Football, Politics and Identity

James Carr, Daniel Parnell, Paul Widdop, Martin J. Power, Stephen R. Millar, James Carr, Daniel Parnell, Paul Widdop, Martin J. Power, Stephen R. Millar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367433550
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000394702
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents a series of fascinating case studies that show how the lives and bodies of clubs, players and fans around the world are enmeshed with politics.

It draws on original research in countries including England, Scotland, Ireland, Poland, Mexico, Algeria and Argentina and includes both historical and contemporary perspectives. It explores some of the most important themes in the study of sport, including sectarianism, migration, fan activism and national identity, and shows how football continues to be tied to political events, symbols and movements.

This is fascinating reading for any student or researcher working in sport studies, political science, sociology or contemporary history.

Chapter 1
‘Show respect to our anthem’

Identity politics and national team football in Northern Ireland

Katie Liston and Matt Deighan

Introduction and context

Football can unite and divide people at one and the same time, especially in divided societies. In September 2017, safety concerns were the main reason why neither national anthems nor flags were (dis)played at a (Women’s) World Cup qualifying game, held in Mourneview Park, Lurgan, between Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (RoI). This is the home venue of the Glenavon Football Club. A credible paramilitary (loyalist) threat was made against a club worker (and his family) were the Irish national flag – the tricolour – to be hoisted there. This resulted in the suspension of normal pre-match protocols. Six months later, underlying identity politics was again exposed, in relations between the two Irish football associations. The ‘switch’ is premised on the dual eligibility of those born in NI. Senior NI manager Michael O’Neill was cited as claiming that the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) ‘only ever approach one type of player: Catholic’ (The Telegraph, 10 March 2018). O’Neill also called for a gentleman’s agreement that would prevent the FAI from approaching any representative NI player between the ages of 17 and 21. It is unclear if this agreement was ever reached. Other incidents too – involving domestic football north and south – have unmasked the depth and scope of identity politics involved, including national anthem protests (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The question of precisely how football (dis)unites people is therefore a matter of debate.

Figure 1.1 IFA Cup final 2018 Cliftonville FC.

Source: Courtesy of Albert Thomas.

Figure 1.2 FAI Cup final 2019 Allan Manus.

Such sporting examples are not unique on the island of Ireland. The histories of modern athletics (Liston and Maguire, 2020) and football/soccer (Moore, 2015) reveal protracted identity cleavages, connected with partition. But all-island teams exist(ed) too, some 60 or so sports governed on a 32-county basis. Historically, the IFA administered football on the island (played in Dublin and Belfast mainly) before the Leinster branch separated in 1921, establishing the FAI. Consequently, footballers have represented both associations, illustrating that sporting nationalism is multifaceted and multi-layered (Cronin, 1999). At least 39 male players represented the IFA and FAI between 1908 and 1950, when the two associations competed separately, and an all-island team was informally constituted to play Brazil in 1973. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) however, ‘switches’ have mainly been ‘southern’ moves, from NI to the RoI, in the men’s game especially (eg Darron Gibson, James McClean, Shane Duffy, Marc Wilson, Michael Duffy, Daniel Devine, Paul George, Liam McAlinden and Eunan O’Kane).¹

NI manager Michael O’Neill is correct, historically speaking, if he meant to indicate that fewer players have first represented RoI and then declared for NI, not vice versa. Relations between the two associations are noticeably tense concerning this. In 2009, the IFA described it as a ‘banana skin’ and needed to ask why some players would rather play for the RoI. We argued previously that this required a necessary distance from the interests and values of either association and from unhelpful compressions of identity politics and sport. For the decisions of players to declare for the RoI were intimately connected with the contested context of football and of life in general in NI. The habitat of national team football plays a critical role in such decisions because intergroup contact often occurs first through the game, which likely plays a contrasting identity-affirming role for nationalists and unionists.

Here, we focus on the accounts of unionist national team players, which reveal how the fortunes of NI have become internalised as part of their habitus, and whose actions continue to reconstruct an imagined national character (Anderson, 1991). Though more work is required on the utility of the Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist (PUL) analytical unit, especially for those who are neither unionist nor loyalist, here the heuristic ‘unionist’ is used as an inductive tool because it was the label of choice for interviewees, even if in reality, three were much closer to loyalism.² This tag guided us in exploring deeply sedimented aspects of their habitus: as British and Ulster Orange men, as the established group in NI football, sharing intra-group habitus codes and fantasy shields (Elias, 2013), but with a contested sense of place and ‘home’ different to other British citizens.

Our two interview cohorts (unionists and nationalists) represent the post-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) generation, the first to be born into and live in relative peace. Nonetheless, they remain trapped in positions, often of mutual fear and distrust, born of the cycle of violence and negative peace, of persistent structural disadvantage, especially in urban interface areas, in which ‘Northern Ireland has yet to be at peace with the idea of peace’ (Brewer, 2018: 271). Football is ideologically and practically enmeshed in this complex knot. For the evidence is clear, especially in post-conflict societies, that sport might not only reflect wider social divisions but also play a role in reinforcing these. To interpret these unionists’ accounts, we first need to understand unionist identities, the ways in which these are broadly reflected in/of football in NI, and the relevance of habitus and habitus codes (Maguire and Poulton, 1999) as sensitising concepts.

Unionisms in NI

Often misrepresented as a homogenous bloc, fissures within unionism have existed prior to and since the early 1920s. Six of the nine counties of the ancient Ulster province became de facto unionist after partition, given the total hegemony of the Stormont parliament and the exclusion of nationalists from positions of power: politically, in civic society and in other prominent occupations. These fissures were/are often revealed through sportive and non-sportive events alike – for example, unionist/loyalist protests following the 2012 decision of Belfast city council to restrict the flying of the Union Flag to 18 designated days and historical local rivalries between Irish league football clubs with strong unionist traditions (eg Bleakney and Darby, 2018; Bairner and Shirlow, 1998). While unionists are generally committed to the maintenance of the constitutional link with Britain, loyal-ists (those with ‘harder’ views [Todd, 2018]; across rural, single-identity towns and urban-interface loyalisms [Brewer, 2018], for some of whom sectarianism is acceptable) proffer a stronger ideological commitment to the political and perceived monocultural entity of NI. This sometimes means confrontation with the British government. Conventionally speaking, loyalism includes those unionists who use/advocate militancy to defend the union, drawn disproportionately from working classes and encompassing political and civic interests. Loyalism was connected with the political organisation of paramilitarism in the 1970s (McAuley, 2005). Simply stated, there are three unionist concerns (ranging from broad to narrow): ideological fears about the continued dilution of unionist/British identities, moral fears about further political concessions (eg the place of the Irish language) and political fears about British betrayal (eg loyalist meetings that opposed the Brexit ‘Betrayal Act’ [Belfast Telegraph, 7 November 2019]). A sense of treachery is now especially acute, given the approach taken by the current British prime minister towards the introduction of a (hard or soft) border on the island/in the Irish Sea and the implications of this for what unionists perceive to be ‘our wee country.’

Of the academic work on the unionist identity continuum, two main interpretations exist. One is that unionism, in its widest varied guises and encompassing loyalism, is a form of (British) state-centred political value system (Aughey, 1989), in which identity politics per se is of lesser analytical importance than any real connection with the state. Though accepting this characterisation, a second view is that unionisms do carry some ‘identity and national resonances’ (Todd, 2018: 137), which are a key reference point for loyalty to the (British) state, but more than this, ‘culture assumes greater importance in Loyalist conceptions of identity than class’ (Brewer, 2013). Consequently, ‘unionism and loyalism always represented traditions, repertoires and ideal types’ (Todd, 2018: 2). There are those Protestants who share views with Catholic nationalists on social issues such as equal marriage or reproductive rights, and there are unionists/loyalists whose religious beliefs are less important than other cultural practices, such as bands/parades, that provide for the expression of communal identity, public space, territoriality and ethnic solidarity (Bell, 1990).

Given its global scope, association football is a powerful sport in terms of identity formation/reinforcement worldwide. One could therefore anticipate a spectrum of unionist identities in the game. Moreover, in divided societies like NI, it has been a dual agent of separation and a contentious point of ethno-national-religious contact, given its changing class (and, more slowly, gender) composition. It is a social site in which real, imaginary and embodied ideas about the ‘national character’ are activated and become viscerally important. In short, identity politics in football in NI trump connections with the British state, making it a complex Gordian knot (Deb, 2019).

The Gordian knot of ‘our wee country’

We set out to unravel more of the hidden crevasses of ethno-national tensions in NI, in which the sense of collective identification was/is low and ‘there is no ideological mortar… holding things together’ (Gormley-Heenan and Aughey, 2017: 501). Since the GFA, incentives were removed for inter-communal conflict, but disputes over the flying of flags in particular continue to act as ‘a lightning rod’ for Protestant unease (Nolan, 2014: 13). Our previous work highlighted that nationalist players were caught in a double bind in international football: generating a habitus mismatch managed through a flexible sporting identity (Liston and Deighan, 2019). Protestant-Unionist rugby union and hockey players too, who represented 32-county sports that have compromised historically on flags and/or anthems, exemplified similar habitus practices. In one rugby union club in NI, the symbolic power of flags, music and sporting attire was used sparingly, and banter was a cultural tool to goad fellow club members but ‘not to display genuine sectarian exclusion’ (Kavanagh, 2019: 492).

Though the composition of the IFA is more mixed than ten years ago, officially it has not changed its position on the national anthem, requiring a change in their article of association, or flag. There are safety concerns among some on the IFA Council, following previous death threats, and neither of the two main political parties – Sinn Féin or the Democratic Unionist Party – supports a change to the anthem. One does not want to normalise NI and the other to negate the union. As a result, we concluded (Liston and Deighan, 2019) that the football idiom ‘Our Wee Country’ – which emerged out of the rebranding of the IFA in 2010/2011 – was a shield for unionists mainly, projecting an imagined charisma, pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: understanding the connection between football, identity and (P)politics
• 1 ‘Show respect to our anthem’: identity politics and national team football in Northern Ireland
• 2 From ‘Billy Boys’ to ‘Ulster Boys’?: sectarianism, Northern Ireland supporters and the emergence of the ‘Green and White Army’
• 3 Two sides still at play 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement
• 4 ‘Poppies in the field’: the spectacularisation of military remembrance in British football
• 5 Football in ‘French’ Algeria and ‘Algerian’ France: from colonisation to globalisation
• 6 Enduring passions: football, Peronism and the politics of national identity in Argentina
• 7 ‘Defenders of European culture’ – ‘refugee crisis,’ football hooliganism and the right-wing shift in Europe
• 8 Ehhhhh pu!… what?: a critical conversation about Mexican football fandom and the word at the centre of a homophobic chant
• 9 Regional politics of place-making and (un)belonging through language practices at a derby football match in the south of the Netherlands
• 10 Rescuing football clubs by supporters: the role and forms of social capital
• 11 The political economy of grassroots football: from obscurity to austerity
• Index