This study explores how televised football in Poland serves as a site for the (re)construction of discourses surrounding race and ethnicity and to what extent this squares with previous studies on sport media conducted mainly in Western countries. In our analysis, we identify the discourses surrounding race and ethnicity that the commentators in televised football draw on and examine how they relate to hegemonic discourses and categorizations in wider Polish society. Our findings show that Polish football commentators draw on transnationally circulating racialized/ethnicized discourses on assumed superior physicality when talking about Black football players and on supposed negative psychological capabilities when talking about White Southern European football players. The findings also show that when talking about non-Polish players and head coaches, the commentators regularly rely on an us-versus-them frame that constructs foreign influences as a threat.
International football can be considered the main site for meaning-making processes related to national and racial/ethnic diversity. Various scholars have argued how international football, with the World Cup as its apex, can be seen as a barometer for understanding dominant attitudes towards societal diversity. A key domain where this diversity is interpreted and given meaning to is mediated football. To provide a wider overview of – often intersecting – meanings given to nationality and race/ethnicity over a longer period of time, this explorative study uses a historical approach to inquire how Dutch-mediated football – especially football commentary on television – has given meaning to a diversifying Dutch national team at three moments in time (the World Cups of 1974, 1998 and 2014). Further, it discusses how mediated football serves as a site for the (re)construction of discourses surrounding nationality and race/ethnicity in the Netherlands. Our findings show that meanings given to nationality and race/ethnicity are fluid, context-dependent and reconstructed in a particular temporal context. Further, it appears that key players have provided a significant role in meanings given to (super-)diversity of the Dutch national football team. Commentary on White Dutch key players was dominated by positive comments (in the World Cups of 1974 and 2014), while comments on Black Surinamese Dutch key players was relatively more negative (in the 1998 World Cup). Moreover, our results contrast with earlier studies in that Dutch commentators did not rely on stereotypical representations of Black Dutch footballers as ‘naturally’ athletic.
The racial/ethnic diversity that can be seen in televised football, together with its wide audience, makes it an interesting place to study meanings given to race/ethnicity. Previous research on the content of these discourses has found that televised football in different countries reproduces a variety of racial/ethnic stereotypes. These discourses arguably help to perpetuate and ‘naturalize’ racial/ethnic inequities. In order to better illuminate how sport media serves as a site where discourses surrounding race/ethnicity are (re)constructed, a fruitful yet understated direction of future research would be to look at the production process of such discourses. Although the theoretical value of production studies has been noted in previous work, there is at this time a shortage of empirical production studies in sport media. The present article describes some of the main findings of previous research on the representation of race/ethnicity in televised football (a dominant subject of research in this area) and audience reception research. Furthermore, the article focuses on main findings from production studies in sport media, supplementing a focus on race/ethnicity with describing production studies on gender – as most production studies have mainly focused on gender and provide relevant insights for the study of race/ethnicity. We conclude with some future research avenues highlighting the importance of exploring production processes in relation to meanings given to race/ethnicity in sport media.
This study explores the meanings given to race/ethnicity by Polish commentators covering games of the Polish national football team on TV. There will be an explicit focus on how such patterns of representation might intersect with those given to national identities in the context of international football. Our analysis reveals that commentators habitually reproduce the racialized stereotype of the ‘natural Black athlete’, particularly in the representation of Black African football players. White players remain more ‘invisible’ in the commentary, yet also here the intersection with national or wider regional backgrounds inflects the patterns of representation. For instance, White Portuguese and White Bosnian players are represented in a fashion that suggests they are placed outside of hegemonic Polish understandings of White (sporting) masculinity. This reveals the contingency and complexity of discourses of Whiteness in the Polish context. The findings reveal that the normativity of European Whiteness is also reflected in the meanings given to Polishness by the commentators, which are imbued with notions of psychological (masculine) Whiteness.
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