of the day it’s not about who played
better, but rather who has historically f——d the other more times, and we support that one
less … So in that sense scoring a goal against Spain or England makes us feel like we are
scoring a goal on history.7

Thus, sports remain, as they were often framed during the Cold War, international political
struggle by other means.
Rejection of traditionally powerful or colonial nations was brought into vivid relief with
Germany. One respondent was critical of Germany’s sense of superiority, saying, ‘they get
too cocky when they play non-contenders. Against Ghana and USA, the Germans did not
play to their full potential. This was also the case against Algeria.’ This intensified when the
team’s celebration after their win included a dance that, according to our German respon-
dent, ‘was definitely derogatory: this is how gauchos walk; this is how Germans walk.’ Uru-
guayan journalist Víctor Hugo Morales strongly critiqued the team’s mode of celebration,
saying that they
 SOCIAL IDENTITIES 9

are – behaving as they did – philosophically a bunch of disgusting Nazis. People who thought
along the same lines as those players killed six million people. In exactly the same way, with
that same way of thinking, that same stupidity and superiority complex. (MARCA.com, 2014)

While the Nazi comparison may seem extreme, our German expatriate had exactly the
same concern: ‘The ramrod straight, in lockstep walking didn’t seem to bother the
audiences cheering, but it bothered me and many other Germans. The Gaucho
Dance became a small 24 [hour] scandal in Germany.’ Thus, political histories resonate
with contemporary sports audiences. Even with globalization, the national retains its
pull;
the idea of nation is so fundamental to the very existence [of] sport – or, more extensively, to
the global media sports cultural complex – that the concept of postnational sport, unlike that
of the shifting constellation of the nation-sport nexus, remains substantively unimaginable.
(Rowe, 2013, p. 25)
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The beautiful (transnational) game

If the World Cup is a transnational sports event, however, the ‘sports’ part is also a vital
consideration. In our interviews, both fans and more casual viewers identified the
games themselves as an important factor, and considerably more often than they
pointed to nation. Sports-related factors for team support have been extensively exam-
ined. Sports audience researchers have identified team history as one key aspect to
team identification (Boyle & Magnusson, 2007; Wann, 2006). The team history that
draws people in could be a history of success (Burdsey, 2006; Kerr & Emery, 2011). For
example, Pawlowski and Anders (2012) note that a visiting team’s brand strength, as a
reputation for quality, can overpower people’s desire to see the home team win. On the
other hand, it is well established that sports spectators bask in the reflected glory of a suc-
cessful team (BIRG-ing) (Cialdini et al., 1976).
While only some respondents directly called themselves fans, many demonstrated a
traditional model of fandom – intensive and extensive engagement with football-as-
sport. Traditional-style fans told us that they prioritized games over work obligations (or
answering our questions). They also recounted their histories, establishing themselves
as longtime fans. Interviewees volunteered this history, much like some volunteered a
self-identification of ‘fan,’ indicating the importance to them of establishing their famili-
arity with the sport. Related to asserting fan identity is establishing loyalty; fans rejected
jumping on the bandwagon as insufficiently dedicated. Sport-focused fans also discussed
games in terms of technical knowledge, including the strategies of various coaches in
terms of field formations or personnel disposition. Sporting knowledge additionally
encompassed discussion of past team performance. Traditional fans also had specific
players they liked or disliked. The final sports-related factor for supporting a team was
the intangible notion of ‘style,’ which scholars have described as ‘ability to play passing,
attractive football’ (Kerr & Emery, 2011, p. 885). Participants also used sports-related
issues to choose between teams. First, several participants told us that they support
winners. However, sometimes there’s excitement, David-and-Goliath style, in rooting for
the underdog. The word ‘underdog’ was mentioned by seven respondents, more than
any other single way of favoring teams. In sum, many participants demonstrated forms
of commitment and identification common for sports fans, suggesting the nation-based
 10 M. STANFILL AND A. N. VALDIVIA

World Cup is not substantively different from other sporting contexts, such that comple-
tely distinguishing global and quotidian sports is inadvisable.
What does differ in the World Cup, however, is that sports factors get articulated to
space, the nation, and the global such that the ability to appreciate the tournament
depends on its transnational character. Fans’ enjoyment of the sport itself relies on trans-
national flows of media and people, undergirded by transnational flow of capital. Much of
the appreciation of game play, that is, relies on access provided by globalized media.
When one fan hoped ‘the winning teams will be the ones which play more attacking
and exciting football and score great goals without resorting to excessive fouling and
diving (though this is probably asking too much, judging by the quarterfinal matches!),’
they desired football that was fun to watch. Some participants explicitly supported
teams that provided good spectatorial experiences. One casual viewer made support
decisions in just this way: ‘I liked watching Germany because of their technical skills. I
also found overall I liked the South American teams because of their fast paced playing.’
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More knowledgeable supporters also used good play as a criterion to assess teams. One
who was a die-hard fan of his country of origin noted, ‘Teams like Colombia and Costa Rica
have gone up on my list of soccer to admire. They played well and clean.’ At times this was
even a support decision: one participant told us, ‘It’s likely that Belgium will be the one I
root for in its next round (against [the] Netherlands) since it really impressed me yesterday
in its game against the US.’ Teams conversely lost support by playing badly or, especially,
unethically. Accordingly, we heard that, ‘I was rooting for Colombia when they played
against Brazil, first because Brazil beat Chile [her country of origin] earlier and second,
because I thought the Brazilian team was playing awful.’ Another interviewee told us,
‘My preference is conditional. For example, if Holland plays bad, I support its adversary;
if the player plays dirty, I support its adversary,’ showing such shifts in a more immediate
way. Importantly, such support decisions demand the capacity, provided by globalized
media, to watch games to assess play.
The distribution and reception of sports communications media at global, ‘glocal,’
transnational, national, and regional levels is therefore an important factor in transnational
sports. In one study, access to media was identified as the most important facilitator of
geographically dispersed people being fans of Liverpool football (Kerr & Emery, 2011).
Voluminous coverage of large events can, Cooper and Tang (2012) note, encourage
people to pay attention simply because of omnipresence, though they indicate that
nonfans may consume sport spectacles differently. While the global scale of events like
the World Cup greatly expands access, availability of games and information is the
minimal condition for support.
Contemporary media provide multiple – and convergent (Jenkins, 2006) – platforms for
media spectacles. Much of the massiveness of contemporary global sporting events is
technologically facilitated, whether by satellite television, web streaming, or Twitter (Bill-
ings & Hardin, 2013; Crawford, 2004). Billings and Hardin (2013, p. 847) note that with
the 2012 London Olympics ‘for the first time, digital coverage exceeded traditional broad-
cast coverage’; particularly, YouTube was highly used in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, indi-
cating how digital media provide access in less-served areas. Indeed, international
communication studies suggest that, contrary to strict media imperialism theory, audi-
ences make choices within constraint based on desire for cultural proximity (Straubhaar,
1991). National location can thus be elided through media. Importantly, this is one way
 SOCIAL IDENTITIES 11

migrant fans can now root for their country of origin, re-accessible through technology,
whereas before if they couldn’t be with the one they loved they perhaps, like Stephen
Stills, had to love the one they were with. However, even this means of accessing
distant sports has limits: The necessity of time shifting (unless those geographically
distant were able to watch at odd hours) required avoiding being spoiled by social
media – and/or not spoiling others. At least one of us ran afoul of these rules, with loud
negative reaction. In such ways, the togetherness cultivated by sport encourages
(mediated) co-presence through simultaneity.8 Alternately, sometimes media structures
constrain support. Depending on one’s viewing location, certain teams and matches are
broadcast more prominently, assuming they will draw the largest audience. In an intra-
national example, the US NFL’s broadcasting rules impede watching geographically
distant teams, constraining fans toward supporting locals (Kraszewski, 2008).9 Our
viewing of 2010 World Cup games in the US and in Spain demonstrated that local
media highlighted the national team and regional rivals. A Spanish national in the US or
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vice versa would have to engage in extra labor to find the matches that they wanted
unless the teams played each other.
The flow of media across the globe is vitally enmeshed with the ways that sports, like
many industries, are transnational. ‘The result of these processes of globalization is that the
organization, style and presentation of sport around the world have become increasingly
similar’ (Crawford, 2004, p. 10). There is now a global prestige economy in football exalting
some countries and regions over others whether they actually compete or not (Burdsey,
2006). Interconnection can also be seen when policy made in response to local labor
laws ripples out globally to all of FIFA (Gardiner & Welch, 2011). At a material level,
sport runs on transnational migration of labor. Recruitment of extranational players to
national leagues has increased (Gardiner & Welch, 2011; Pope & Williams, 2010). Conse-
quently, ‘countrymen playing overseas may act as ambassadors for their native land
and enhance the popularity of team brands outside their domestic market,’ as players
bring interest from their countries of origin or back to them (Kerr & Emery, 2011,
p. 898). A Kenyan participant gestured toward the ways origin can matter alongside
nation of current affiliation when she said she was ‘drawn to Belgium since their striker
is Kenyan-Belgian.’ The players of most top ‘national’ teams play in their origin countries
only for the national team. For example, Argentinian star forward Lionel Messi plays for FC
Barcelona. Kaká, the Brazilian midfielder, played for Real Madrid and holds an Italian pass-
port that allows him to play as an EU citizen. Robinho, Brazilian national team forward,
plays for Milan. Jorge Valdivia, midfielder for Chile, was born in Venezuela and plays pro-
fessionally in Brazil. Coaches, too, aren’t necessarily from the countries that they coach,
even in the World Cup. Marcelo Bielsa, 2010 Chile coach, is Argentinian and has also
coached Argentina’s national team. German Jürgen Klinsmann was the 2014 US coach.
Labor mobility matters because professional team membership was something that
fans used to assess play for national teams – with transnational effects and affects. One
said, ‘I like Arjen Robben since he plays for my German club team. I don’t like his diving
or whining, though I dismiss it when it’s for my team/in our favour.’ Others disliked particu-
lar players as members of rival professional teams. High profile players also attracted antip-
athy, notably Barcelona/Argentina’s Messi. These players’ transnational football careers
impacted how they were perceived playing for their national teams, and often conse-
quently perceptions of the national team itself. Elite fútbol players are transnational
 12 M. STANFILL AND A. N. VALDIVIA

workers and, like other transnational labor migration, ‘drawn disproportionately from
poorer nations with comparatively weak national competitions to play in richer, stronger
national competitions’ (Rowe, 2013, p. 23). Flows of talent not surprisingly channel stars
from Latin America to well-funded teams in Europe and within Latin America to better-
funded teams. Following the 2014 World Cup, Latin American talent was snapped up
by European teams: James Rodriguez of Colombia joined Real Madrid and Alexis
Sanchez of Chile joined Arsenal in the UK. There is also African talent in European
teams, including many European nationals born in Africa who changed their citizenship
after achieving fútbol fame. This global power map is why US coach Klinsmann preferred
to field US players who belonged to European teams because he found US soccer leagues
inauthentic and uncompetitive (Foss, 2014).
Transnational flows of players, audiences, and media are deeply tied to sport’s imbrica-
tion in transnational capital. One key site is corporate sponsorship. Sponsorship impacts
how the game is experienced by audiences, at times with transnational outcomes, such
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as marketing encouraging Pan-Africanism in the 2010 World Cup (Bolsmann, 2012).

Indeed, the international audience for a team, sport, or event is often larger than the dom-
estic one (Kerr & Emery, 2011; Rowe, 2013). Building brands that travel well internationally,
therefore, is lucrative (Kerr & Emery, 2011; Salazar-Sutil, 2008). In these ways, sports-related
and place-related factors are tied together by capital.
This, then, is the attenuated, complex notion of connection that we call transnational affi-
nity. Supporters neither simply cheer their origin nation nor their current nation of residence,
but rather have multiple and shifting allegiances based on context. Some express temporary
and contingent support for larger categories such as the nation of Spain, the region of Africa,
or the geopolitical position of ‘former colony.’ The nations supported by others are outcomes
of processes of transnational flow: not just parental but grandparental origins, not just a
current residence nation but intermediate stops, not just a player’s team in the World Cup
but where they came from before that, not just what’s broadcast in their national territory
but the full fruits of transnational media. In such ways, the meaning of World Cup teams is
shown to be deeply national, but not in any way simply national. It is instead complicatedly
transnational – including the national but going beyond it. This makes for difficult parsing out
of allegiances. Perhaps the most accessible affinity, in an era of neoliberal capital, is that of
global brands, articulated to nations in shifting ways but recognized across the globe, regard-
less of imperial traces (though transnational capital often benefits from imperial histories).

Conclusion
Whereas global sports competitions and spectacles such as the World Cup, the Olympics,
and others purport to represent nations, the reality is far more complicated. Globalization
compels us to conceptualize audiences and fandom in relation to complex and intercon-
nected flows of population, culture, and capital. This project foregrounded fan loyalties
and affinities during the 2014 World Cup to examine these processes. In particular, we
attempted to track national team fan support as the tournament progressed from 32
teams to the final two. We traced the complex affinities of diasporic populations, the
role of regional rivalries and solidarities in support choices, and the differences between
global political power and sports status, using the World Cup and the affective ties that
it generates to explore more complex issues of geopolitical inequality, media imperialism,
 SOCIAL IDENTITIES 13

and digital access. While the size of our interview population precludes making general-
izable claims, this study’s emergent themes are suggestive as directions for future
research. Sports illuminate the dynamic nature of national identity, the fragile coherence
of nation-states, the mobility of labor, and the importance of global capital in producing
hybrid teams playing before hybrid audiences with hybrid allegiances.
When mobility of populations, forced and voluntary, applies as much to fans as to
players, referees, and managers, tracing fandom to nation becomes challenging. Indeed,
World Cup fan loyalties illustrate contradictions many workers, consumers, and citizens
face in a global economy. Foremost among our findings is that transnationalization
greatly challenges the nation-specific nature of team selection and fandom of the Cup.
Nation-based affinities of sport still matter, but ‘the nation’ is the object of transnational
affinity, not simple or spatially located. The nation retains relevance, of course, as most
people still claim citizen rights and mobility – forced or voluntary – around the globe
through national belonging. Nonetheless, transnational capital makes national affinity
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much more flexible, with the value of players enhanced as they migrate to wealthier
teams and regions, branded teams whose uniforms and stadiums bear logos of transna-
tional capital that are easily recognizable by audiences around the globe and whose pro-
minence arguably contributes to the displacement of national identity and regional affect,
and fans developing strategies for parsing affinities, attention, and affect.

Notes
1. We mix and match ‘football’ and ‘fútbol’ throughout.
2. In fact, it might be useful to delineate two types of ‘normal’ fútbol fans: those who follow it
year round and those who tune in every four years for the World Cup.
3. This chant might also be translated as "I am a Spanish, Spanish fag," perhaps adding poign-
ancy to the moment of national pride through the recuperation of the slur.
4. The widespread concern over corruption and infrastructure failures that happened with Brazil
is a more intensified version of this.
5. Ironically, for an anthem that purports to celebrate Africa, ‘Waka Waka’ demonstrated little
concern with the intellectual property rights of African musicians. Both Shakira and Dominican
Republic merengue group ‘Las Chicas del Can’ faced copyright challenges from Cameroonian
group ‘Golden Sounds’ for unauthorized use of one of their hits in ‘Waka Waka.’ These lawsuits
were settled out of court.
6. There was similar support for Brazil as host country in 2014, with two different respondents
noting that they wanted Brazil to win third place, ‘simply to regain a bit of pride as the
host country’ and ‘As the host country, I’d hate for them to finish out this competition
empty-handed.’
7. This is our translation from the original comment in Spanish.
8. Thanks to John Nerone for encouraging us to emphasize this point.
9. Monopolistic rather than geographic constraint produced similar unavailability during the
2012 Olympics, when some events were available only on the version of NBC Sports for
Comcast subscribers because Comcast owned NBC.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank their participants for their generous sharing of their time and experi-
ences as well as John Nerone and Sharon Mazzarella for comments given on an early version of this
article.
 14 M. STANFILL AND A. N. VALDIVIA

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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