Dr. John M Sloop
Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a cultural critic of matters of public interest. He is the author of several books, including Soccer Neoliberal Pitch: The Sport’s Power, Profit, and Discursive Politics (2023, University of Alabama Press): .
Email: John.m.sloop@vanderbilt.edu
At the end of the group stage of the World Cup, I saw a post on social media that read: “Me, changing ethnicities as I cheer during World Cup matches.” The post was accompanied with the portion at the end of the video that accompanied Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” in which a series of men and women of different ethnicities (and ages) slowly but seamlessly morph one in the other as if a single person was taking on multiple ethnicities (and genders).
What made this comment particularly interesting was that it meshed with an observation that a significant portion of U.S. soccer fans have an ability or tendency to treat national teams as franchises rather than as nationally determined fan bases. On the one hand, US nationalism and fanship is, of course, a solid subject position. Laurent Dubois, in his The Language of the Game, observes that part of the draw of national competitions, like the World Cup, “is that many people who might rarely make a show of nationalism can, in the festival atmosphere, deck themselves out in flags and national symbols in a way that feels joyful and playful and creates connections across social and class boundaries.” More, he goes as far as to say that perhaps one of the pleasures of supporting the USMNST (the United States men’s national soccer team) is, rather than holding onto American exceptionalism, as Dubois notes, “The fact that US soccer culture has in many ways lived, and thrived, on the margins of mainstream sports is part of what has made it a vector for different ways of thinking about what this country is and can be.” That is, in short, he is arguing that supporting the US Men’s team is an opportunity to rethink the US as only one country of many.
Yet, something more seems to be going on here. Michael B. Devlin and Andrew C. Billings have illustrated that, “Given the heterogeneous demographics of the United States, a U.S. citizen may, nonetheless, identify with another country in a manner equal to—or superseding—perceived kinship with the United States.” Moreover, it is not simply heterogeneous demographics but this is coupled with changing viewing demographics. As Darin W. White illustrates, soccer fans in the US have a growing tendency to watch foreign (mostly European leagues) rather than, or in addition to, their fanship of MLS clubs. While all soccer viewing and fanship is on the rise, the commitment of fan identity toward teams and players outside of the United States, who come from nations across the globe, means that not only are US viewers heterogeneous, but so are their fan identities. This combination allows for a shifting sense of support and identity.
Rather than an ability to rethink what the US might be through sport, then, it might be that the US fans ability to switch alliances so easily (to change ethnicities?) provides an even more interesting, or more creative, subject position—the ability to not just rethink what the US might be but to rethink subjectivity itself. More, given a sports landscape that has never required geographic proximity to become a franchise fan (of American sports, or, indeed, of our favorite Premier League franchises), the ability to choose a different country to identify with (e.g., a fling one had during study abroad in France) becomes easy (just as the ability of franchises to pick and move encourages a looser aligned team identity). If national identities are imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson tells us, the past inability to articulate the men’s soccer team with success has made it far easier for US fans to support others, to identify as if constituted by a different imagined community. If hard core supporter groups elsewhere often identities politically with their nations (or some version of it),as both Franklin Foer has pointed out, that is not the case here.
Hence, in supporting soccer—well, men’s soccer—identity for US fans is far more fluid, far less fixed than it is for other nationalities, and it is overdetermined by our history with franchise economics, our lack of success as a team, and understanding the sport itself as “foreign” and marginal, despite its long history in the US. As a result, fans have the ability to switch identities, to link with other nations, in ways unimaginable by others. And perhaps, this is just the type of creative imaginary we need in this moment. Perhaps it is just as beneficial to imagine oneself as a member of different community as it is to rethink one’s own. What is it, for example, for a 50-year-old Midwestern woman to identify with Cape Verde? What benefits or costs are derived from a moment, even one so rare, when one is able to disarticulate themselves from their own nation state?
The World Cup is giving us an opportunity to ask that question. And it’s one very much worth pondering.
