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Visualizing the game: global perspectives on football in Africa1
Susann Ballera, Giorgio Miescherb and Ciraj Rassoolc
aDepartment of History, University of Basel, Switzerland; bUniversity of Basel and Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Switzerland; cDepartment of History, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Introduction
Football, in many ways, is a visual endeavour. From the visual experience within the stadium itself to worldwide media representations, from advertisements to football art and artefacts, football is much about seeing and being seen; about watching, making visual and being visualized; about representing and being represented. At all levels of the game, ranging from a FIFA World Cup final to an ordinary youth soccer game played on the street, football is a profoundly visual experience. One of the formal elements of the game relates to the visual landscape of the street or pitch, and players arranged in formations of defence and attack, with attention to the geometries of passing, crossing and the offside rule. Good players are spoken of as possessing âvisionâ, in being able to visualize the patterns of play and likely trajectories of the ball.
Football is also enjoyed by viewers, either arranged simply as a crowd or, more formally, as supporters who are assigned different sections of the stadium. These spectators are either hardened fans, who are armed with an arsenal of supportersâ accoutrements and visual markers of partisanship and attentive to vocal or performative rituals of support, or are spectators interested in the more artistic and skilful aspects of the game. The game is a spectacle, played in order to be viewed. The viewing is both a witnessing of a victory, draw or defeat and an occasion for visual pleasure, as an experience of the arts and aesthetics of football. In turn, some footballers play âfor the crowdâ, engaging in showboating, skilled dribbling and trickery, often at the expense of either progress towards scoring a goal or getting a yellow card, for example for removing their shirt. Occasionally, the crowd momentarily departs in unison from the narrative of the match, engaging in its own pleasure of solidarity and comradeship, such as in a Mexican wave weaving its path around the stadium.
Moreover, the game today is part of a global, transnational cultural economy of young migrant players, agents, branding and celebrity that is characterized by an intensely visualized fandom of club colours, flags and banners, and a world of advertising on electronic boards surrounding the stadium and often digitally on the field itself. Footballâs visuality has been completely changed to suit an age of mass media and satellite live broadcasting, as the gameâs viewership is multiplied and transferred into living rooms, bars and public squares around the world, as television stations and media companies compete for viewership of a game turned into a hypercommodity. This is a world of mass advertising and branding, as sport and commerce blend into a market of commoditized experiences and celebrity players. It is also an age of new sporting institutions, such as the fan park, where football can be viewed by fans assembled in a simulated stadium, without live players but with an electronic experience of spectatorship and visualization.
As we await 3D satellite broadcasts of the game, the possibility arises that in the future the game of football may exist mainly through simulation, modelling and representation, without actual live players surrounded by fans assembled in a football stadium. With the development of television broadcasting, the increase of football pay-TV has challenged the visibility of matches and fostered new forms of visible representation. The spread of mass media has generated the development of short-cut videos, viewed through YouTube, and the production of textual and oral representations of the match through goal-by-goal live ticker, live updates, Twitter, online radio stations, media coverage, chat groups, SMS news, and Facebook.2
This volume aims at exploring the visual worlds of football in Africa. It considers pictures and images of football, football players and fans, as well as their social, cultural and political roles in society. It reflects the activity and social contexts of seeing, watching and being seen in and beyond the football arena, and questions how football is made visible (or what remains âinvisibleâ and hidden), how it is perceived (or unperceived), and how images of football players, games and stadiums are produced and spread through photographs, posters, newspapers, World Cup bid books, cartoons, and postage stamps. It is also interested in how these images generate different social and cultural imaginations in a construction of visuality, and how they have been utilized for political purposes.
The volume is based on a conference called âVisualizing the Game: Global Perspectives on Football in Africaâ, which we organized in January 2010 at the University of Basel, in conjunction with the Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB) and the Centre for International Sports Studies (Neuchâtel). The conference took place on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition on the history of football in Cape Town at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, which invited the District Six Museum (Cape Town) to display in Basel a condensed version of their exhibition âFields of Play â Football Memories and Forced Removals in Cape Townâ. The Basel exhibition was accomplished through a collaborative project of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB), the District Six Museum (Cape Town), the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town) and the University of Basel. One of the concerns of the exhibition was to show, before and during the FIFA World Cup in 2010, images of South African football history other than those dispersed by international media coverage, and to provide deeper insights into the past and present of everyday football memories and experiences in Cape Town.
Sport and visuality
The cultural turn in the social sciences has deepened the study of sport and sports history in recent times. Yet, it has taken rather a long time for questions of culture to be addressed. In a recent research report, the historians JĂźrgen Martschukat, Olaf Stieglitz and Kirsten Heinsohn noted that from the 1970s onwards, sports history focused mostly on institutions, persons, and associations.3 Christiane Eisenberg highlights that sports historians were particularly interested in sport as a âsocial formâ and scholars often had a focus on the rules and organization of sporting competitions.4 Some have examined the economic implications of local, national and international sporting events, players and institutions, whereas others have investigated political influence on sport and vice versa.5 According to Douglas Booth, sports historians followed âan imperative to place sport in its social, economic and political contextsâ.6 They were âgrounded in empiricismâ and saw âcontextualization as a deliberate strategy to bolster the fieldâs low statusâ. However, they neglected other fields, such as the language of sport, cultural texts in the sporting performance, or even the body as an expression of social and cultural practice.7
While Booth acknowledges the potential of cultural history approaches to sports, Eisenberg expects that the future of sports studies will still have a social-history focus, even though new topics will have to be considered: for instance, the commercialization of sport. According to her, it would be worthwhile to ask how images of sporting personalities are produced, how brand labels are shown or hidden within television broadcasts, or fans stage themselves for the cameras.8 In contrast, Martschukat, Stieglitz and Heinsohn consider sports studies and history a particularly appropriate staging ground on which to draw connections between social and cultural history approaches and histories of the body. The authors underline how sports provide deep insights into âsocio-cultural order in modern societiesâ, adding that âsports history is ideally suited to grasp how body performances contribute to the re-production of identities of gender, ethnicity, race, and class (and many more)â.9
This volume on âvisualizing the gameâ contributes to such a multilevel approach. The authors in this volume explore sport â and in particular football â as a social and cultural expression. They understand football as a social practice and as a cultural text. They ask questions about the production, representation and meaning of the visual worlds of football and analyse how visibility and visuality are generated, performed and spread, and how the visual worlds of football in turn affect social, political and cultural life. We understand âthe visualâ in a very broad sense. In the course of what is known as the visual turn, the scholarly focus on images developed gradually from an understanding of images as sources to a recognition of images as historical agents in their own right and as part of a broader scheme of visuality. Visuality is part of an everyday social and cultural experience, whereas images play a crucial role in representation, communication and memory. Images therefore have to be understood in their specific materiality, in their specific historical context, and with their biographies taken into account.10
Erwin Panofskyâs concept of understanding the image through an iconographical and iconological interpretation has been fundamentally broadened by consideration of the circulation/dissemination and reception of images. Moreover, the approach taken by the researchers at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB), which has inspired our exploration of the visual worlds of football, is highly influenced by an archival perspective and a multiplicity of different kinds of images, such as photographs, posters, maps and calendars. Posters especially have been explored by considering the mediumâs action and interaction with its specific and changing environments, with its various viewers and their specific perceptions in the past and present. Some of this research has been displayed in exhibitions through which the visuality of these objects and their potential as public visual heritage could be further explored in different social and geographical settings.11
Research into sport and its visual dimension is still scarce, though interest in these questions has been growing of late. Most research has focused on sport and media, with one central theme being the business of mass media and commercial sports coverage. Some have considered the construction of gender and identities through representations of sports and football in media accounts, while others have examined the visual practices of media audiences and the interconnections between viewers, producers and transmission. Grant Jarvie has pointed out that there is a âsharp tension between media logic and sports logicâ, with sports increasingly becoming âdependent upon media rules but without completely losing the reality of real sportâ.12 Jarvie underlines how the âcommentary and the visual presentation of sport is not neutral in that text and images are organised to tell a particular storyâ.13 Garry Whannel argues that it is therefore worthwhile to ask how representations of sport on television are organized, how they are produced, what âthe cultural and economic relations between television and sportâ are and how, if at all, âtelevision transformed sportâ.14
There are many questions relating to wh...
