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Populism in Sport, Leisure, and Popular Culture; edited by Bryan C.
Clift and
Alan Tomlinson
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Populism in Sport, Leisure, and

Popular Culture
This book examines and establishes the sociological relevance of the concept
of populism and illuminates the ideological use of sport, leisure, and popular
culture in socio-political populist strategies and dynamics. The first part of
the book – Themes, Concepts, Theories – sets the scene by reviewing and
evaluating populist themes, concepts, and theories and exploring their cul-
tural-historical roots in and application to cultural forms such as mega-
sports events, reality television programmes, and music festivals. The second
part – National Contexts and Settings – examines populist elements of
events and regimes in selected cases in South America and Europe: Argen-
tina, Brazil, Greece, Italy, and England. In the third part – Trump Times –
the place of sport in the populist ideology and practices of US President
Donald Trump is critically examined in analyses of Trump’s authoritarian
populism, his Twitter discourse, Lady Gaga at the Super Bowl, and populist
strategy on the international stage. The book concludes with a discussion of
the strong case for a fuller sociological engagement with the populist
dimensions of sport, leisure, and popular cultural forms. Written in a clear
and accessible style, this volume will be of interest to sociologists and social
scientists beyond those specialising in popular culture and cultural politics
of sport and leisure, as the topic of populism and its connection to popular
cultural forms and practices has come increasingly into prominence in the
contemporary world.
Bryan C. Clift is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department

for Health at the University of Bath, UK, where he is the Director of the
Centre for Qualitative Research.
Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of

Brighton, UK, and has written widely on sport, leisure, and popular culture
in their sociological and historical contexts.
Populism in Sport, Leisure, and Popular Culture; edited by Bryan C. Clift and
Alan Tomlinson
Created: 11/12/2020 @ 20:17:57
Populism in Sport, Leisure, and

Popular Culture
Edited by Bryan C. Clift and

Alan Tomlinson
Alan Tomlinson
Created: 11/12/2020 @ 20:18:03
First published 2021

by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Bryan C. Clift and Alan Tomlinson;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Bryan C. Clift and Alan Tomlinson to be identified as the authors of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
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by Taylor & Francis Books
Alan Tomlinson
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Contents
List of figures vii

List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii
PART 1
Themes, concepts, theories 1
1 Populism, sport, leisure, and popular culture: Setting the scene 3
ALAN TOMLINSON, BRYAN C. CLIFT, AND JULES BOYKOFF
2 Whither “the people?”: Populism, ideology, and the contested

politics of sport 26
RICHARD GRUNEAU
3 Populist elements of SINGO discourse and practice: Unravelling

the undercurrents of the popular cultural event 41
ALAN TOMLINSON
4 Neuro-liberalism: Enterprise, gender, and the marketing of

the self 56
DEBORAH PHILIPS
5 The radical populist pitch of the 2009–2011 U2360° Tour 73

MICHAEL WILLIAMS
PART 2
National contexts and settings 87
6 Blame Games: Sport, populism, and crisis politics in Greece 89
JACOB J. BUSTAD
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vi Contents
7 From fascism to five stars: Sport, populism, and the figure of the
leader in Italy 102
SIMON MARTIN
8 Sport, music, and populism in Brazil 122

RENATA MARIA TOLEDO
9 Dilma Rousseff, Brazilian cultural politics, and the Rio 2016

Olympics: Left in Lula’s wake 136
BRYAN C. CLIFT
10 Populism and sports in Latin America: Old and new ways of

narrating the nation 155
PABLO ALABARCES
11 Populism and political motives for hosting the FIFA World

Cup: Comparing England 1966 and Russia 2018 167
ALEX G. GILLETT AND KEVIN D. TENNENT
PART 3
Trump times 183
12 Blue collar billionaire: Trumpism, populism, and uber-sport 185
DAVID L. ANDREWS AND BEN CARRINGTON
13 A tale of two Twitterstorms: The NFL, Donald Trump, and

digital populism 202
JULES BOYKOFF
14 The Gaga and the global: American double articulation at Super

Bowl LI 220
DAFNA KAUFMAN
15 Art of the deal: Donald Trump, the 2026 FIFA Men’s World
Cup, and the geopolitics of football aspiration 234
ADAM S. BEISSEL AND DAVID L. ANDREWS
16 Afterword: A sociological future for populism? 254

BRYAN C. CLIFT AND ALAN TOMLINSON
Index 260
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Chapter 10
Populism and sports in

Latin America
Old and new ways of narrating the nation
Pablo Alabarces
From conservative protection to popular practice

In 1912, Argentine President Roque Sáenz Peña sent former President Julio
Argentino Roca (1880–1886 and 1898–1904) on a diplomatic mission to Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil. Roca took advantage of the simultaneous visit of an
Argentine football (soccer) team to Brazil and accompanied the players in
two friendly matches against squads from Rio de Janeiro (Carioca) and
from São Paulo (Paulista); the Brazilian national team had yet to be inven-
ted. The former president had already taken the Argentine squad on a
diplomatic visit in 1908: in the match between the national team and a
combined Carioca-Paulista side, the Argentines won 3–2. The two new
matches in 1912 were held in both Brazilian cities, allowing Paulista (who
lost 6–2) to play at home in São Paulo and Carioca (who lost 4–0) in Rio de
Janeiro.
Evidently, the former President was also a football fan, since in 1904 he
had already been the first Latin American President to attend an interna-
tional football match – the 3–0 defeat of Argentine club Alumni to South-
ampton of England, the first international match in the history of football in
Argentina and possibly the entire continent of Latin America. On the day of
the second match in Rio de Janeiro, another legend was born. At the end of
the first half, with goals from Ernesto Brown, Alberto Ohaco, and two from
Harry Hayes, Argentina was already leading 4–0. Roca went to the Argentine
changing room and asked the players to: “let themselves be beat for the
homeland.” As the numbers confirm, the match ended with the same four
goal difference; it is worth wondering if the political influence of Roca –
military officer and politician who dominated the Argentine scene over forty
years from 1879 until his death in 1914 – was inversely proportional to his
footballing influence. On the other hand, a parallel legend claims that the
captain of the Argentine squad, the mythical Juan Brown, star of Alumni,
responded to Roca’s request: “General, politics are politics and football is
football.” Beyond the legend, the matches did actually exist, and there are
photographs of Roca at Das Laranjeiras stadium alongside Brazilian
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156 Pablo Alabarces
President Marshall Hermes Rodrigues da Fonseca and Minister Manuel

Ferraz de Campo Sales, the senior politicians of both nations.
During the first years of the twentieth century, the presence of Latin
American heads of state at sporting events was persistent: inaugurating sta-
diums, attending important matches, including football in school curricula,
intervening to solve institutional crises within the football associations as in
the simultaneous Argentine and Uruguayan cases in 1926. From the very
beginning of the 20th century, and especially once the processes of popular-
isation were advanced, leading to football’s transformation into a mass phe-
nomenon, politicians of every ideology and, in reality, all conservatives
immersed themselves in football avatars. They imagined, suspected, or
understood that popular desires had found in football a fertile field to grow,
and they decided to apply the old saying panem et circenses (bread and cir-
cuses) to the (fallacious) idea that football entertainment would protect them
from other risks such as strikes and rebellions.
Of course, this is a field of opposing opinions, which has never settled the
discussion one way or the other. A quick look at Latin American history
reveals that despite the vain attempts of the political use of football to avoid
or prevent, or at least impede, them, strikes and rebellions spread through-
out the entire continent; even revolutions in some cases. In general, political
history has not paid much attention to the greater or lesser presence of
football in a society to explain the causes or consequences of political, eco-
nomic, and social phenomena; no one has ever dared to affirm that some
popular insurrection or protest was halted because the subjects were too
busy watching Pelé’s matches.
Nevertheless, the discussion regarding the political efficacy of power’s
instrumentation of football “smokescreens” does concur on one thing: Latin
American leaders believed and believe without a doubt that this efficacy is
indisputable. The more football they offer the masses, the less these will tend
toward riots or protests; the more sporting successes accredited to a politi-
cian during his term, the greater his chances to be eternalised in history, or
at least in the popular memory. In other words, this relationship does not
exist and it has never been verified, but the dominant groups believe in it as
though it were an indisputable truth. Sporting efforts to consolidate political
power are discussed in a Greek context in Chapter 6 by Jacob Bustad, in an
Italian context in Chapter 7 by Simon Martin, and in Brazilian contexts by
Renata Toledo and Bryan Clift in Chapters 8 and 9, respectively.
It is difficult to find cases in which political attention toward sporting
phenomena stems from a popular and democratic vocation, a sports policy
that posits the need to expand the practice and consumption of sport simply
as a popular right, for example. Perhaps, some exceptions have been the
sport policies implemented during the first Argentine Peronism or, more
drastically, in the case of Cuba after the 1959 Revolution, or even its Sandi-
nista Nicaraguan imitation in 1979 (Alabarces, 2009; Sugden et al., 1990).
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Populism and sports in Latin America 157
Nonetheless, in each case, football was not involved. Then again, football
had become a mass phenomenon very early on and, consequently, also had
become a spectacle, or commodity, which national governments had very
little opportunity to appropriate and even less intentions of distributing
democratically. It is possible that the most noteworthy example was the very
recent nationalisation of the television broadcasting rights of football in
Argentina between 2009 and 2016, but even this initiative, the most notor-
ious advance on the “private” property of the television monopoly on the
continent’s football narratives, was much closer related to the Peronist gov-
ernment’s goal of attacking the multimedia conglomerate Clarín – the holder
and beneficial owner of the broadcasting rights – than with the alleged
“democratisation” they proclaimed (Alabarces, 2014). Anyway, we return to
this case later.
Nevertheless, even until today the presence of government leaders and
state policies has accompanied the whole process we are narrating. If mere
match attendance was already an indicator – Argentine President Alejo Julio
Argentino Roca Paz’s presence at the fixture between Alumni and South-
ampton in 1904 shared, at the very least, a spectacle of his own social class
put on for itself – after 1930 this would become procedure during the dic-
tatorship of Getulio Vargas in Brazil through to the subsequent democratic
government, according to German historian Stefan Rinke (Rinke, 2007).
Until then, a more or less active, or merely honorary intervention, such as
the presentation of an award, existed at the school or institutional level.
Since the 1930s, active involvement appeared in the construction of sta-
diums throughout the entire continent, in some cases the property of local
government. Nacional of Lima was inaugurated by the dictator Augusto
Leguía as early as 1923 and re-inaugurated in 1952 by the dictator Manuel
Odría. Nacional of Santiago de Chile was inaugurated by Arturo Alessandri
in 1938 and re-inaugurated (for the football World Cup) by his son, also
President, Jorge Alessandrini in 1962. Nonetheless, this also occurred with
club stadiums: both the Monumental Stadium of River Plate (1938) and the
Bombonera of Boca Juniors (1940) were constructed in the same decade.
Both projects were made possible thanks to the concession of cheap loans
from the national government presided by General Justo, who rose to power
through the conservative fraud of that era. As a “colourful” aside, River
Plate’s stadium was later remodelled and re-inaugurated in 1978 by General
Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorial regime to be the headquarters of that year’s
football World Cup.
The period of Brazilian political history from 1930 until Vargas’s suicide
in 1954, known as Varguism, was the first successful populism in Latin
America (see also Chapter 8 this volume for further discussion of Vargas’s
populism). Its significant interest in sport could only be emulated by the
second great populism; Argentine Peronism between 1945 and 1955, with
various returns to power (1973–1976, 1989–1999, and 2002–2015). This
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158 Pablo Alabarces
interest was manifested in the construction of stadiums like the Pacaembú in

São Paulo, inaugurated in 1940, though the Maracaná was not built by
Vargas but rather by his successor, Gaspar Dutra. We can also see this
attention to sport in the creation of the Conselho Nacional de Desportos
(National Council on Sport) in 1941, the first political institution dedicated
to developing specific athletic programmes on a national level. Brazil was,
until those years, a poorly integrated nation due to its geographic expanse as
well as its social economic, political, and cultural disparities. Furthermore,
the coverage provided by the newly founded National Radio, created by
Vargas in 1936, based out of Rio de Janeiro but with a national reach, con-
tributed to the diffusion of football across the whole country.
On a wider scale, what Varguism deployed was an operation through
which the great popular culture formations were captured – samba, football,
carnival, capoeira. These were transformed into national symbols proposed
by the central state, according to the Brazilian anthropologist, Renato Ortiz
(1991). The footballing triumphs from 1938 onwards, on a continental and
eventually international level, contributed to this operation: they allowed for
the suppression of racial inequalities with the myth of a footballing racial
democracy and aided in the fight against the “complexo de vira-lata” (an
approximate translation would be “stray-dog complex”), an expression
coined by journalist and dramaturge Nelson Rodrigues to label a supposed
Brazilian “inferiority complex”, which would be debunked by the footbal-
ling triumphs between 1958 and 1970. The sports journalist and devout
Varguist Mario Filho, a great proponent of the football World Cup in 1950,
as well as the construction of the Maracaná stadium, would invent the first
samba school parade at the Carioca Carnival. His journal, Mundo Esportivo
(Sporting World), invented the parade in 1932 to cover the slow sporting
months due to a lack of competitions. Soon after, as we know, carnivals
would become one of the greatest tourist attractions of the city and another
national symbol.
The first Argentine populism

As analysed in Fútbol y Patria (Football and Fatherland (Alabarces, 2002)), the
relationship between the Argentine State and football has been ever chan-
ging, but took off during Peronism: sporting accounts, in which plebeian
heroes obtained international glory representing the “people”, were meticu-
lously aligned with the narratives proposed by the administration of Juan
Domingo Perón between 1945 and 1955. This can be observed in journalistic
and cinematographic accounts. The state edited a weekly massive sporting
publication, Mundo Deportivo (Sporting World), which presented the “Pero-
nist interpretation” of sporting events not in the State’s name, but organised
by the purported “climate of the times”. However, Peronism also acted on a
more concrete and pedestrian level, not just in narratives. In a recent book
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on the period, Israeli historian Raanan Rein (2015) indicates that Peronism
represented itself simultaneously as many things: government propaganda,
of course, and attempts of social control under the cloak of “class reconci-
liation” that populism tried, and tries, to achieve; at the same time, Peronism
proposed, as we said, the production of democratic narratives in which
popular sporting heroes could represent patriotism. It also established mas-
sive athletic programmes. In the cases analysed by Rein and his collabora-
tors, it can be clearly seen that State intervention in sport was complex. For
example, during the football players’ strike in 1948, the negotiation between
various actors can be seen: civil servants, key government figures – Eva
Perón herself – sporting directors, labour unionists, with postures that even
contradicted the official administration and were not stifled or suffocated in
an authoritarian manner. Conflict resolution was far from following official
expectations.
Likewise, Rein’s research stems from the base that sport clubs, civil
associations in Argentina, were key mediators in the organisation of the
phenomenon: the analysis of different cases shows the different relation-
ships in which the popular clubs engage with the national or provincial
government, meticulously negotiating honour and benefits from the mod-
erate to the excessive, generally in the form of loans for athletic facilities,
or simply to get out of tough situations. Although a certain mythology
focuses on the case of Racing Club, favoured by state credits for the
building of its new stadium, named President Perón. Historical research
reveals two things. On the one hand, the principal actor involved was
Minister Ramón Cereijo, fanatic of Racing Club, not Perón directly.
Nobody knew with complete certainty if the president was a supporter of
Racing Club or Boca Juniors or if he didn’t even care for football. On the
other hand, a 1947 law enabling the concession of loans to athletic institu-
tions imitated a similar one dictated by the conservative Presidency of
General Justo ten years earlier.
In 1951 at Wembley stadium (London), Argentina and England played
their first football match in history: the English team won 2–1, a result which
the Argentines judged as a dignified defeat in which goalkeeper Miguel
Rugilo was the indispensable hero (nicknamed “the Lion of Wembley”). The
rematch was played two years later in Buenos Aires, and Argentina defeated
the “perfidious Albion” for the first time, 3–1. This time, the hero was
Ernesto Grillo who converted a goal which would be called “rioplatense”
(from the River Plate region) by the euphoric sports press of the era – the
characterisation alluded to the goal’s combination of surprise, dribbling, and
quality, traits typical of the “estilo criollo” (“creole style”). Argentine author
Osvaldo Bayer, in his script for the documentary film Fútbol Argentino
(Argentine Football), asserts that he found a newspaper of the time which said:
“First we nationalised the trains [Perón had done so in 1949], today we
nationalise football.”
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160 Pablo Alabarces
This match was played on 14 May 1953: in its memory, the Day of the
Argentine (Male) Footballer is celebrated, a new wrinkle in the nation’s
unwavering local narcissism.
Military times
A few years later, already into the 1960s, almost the entire subcontinent was
living under military regimes, which would consolidate their power in the
following decade. In 1978, only Mexico, Costa Rica, and Venezuela enjoyed
democratic administrations, while Colombia was amidst a civil war. The
ways in which football felt the consequences of Latin American totalitarian-
ism were very different, but the climax can be found in the organisation of
the 1978 football World Cup in Argentina.
Argentina was chosen in 1966 as host of the 1978 football World Cup,
twelve years earlier when there was a democratic President. When the
administrators returned to Argentina, the dictator Juan Carlos Onganía was
in power. The first serious steps of the organisation were taken during the
democratic government of 1973, but the definitive organisation was carried
out by the most infamous dictatorship in Argentine history, which began in
1976 and lasted until 1983.
Argentina won its own World Cup; it was the last country-host to do so until
France 1998, and since then it has not happened again. Both the organisation and
the elaboration of the tournament took place in an ominous and repressive cli-
mate, which included the explicit prohibition of criticism of the national football
team in the press. The stadium where the inauguration and the final were played,
River Plate’s Monumental, was located 200 metres from the worst concentration
camp and extermination facility of the dictatorship, the sinister Mechanical
School of the Navy (ESMA). The costs of the tournament were extremely high;
it was more expensive than the following tournament in Spain, even though eight
fewer teams participated. The groups of political exiles in Europe moved in
favour of a boycott by the European teams, accusing the military government of
the disappearance and torture of dissenters, but no government or football
association adhered. Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)
was even less inclined to boycott; at that time the governing body was led by the
only Latin American to reach the presidency, Brazilian João Havelange, who
explicitly supported the Argentine dictatorship; he was, after all, a recognised
party member of the Brazilian dictatorship of the time. Unconvinced by the
support at FIFA, in the following years, Havelange named the Argentine Carlos
Lacoste, a high-ranking navy officer, as Vice President with responsibility for the
organisation of the tournament. Lacoste was widely and repeatedly accused of
much of the uncontrolled corruption surrounding the competition.
At any rate, football was also played, with the presence of a still strong
Peruvian team which would win its group, and a Brazilian squad which fin-
ished far short of the post-Pelé legacy, barely making it through to the
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second round. However, in the next round, the three Latin American teams
ended up in the same group along with Poland. Peru lost to Brazil and
Poland to Argentina in the first match. The second fixture saw Peru lose
once again but this time against Poland, while Brazil and Argentina ended in
a goalless draw. In the third match, Brazil defeated Poland 3–1 two hours
before the match between Argentina and Peru, obligating the home team to
win by at least four goals in order to make it to the final against Holland.
As the world now knows, Argentina would go on to win 6–0.
The controversy surrounding the match with Peru began significantly after
the tournament. In Argentina, nobody doubted the legitimacy and legality of
the triumph, though in the rest of the world, principally in the Brazilian
press, the game was quickly and repeatedly classified as the product of an act
of corruption, of negotiations between governments, of massive bribes. In
1979, Peruvian player Rodulfo Manzo, who had recently joined Argentine
club Vélez Sarsfield, confirmed in a conversation with his new teammates
that all the Peruvian players were paid bribes, except Juan José Muñante.
Argentine journalist Pablo Llonto managed to obtain the testimony of Per-
uvian player Juan Carlos Oblitas who, in 1986, affirmed that: “Four or five
Peruvian players received money” (Llonto, 2005).
At the same time, Ricardo Gotta, the Argentine journalist who worked
the most thoroughly on that fateful fixture, lists Manzo’s confession, suspi-
cious calls between Argentine and Peruvian government officials, the dona-
tion of wheat (estimated at $2 million), the fluid contact between both
dictatorships, and the fact that the son of Peruvian dictator Morales Ber-
múdez presided over the delegation (Gotta, 2008).
The best interpretation of this scandal was offered by the 2003 documentary
film Mundial 78: la historia paralela (World Cup 78: the parallel story), scripted by
Argentine journalist Ezequiel Fernández Moores. The film was the first to affirm
that the dictator Videla visited the Peruvian changing room, accompanied by
none less than former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to speak about
Latin American unity and wish the athletes luck. In the documentary, Juan Carlos
Oblitas does not hesitate to label the action as a kind of pressure, though he claims
to be unaware of any bribes or other explicit suggestions, despite his 1986 state-
ment to the contrary. It seems that the presence of the dictator was enough to
pressure the Peruvians. It is unknown whether Videla violated the intimacy of the
Argentine changing room before any of the matches, though he routinely visited
the players afterwards; it seems nevertheless that his presence with the Peruvians
that night functioned as a successful and suggestive manoeuvre. With or without
bribes and/or grain shipments, the presence of Videla must have sufficed.
The opium of the people?

Amidst the pain and the repression of the dictatorships, football sometimes
functioned as a free space. Of course, this supposes the contradiction of the
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162 Pablo Alabarces
modern opium of the people hypothesis, which was popular amongst intellec-
tual sectors at the end of the 1960s on the southern continent. According to
this premise, football emerged as a kind of substitute for religion to desen-
sitise and derange the popular conscience. Thanks to football, the public’s
attention would be distracted from what was actually important – the
exploitation, the totalitarianism – to be preoccupied with such banalities as
the goals of Pelé or Maradona. In Latin America, this hypothesis was, sys-
tematically, tied to conservative right-wing military dictatorships, never to
“populist” regimes.
This theory was emphatically refuted in the early 1980s by the first scho-
lars of sport on the continent, specifically Brazilian anthropologist Roberto
Da Matta. In a compilation titled O universo do futebol (The Football Universe),
Da Matta (1982) rejected this interpretation, demonstrating how the world of
football facilitated a representation of the dilemmas and conflicts of Brazilian
society – its injustice, its racism – and not their concealment. However, at
the same time, football enabled the development of a fiction that all fans
recognise as such but still enjoy: about a transitory equality, a democracy
imagined on the field of play, a place where the weak can defeat the power-
ful, as is remarked by Allen Guttmann (1994). In this manner, the Brazilian
dictatorship could celebrate the triumph of Mexico 1970 as its own while the
crowds (astutely?) gave themselves up to carnivalesque celebrations, to that
form of celebration which inverts hierarchies and frees bodies and souls, at
least temporarily. The same could be said of the popular celebrations in
Argentina in 1978: it was the only time when the streets could be occupied
during the dictatorial terror, celebrating a sporting victory that did not,
necessarily, include the oppressors. The mobilisations in Buenos Aires
avoided Plaza de Mayo, the political centre of the nation, where popular
political demonstrations were regularly held. The fans were celebrating their
players, not necessarily their dictators.
Undoubtedly, both dictatorships hoped to capitalise politically on the
successes, but neither could prove, undoubtedly, that their goal had been
achieved.
Brazil 2014: the return to the state–populist machine

The situation changed with the democratic transitions at the end of the 1980s in
Latin America. The same dictatorial excess of the previous decades generated
certain reservations toward the use of sport. The open association of the dicta-
torships with football competitions and their political utilisation drove the new
democratic governments to approach the relationship with caution; the actual
efficacy of such political interventions was never, as previously noted, proved in
terms of social behaviours. The 1990s, known as the “neoliberal” era on the
entire continent, came with the arrival of conservative administrations which,
nonetheless, employed right-wing neo-populist rhetoric. At any rate, the
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relationship between politics and football continued to be understood accord-

ing to the myth we have already explained: the elites’ absolute confidence in
football’s capacity to “distract the masses”, with absolutely no proof to confirm
its efficacy. As analysed in Football and Fatherland (2002), a neo-populist rheto-
ric, the celebration of a presumed “national unity” of football consumers,
would dominate the market – journalism, advertising, and marketing.
The arrival of the new century meant the emergence in almost all of Latin
America of progressive administrations, characterised as a “pink tide”
among North American political scholars (such as Marc Zimmerman and
Luis Ochoa Bilbao). Conservative groups decided that the most appropriate
way to describe these governments was as “populists”; however, the only
trait in common was in several equal-income distribution policies. The
football rhetoric was not modified: it was still more market than government
related. It is worth noting that the Latin American President who gave the
most importance to football symbolism was the Colombian conservative
Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018), who even campaigned for the presidency
wearing the national team’s jersey. This was not about a “populist”, not even
close. He clashed relentlessly with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez
(1999–2013), a kind of symbol of the progressive “populisms” of the con-
tinent. In that sense, a good case for analysis is the experience of the Kirch-
nerist administrations in Argentina (led by Néstor Kirchner and his wife,
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, democratic presidents between 2003–2007
and 2007–2015, respectively).
Kirchnerism had proposed a new legitimacy of traditional Peronist dis-
courses: the old national-popular narrative, adjusted slightly to the new
times, which included the condemning of the neo-liberal decade – though it
was also led by a Peronist, Carlos Menem (1989–1999). This new legitimacy
implied the explicit affirmation of the return of the State as a central actor in
social and economic life. Although this was not completely verified – the
organisation of the economy remained in large part in the hands of private
corporations – the affirmation was resounding: the State had returned to
fulfil the functions it should never have lost, its narrative functions included.
The central role of the State as patriotic narrator in Argentine society had
returned with force. Before this, football could not propose alternative dis-
courses because it had never done so, not even in conservative times. When
the figure of Diego Armando Maradona enabled a somewhat autonomous
tale, it had consisted in exhibiting the continuity of the old national-popular
Peronist narrative. By bringing this back to the scene, in its newly State-pro-
posed version, as in the old and nostalgic days of the first Peronism – which
continues to operate as a kind of Golden Age of modern Argentina – football
could not embody any efficient national narrative again. It could barely pre-
sent its survival as a commodity, controlled by the market, with commercial
advertisements as the great foundation of its texts. As the meanings of the
fatherland had once again returned to discussion in political contexts, football
Alan Tomlinson
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164 Pablo Alabarces
was left only with the empty yet grandiloquent rhetoric of its sponsors, which
continued to be plagued with the clichés of patriotic sermons.
The problem is that the Argentine government did the same.
In 2009, the programme Fútbol para Todos (Football for All) appeared, the
nationalisation of the broadcast of Argentine domestic football, which was
later complemented in 2011 by Deporte para Todos (Sport for All) which
established the mandate for the open transmission on public television of
any sporting event involving decisive competitions for Argentine athletes.
Thus, a policy of patrimonialisation of sport was presented, framing the con-
sideration of certain intangible goods, insomuch cultural and mediatic pro-
ducts, as public patrimony. The Argentine government had produced a legal
instrument that finally confirmed the relationship between sport and father-
land, at least as patrimony of a national-popular culture: a kind of definitive
affirmation of the nationalist possibilities of sport. Nevertheless, it limited
itself to produce sport – it could only produce it – as a cultural commodity,
a kind of ratification that, despite democratic temptations, the dominant
logic is that of a cultural industry. At this point, there is no patriotism which
is more than simply merchandise. The sports that the national government
incorporated as patrimony were, of course, just those with significant televi-
sion audiences: the rest were not worth worrying about.
In 2014, however, things got complicated. Once again, Fútbol para Todos had
acquired the exclusive broadcast rights for the football World Cup in Brazil,
monopolising almost the entire voice on television, at least on open access
channels (the cable network TyC Sports as well as the satellite network, Direct
TV, also transmitted Argentina’s matches). First, the programme presented its
journalists in a formation like a football team, wearing suits but also with jer-
seys and football boots, singing the national anthem on a pitch while imitating
the movements of players with the slogan “a football team and a team of
journalists for one unique Argentine passion”. In this way, the press coverage
resembled the game itself, as though representative. Let us put it this way: the
journalists also went for the conquest of the Cup, which could explain why
the commentaries were so unbearably patriotic, loudmouthed, xenophobic
and even racist, and also homophobic.
Along with the journalistic performances, State advertisements were also
promulgated. As in the transmission of domestic football matches, the
public broadcast prioritised the slots to promote the State’s advertisements.
One politically correct advertisement condemned human trafficking at mega-
events. Others banalised the State’s supposedly successful social “inclusion”
programmes – obtaining a credit for a home, graduating at a new uni-
versity – transforming them in goal celebrations of their beneficiaries
(another now explicit turn of the screw in the footballisation of the social
and political). However, the culmination was the advertisement “Nobody
wins a World Cup alone,” which assimilated all the “achievements” of the
Kirchner administrations with the avatars of the national team: “to win, the
Alan Tomlinson
Created: 11/12/2020 @ 20:21:51

country must be united.” Journalist Horacio Verbitsky, a Kirchnerist acti-

vist, affirmed that it was a:
fallacy which descended directly from the rhetoric used by the dictator-
ship during the 1978 World Cup and which was reiterated in the
unbearable commentaries of the commentator of Argentina’s matches
[…] This piece constitutes an unbearable banalisation and a spurious use
of serious issues
(Verbitsky, 2014, p. 10)
A theoretical, as always provisional, conclusion

Of course, the resemblance that Verbitsky finds with the dictatorship’s dis-
course is just that, a resemblance. It is not about identity. The continuity is
in the desire, common to democratic and authoritarian, conservative or
populist, governments, to use the supposed benefits of football to their
favour: to manipulate or to transfer athletic success to political success. As
we have pointed out, the dictatorship aimed for both the famous “smo-
kescreen” and civil consensus whereas in the case of Kirchnerism, the
administration attempted to tie a strong athletic performance to a national–
popular narrative of an era.
In the 2018 football World Cup, the new conservative administrations of
Argentina and Brazil – which replaced the allegedly “populist” and pro-
gressive prior administrations – along with the already conservative govern-
ments of Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Costa Rica, employed the
same nationalist rhetoric that associated athletic success with supposed or
disputed national grandeur. There were no differences between them, but
rather levels: the persistent use of Colombia’s national team jersey by Pre-
sident Santos; the systematic utilisation of football language by Argentine
President Mauricio Macri; embanderamiento ceremonies such as the assign-
ment of an official flag of the Mexican team by President Enrique Peña
Nieto. All of them are conservative presidents and opponents of an alleged
populism.
Essentially, it involves a combination of two logics, which the literature had
tended to describe as opposing or irreducible: on the one hand, the national-
popular logic which understands the State as a machine that produces demo-
cratic meanings and, on the other hand, the neoliberal-conservative logic that
trusts the market – which it calls civil society – as the only enunciator and nar-
rator. In reality, here we see the points of contact between populism and neo-
liberalism: populism only adds passion, affectivity, and massiveness to what
neoliberalism has already transformed into televisual merchandise. In short,
even with the novelty of the patrimonialisation of televised Argentine sport –
radically original in the context of Latin America, where no other government
has dared to interfere with the colossal business of the networks – these
Alan Tomlinson
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166 Pablo Alabarces
processes can be described as another twist: the reconciliation of both political

and narrative logics.
Or we can suggest another definition: ultimately, they are all populists.
Conservative populists or progressive populists, even when the former
strongly refuse to be qualified as such; all of them propose a discourse in
which sports representation implies national representation. As we have
discussed here, they all firmly believe that this association means political
revenue among their communities; because Latin America is a fundamen-
tally football continent, all of them privilege football over any other sport;
and they all shift women’s practices to a forgotten background, accepting
that national representation is only effectively exercised by men. All of them
trust, ultimately, although they cannot state it explicitly, that sport – and
football specially – is the modern opium of the people. It is, in short, a
populism with very little confidence in the people.
References
Alabarces, P. 2002. Fútbol y Patria. El Fútbol y las Narrativas de la Nación en Argentina.
Buenos Aires: Prometeo.
Alabarces, P. 2009. El deporte en América Latina. Razón y Palabra, 69, julio–septiembre,
pp. 1–19.
Alabarces, P. 2014. Héroes, Machos y Patriotas. El Fútbol, Entre la Violencia y los
Medios. Buenos Aires: Aguilar.
Alabarces, P. 2018. Historia Mínima del Fútbol en América Latina. México: El Colegio
de México.
Bayer, O. 1990. Fútbol Argentino. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.
Da Matta, R. 1982. O Universo do Futebol: Esporte e Sociedade Brasileira. Río de
Janeiro: Pinakotheke.
Gotta, R. 2008. Fuimos Campeones. La Dictadura, el Mundial 78 y el Misterio del 6 a 0 a
Perú. Buenos Aires: Edhasa.
Guttmann, A. 1994. Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Llonto, P. 2005. La Vergüenza de Todos. Buenos Aires: Editorial de las Madres de
Plaza de Mayo.
Ortiz, R. 1991. Lo actual y la modernidad. Nueva Sociedad, 116, pp. 94–101.
Rein, R. 2015. La Cancha Peronista: Fútbol y Política 1946–1955. San Martín, Argen-
tina: UNSAM.
Rinke, S. 2007. ¿La última pasión verdadera? Historia del fútbol en América Latina
en el contexto global. Iberoamericana, VII (27), pp. 85–100.
Sugden, J., Tomlinson, A., & McCartan, E. 1990. The making and remaking of white
lightning in Cuba: Politics, sport and physical education thirty years after the
Revolution. Arena Review 14 (1), pp. 101–109.
Verbitsky, H. 2014. Vamos, Argentina. Página, 12, 6/7/14, p. 10.

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Populism in Sport, Leisure, and Popular Culture; edited by Bryan C.

T&F PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

Populism in Sport, Leisure, and

Bryan C. Clift is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department

Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of

T&F PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

Populism in Sport, Leisure, and

Edited by Bryan C. Clift and

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First published 2021

ISBN: 978-0-367-35638-5 (hbk)

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List of ﬁgures vii

2 Whither “the people?”: Populism, ideology, and the contested

3 Populist elements of SINGO discourse and practice: Unravelling

4 Neuro-liberalism: Enterprise, gender, and the marketing of

5 The radical populist pitch of the 2009–2011 U2360° Tour 73

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8 Sport, music, and populism in Brazil 122

9 Dilma Rousseﬀ, Brazilian cultural politics, and the Rio 2016

10 Populism and sports in Latin America: Old and new ways of

11 Populism and political motives for hosting the FIFA World

13 A tale of two Twitterstorms: The NFL, Donald Trump, and

14 The Gaga and the global: American double articulation at Super

16 Afterword: A sociological future for populism? 254

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Populism and sports in

From conservative protection to popular practice

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President Marshall Hermes Rodrigues da Fonseca and Minister Manuel

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interest was manifested in the construction of stadiums like the Pacaembú in

The ﬁrst Argentine populism

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The opium of the people?

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Brazil 2014: the return to the state–populist machine

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relationship between politics and football continued to be understood accord-

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country must be united.” Journalist Horacio Verbitsky, a Kirchnerist acti-

A theoretical, as always provisional, conclusion

T&F PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

processes can be described as another twist: the reconciliation of both political

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