Drawing Football With Love
Yrsa Roca Fannberg’s quixotic blog, art versus sport is more than a Barça blog – it is what the title promises, a site pulled in both those directions – art and sport – at once.
I went down to Barcelona partly to meet Ysra, and to look more closely at the wonderful watercolors she has posted on her site. Last week, she kindly met up with me and my friend, the artist Ming Yuen S Ma.
Yrsa is an independent minded artist who works across a range of mediums – at the moment she is studying documentary film-making. She makes these gorgeous watercolors in the same spirit with which she writes – with an eye to mood, delicate questions of psychology and emotion, with an eye to not only the sublimity of the sport, but to its beauty – which is sometimes quite ordinary, and at other times quite melancholy. The tone of her writing is nearest to Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow – one of my all-time favorite reads.
It was a joy for me to meet a woman similarly engaged by the sport – for those of us whose identities are primarily bound up in art and intellectual life, an absorbing passion in football can be quite isolating. Even though many women play and become fans via their attachment to their fathers, brothers, to the men in their lives, that affection for “their” sport can make us, well, a little bit weird.
Talking Football
Speaking for myself, when I’ve tried to talk footie with guys as a way to, well, talk to them, I’ve come away with the distinct impression that I’ve transgressed some major rule of womanly conduct. A few weeks ago, for example, I sat on a London bound train with my friend Mandy, who is perhaps the biggest Arsenal fan ever (and that is saying a lot). She’s followed the team since god knows when: she is no casual expert on the subject.
Across the isle are two guys: a BBC sports journalist, and an American tourist. They were talking football – and stuck with this subject for a full two hours. They talked about relegation – a fascinating, exotic form of sport brutality to us Yanks. As it happens, I’d just read National Pastime, a comparative economic analysis of major league sports in the US and around the world – focused in part on the relegation system and its economics. I mentioned this to them in a casual, conversational way. They both looked at me, said nothing, and then continued talking as if I’d said nothing.
I suspect a lot of women who love football have had similar experiences – my friend Mandy hadn’t even bothered trying to talk with those guys, and welcomed me back to our discussion with a knowing look. Women really, really love to talk about their sports. It sucks to be shut out of a conversation because you are a girl – and that sense of rejection is made worse when a guy looks at you like you are stupid. Men are fans – when women talk footie we are, well, crazy, or we must be lesbians – or even crazy lesbians.
When men talk footie with each other – when they talk in great depth and with enormous intensity of feeling about other men – it is often not just about footie, it’s about their relationships to each other. It’s a way to be a guy with other guys. A woman who tries to take part in this sorts talk upsets whatever delicate balance is in place that allows guys to talk with and about guys without, well, thinking about guys.
Drawing Football
Back to Yrsa’s work: Most representations of footballers are hyper-heroic, hyper masculine. When Yrsa offers a visual meditation on that ecstatic post-goal moment, she literalizes this explosive joy, as above, in “Encima 2″ (I think that’s ‘Ecstasy 2′ in Catalan). Sports photography tends to amplify the testosterone even in failure, when our sports heroes are made to look more like fallen soldiers than human beings. Not often do we see them look like the big babies they sometimes are, like Messi at the top of this post.
Or take the portrait of Thierry Henry above: he looks weighed down by his own feet, as if he gets heavier and heavier as he gets closer to the ground. If you’ve ever played 90 minutes, you might relate – I know that there are times when the ground feels attached to my feet – like the earth itself is holding me back. I think I see in this as an affection for Henry alongside a mix of hope and a fear of disappointment. But perhaps I project.
The thing that moves me most about these images – about especially “In Training” (right) – is that they are quite plainly made out of love. And that love isn’t filtered by the requirements of a macho/heroic tradition. Maybe because Yrsa’s a woman it’s acceptable to look at and see men in this way, and to paint them with this sort of delicacy. Maybe because she’s half Icelandic/half Catalan – and because she played herself in Sweden until she was 14 (she says she was terrible) – she approaches the subject of Barça and football culture with an eye that is both that of an insider and that of an outsider. I think Barça fans would agree that the freedom with which she looks at this world gives us a glimpse into its beauty and its emotional intensity.
When she’d spread her portfolio out on our table, the waiters in this tapas bar stopped, called others over, and pointed to the portraits – “Oh, that’s Messi, for sure, look at how he holds his head”, and “You can’t miss Thuram there” or they’d shake their head in consternation as they identified the prodigal son: “Ronaldinho.” Our faces lit up with a kind of warmth – the same warmth that animates Roca Fannberg’s images: these are members of the family, and we love them no matter what.
About the Author
Jennifer Doyle an occasional contributer to Pitch Invasion, and also writes From a Left Wing, ruminations on the beautiful game, from an unlikely player & fan.
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What you say about discussing football with men astonishes me: nothing could be further from my experience. I am a very girly girl, and I talk about football with men everywhere I go. It is the single most important way I make new friends – both online and in real life. My last 3 partners I have met through football websites; many of my male friends and acquaintances I met through talking football with them. Certainly here in Italy, but also in the UK, I have found men are *more* likely to talk to me about football than about anything else! As you say, it is so often a way to talk about other things. I tend to find it hard to talk to women since so many women don’t have this “in”. In fact, I have very few female friends (3, at the most generous possible count) and I have no idea how to make new ones. If only more women wanted to talk about football, I might just have a chance.
I wonder why we have had such different experiences? (maybe I have the soul of a man and/or no social skills? maybe the two are in any case synonymous?)
I find some women have an as active if not more active involvement in the game, one that goes beyond a means of communication with male friends or partners or as some sort of political or artistic hermeneutic lense through which to see the world. In the same way that some prefer the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, some women follow football simply because it’s football, the same as anyone else, without some sort of trumped up, patronizing ivory-tower ‘greater reason,’ whether it’s politics or visual art.
Ahh…I get to learn more about SpanglyPrincess – whose blog I admire very much!
The things I describe are particularly true in the UK (soccer culture is so different in the US that it doesn’t quite compare) – and, as I’ve been talking with other women about this in the UK, we’ve been noticing that the weird exclusion thing is very particular to mainstream football culture here – to small talk in particular, too. (If you are in the pub, for example, alone, watching an Arsenal game, a ton of guys will offer you a seat – but if you venture to comment about things, to offer analysis, some guys will be really put off – but others will be way into it.) I am, I should say, not a girly girl, nor is my friend Mandy, nor are, now that I think about it, most of the women I know (academics, artists, and footballers).
I admit, my comments are targeted at a pretty narrow slice of football macsulinity – more the casual talker than the avid fan. The real fan, I think, just likes to see enthusiasm for the topic in any form.
You should have seen the responses to my first posts about women’s football and women’s issues on soccerlens – I moved over to Pitch Invasion because I knew the readers here wouldn’t make really offensive remarks about women as players and as commentators – or that if they did, the moderator would see those comments as inappropriate.
I’d love to hear from more people about their experiences of gender & sports talk.
Hi Richard,
Your response is in the neighborhood of what I’m talking about. Funny, I’d just cut out the following from my response to SpanglyPrincess:
“I know too that I’m just one of those women that some people have an allergic reaction to – the virago, the smart girl, etc.”
But I was afraid I’d sound paranoid. Simon Kuper and Alex Bellos can combine their love of football with their interest in culture & history – but when a feminist does it? Or an art critic? She’s patronizing? Making it up?
I sign this as a proud member of the English Department’s faculty at the University of California, Riverside. Not the ivory tower that is, for example, the board of the FA or FIFA!
Mmmm, that’s a bit knee jerk. I love Bellos, Kuper, Goldblatt, and I don’t hold women football writers to any other standard. And I think my partner would hold you to account for the ‘allergic response to smart girls’ comment as well, at least if that’s what you read into my response. I just think that women, like men, can like football for whatever reason they prefer.
Sometimes it seems to me that some intellectual quarters (men and women) need to qualify their interest in football by couching their appreciation in the form of this that or the other grand narrative, feminism, Marxism, nationalism etc. etc. The immediate emotive response to footballers is more in line with a natural human response, something your friend’s portraits point out. But does that extend from her gender or her humanity? Isn’t the distinction spurious? Are most or all male representation of footballers “hyper-heroic, hyper masculine?” I’m not certain this is how most men view the sport, in the same way the women don’t enjoy it differently because of some sort ‘inherent’ gender trait.
From my own personal experiences talking football with women is not a problem, as i have a sizeable number of friend girls who are both passionate and knowledgeable about the game. However i have to admit that i have made pre judged opinons of a female about the notion of her knowledge of football; that she would not know much and that i would have to inform her. But when i stand corrected or i am tackled on my levels of chauvinism i am ultimately predisposed to apologise ashamedly. When i talk football with my male friends there is a great degree of masculinty, bravado, aggresiveness and banter; especially taken into the context of rival supporters. This is good and i enjoy the experience but perhaps its better talking football with a woman (or the women i have spoken to) rather than my men friends, as a palcid conversation about the subject is most likely to ensue, rather than the shouting to get your voice heard that i get with my men friends.
ps Jennifer: great article, and yes your writings do share a resmbalance to Simon Kuper, and much like Franklin Foer’s book “How football explains the world” albiet combining a feminist perspective. Patronising the article is not.
Ah Franklin Foer — a perfect example. “How Football Explains the World” is really an extended polemic against any club with a hint of partisan support that crosses the boundaries deemed acceptable by his own particular ideological view. Predictably, Barcelona, that darling of the academic left, comes out on top in his estimation. It’s all so…yes, patronizing.
Although Jennifer I’ve scoped out your blog and it’s better than mine, so I don’t have much of a leg to stand on. You may already know this but during Dick Kerr’s Ladies were at one point as big a draw in England as League One . What do you think Kristeva have to say about gender in football?
Oh! Kristeva’s one of my fave’s. I saw her talk once when I was in college and understood not a word. I don’t have the impression she’d be super interested in footie played by any gender. But: Let’s imagine in an alternative universe she’d be an Arsenal supporter , in which case, I’d say we could turn to her marvelous treatise on depression – Black Sun – for insight into what she’d be saying about the end of this season!
And, sorry if my response to yours was a bit knee-jerky. I’ve had very bad experiences on another blogging community – feminism + football = explosive combination!
I was taking issue with your anti-ivory tower remark. I should clarify – in that particular conversation, I tried to join in on several different points, and mentioned I’d ‘read this book about relegation’, not “I read an economic analysis of…”.
I checked in with my teamates, and most said they knew what I was talking about socially. And, visit my site- I clarify some of my points about this talk thing there. And hi Zappata! Great to see you here too!
Ah now if we want to talk about bad reactions to mentioning football, academia is indeed the place. Last year I combined my season ticket on the Curva Sud with an research fellowship at Oxford, and let me tell you the reactions I used to get at the incessant formal dinners whenever I was over there were hilarious.
Most typical response: “oh are you researching the sociology/ ethnography/ anthropology/ politics / economics/ gender roles / fashion/ sexual depravity of football fans?”
“no, I *am* a football fan” [though I'd be quite into doing all the above]
*silence*
or indeed outright incredulity. But as a female military historian I am used to incredulity and patronising sexism about my intellectual pursuits (oh you work on the First World War? what, nurses? grrrrrrrr).
Jennifer: I don’t know about your English friends’ experiences, but I have to point out that in the UK you are suffering from a double disadvantage. Far far worse than a woman – most male fans know at least some regular matchgoing women – you are American. And “everybody knows” that yanks know nothing about football. An American woman?? as likely meet a non-paranoid Juve fan as a knowledgeable American female fan.
Oh – at Oxford I can imagine a thousand reasons why one might want to hang oneself at those dinner tables.
Re: the talk subject, I wonder if not a lot of women read pitchinvasion? Or not a lot of self-identified feminists & members of the queer-friendly circles I move in? Because that’s the sort of women I mean. The American thing isn’t the problem – one of the guys on the train, for instance, was a Yank. He did, I should say, lose the interest of his conversation partner when he said he had been supporting Liverpool, but felt he should switch his alliance to Man U. Then the BBC journalist explained to him that in no uncertain terms did one switch one’s teams like that. But it’s unfair to represent that instance as exemplary.
The gender thing is pretty heavy – I wrote this post in this way after talking to a lot of women over the past few months – casually, with my friends and teammates. But isn’t true of all women’s experiences, and it certainly doesn’t characterize all men’s relationships with women around the topic of footie. (See the responses to my post on From A Left Wing about coed footie for lots of really nice statements from men about *playing* with women.)
My Dad’s from Croydon, and I’ve been here a while – I’m American in my accent, sure, but there’s no way anyone talking to me for more than two minutes about footie will think I don’t know what I’m talking about. My point is that *that* is in many circles a problem for guys. But this is true if they are talking about Marxist theory or Hong Kong action films – my expertise on either topic would be just as unwelcome.
I am enoying writing about football – and about learning about the really interesting academic work out there – largely from people interested in class, race, etc. and by feminist sociologists. The journal “Soccer and Society” is really, really interesting – and any fan who really knows their footie can get something out of the articles about their teams & their histories. But I have a feeling the people writing those articles aren’t teaching at Oxford & Cambridge. Just a feeling! (Check out Jean Williams’s books about women’s football, by the way. They are dry, sure, but very very helpful.)
re: academia & footie – I would say that my passion for footie has isolated me from other acedmics, but it isn’t totally true. My friend Mandy mentioned above is Mandy Merck – she’s a film professor at Royal Holloway and an academic of the first order. Andrew Ross, chair of American Studies, used to play – I think semi-pro? – in Scotland (where he’s from), and he’s written about Man U – and a short “think piece” about “The Ballad of Posh and Becks” for American Quarterly. It’s really spot on – but in many ways no more or less informed/academic than the best blog site – like Pitch Invasion. And hey, Isn’t Tom a PhD student at Chicago? You, me, Tom – that’s at least three here working the Ivory Tower’s meal ticket plan.
Spangly — spot on. I work within some fairly highbrow institutions, the University of Toronto as an administrator (evil, I know, but free post grad studies if I so choose which, after four years at McGill on the seedy underbelly of the philosophy department, I’m still on the fence about) and as professional countertenor. Mostly my love of football is viewed with bemused tolerance or outright contempt. But a lot of the time, and this comes from men mostly, there is an understanding that ‘oh, he’s male, it’s within him to love “sports”‘ as if ’sports’ and football are interchangeable.
For women, I find they’re forced to provide some sort of beefed up defense of their interest in the game. In academic circles, it’s exactly as you put it — unless you’re planning to study football as some savage oedipal orgy or as an expression of bourgeois repression, you must be play acting ‘being one of the boys.’
I had the pleasure of meeting Kristeva on a two or three social occasions many moons ago, before she was a huge name, and I was still playing at being an academic of sorts.
It didn’t really occur to me to talk to her about my experiences on the terraces at Red Star in St. Ouen, and I’m pretty sure that Jennifer is right about her general lack of interest in the sport. I imagine that she found the Blanc, Black, Beur team of ‘98 to be of some passing interest, but I rather doubt that you would be able to engage her in a long discussion of the post-modern aspects of the career of Dominique Rocheteau.
Given the degree to which Italian television coverage of football features ridiculously objectifying use of scantily-clad “showgirls” who hold clipboards and/or read emails, it is interesting to see that informed and intelligent “students of the game” who happen to be female are nonetheless taken more seriously than their counterparts in Britain. Spangles obviously has much more personal experience with this than I ever could have, but my sense is that her experience is not atypical. If one is able to demonstrate a certain level of sophistication in one’s analysis and a sense of history, then one is pretty readily accepted into the conversation, even if one is otherwise “other” (be one female or American). And Ilaria d’Amico is taken seriously even if she holds a clipboard and wears stilettos, because she knows what she is talking about.
I think that may be because football is more deeply rooted in all aspects of Italian society than it is the UK (the “middle classes” here have always cared), and because there is an essential mysoginist element to the “laddish” culture whose rise to prominence in the UK overlapped with that of the football boom (with football itself being an essential element of that “culture”). There’s also the fact that Italian football conversations tend* to be more focused on tactics than on “passion” and “playing for the shirt”.
* this whole comment is obviously reliant on gross generalisations that are far from universally true.
Ursus is bang on the money so far is Italy goes, yes.
It is actually a very interesting exception to a phenomenon which I have been thinking about these last few days to do with women in authority and femininity. The reaction to Angela Merkel’s impressive display of decolletage confirmed the trend which to me seems have become axiomatic: a woman cannot be taken seriously if she is feminine, or heaven forbid, sexy. Witness Hillary’s horrible unflattering outfits. Female politicians and academics – and women in many other areas – feel or are made to feel that they have to desexualise themselves in order to have any kind of credibility. Especially in a traditionally male arena. There has been a dichotomy between “women worth listening to” and “women worth looking at”. Hence if you look “too good” you can’t be serious: style denies substance. [I can't say I have ever personally bought into this: if you don't want to listen to what i have to say because of my high heels or my make-up, that's your loss not mine.] In Italy it doesn’t work like this so much, partly because everybody is supposed to look good all of the time, and women like D’Amico can thus be both dressed up dollybirds and credible commentators.
Here I have not once ever had any kind of dismissive reaction to my talking about football. But I know lots of female Italian fans of various ages (and class backgrounds) so I think it’s easier that way. I’m still amazed about the negative experiences Jennifer reports in the UK and it makes me realise how few women I know. This discussion is troubling me on all sorts of personal levels now. I would have said that I self-identify as a feminist, though I am not hugely engaged in gender issues in my work (feminist criticism rarely applicable to military tactics). And I rather enjoy the fact that my social and intellectual interests lie in traditionally male fields.
“My point is that *that* is in many circles a problem for guys. But this is true if they are talking about Marxist theory or Hong Kong action films – my expertise on either topic would be just as unwelcome”
This is something again which interests me hugely because it’s so far from my experience. Though we risk straying from the topic of the blog (sorry!). Maybe I’m not a very good feminist, I’m beginning to think.
Meanwhile, dinners with inebriated emeritus fellows aside, I would say that among younger academics there is considerable openness to football and a large number of fans, even at Oxford! There’s a class/generational gulf I think, about football in Britain most particularly. I miss the dinners though, they were great
I do wonder if this business of being ignored on the Tube is as much of a gender / anti-American thing as it may at first seem. Leaving aside the fact that talking to anyone you don’t know on the London Underground should, in many people’s eyes, apparently be enough to get you sectioned…
Whilst I’d never dispute, Jennifer, that your accent came into the BBC journo’s perception of you, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the fact you’d *read a book* on the subject also had a lot to do with it, and he just got scared. Not because you were a woman reading a book on football, not because you were an American reading a book on football, but because you’d read a book on football. We don’t do that here. We may have football in all-consuming, totally saturated visibility everywhere we look, but very, very few people who declare themselves ‘massive football fans’ will have read / be reading, for instance, ‘The Ball Is Round’. Never mind Galeano. Christ, if an English writer tried writing about the game in the same manner as a Rioplatense, he’d be viewed very suspiciously indeed. Our equivalent of Eduardo Galeano is Brian bloody Glanville. Henry Winter and James Lawton are highly respected football writers in the British press.
In other words there’s a fear of intellectualising too much in Britain that only a select few such as David Goldblatt can really break through. And the normal fan here isn’t anywhere near as obsessed as he or his friends think he is. I’ve met two Englishmen who can hold a conversation with me on football for more than a few minutes, two of my best friends, and every other time I meet someone who’s ‘a massive football fan’ (either by their own admission or that of whoever introduces them to me), it emerges after a couple of minutes that they haven’t even heard of Garrincha, or can’t tell me who won the 1930 World Cup, or whatever.
The rioplatense nations, which of all the countries I’ve watched and talked football in are the ones that comes close to British levels of obsession with the game (which is why I love Argentine football enough to be writing about it), actually takes it seriously – intellectually seriously, I mean. Their language includes the word ‘fútbolisticamente’, or ‘footballistically’, a fine word which I’ve attempted to introduce to the English language with such success that Arsene Wenger said it on Match Of The Day earlier this season (though I bet he gets the credit for inventing it now). That English didn’t have such a word beforehand says a lot for differing approaches to discussing the game, I think. The average man in the street in Buenos Aires can tell you, for instance, which club Alfredo Di Stéfano played his first ever professional match for (no, not River…), or any number of historical, personal, tactical or political points on their football. I suspect you’d get a more serious response there (except of course that your American accent isn’t going to help you gain any credibility in this field when talking to a South American). I certainly do.
Jennifer deserves extra praise for having engendered (heh) such an excellent discussion in the comments.
Spangles, you are much too hard on yourself. You are a terrific feminist, primarily because you are a brilliant writer, creative thinker and wonderful person who is female and supremely confident in both your womanhood and personhood.
Sam, one thing that I think is at work here is that North American gringos who fall in love with football tend to have an overly positive and romantic view of the reality of the British football experience. A lot of that is purely linguistic (our early exposure is almost always to or through the British media), some of it is “educational” (the number of British coaches plying their trade in North American schools, amateur clubs and camps is huge), and some of it is no doubt down to cultural affinities and a sense of the “special relationship”. Because we grow up having to defend ourselves against the “soccer is boring” Neanderthals who dominate the mainstream sports media, we can’t help but look to a country where football is a major preoccupation as anything but a type of promised land.
And yet, when we finally make it there, we find that just like Eldorado, the visions of the streets being paved with footballistic gold aren’t true (or at best, that there are a few flecks of gold leaf covering places like WSC, OTF and parts of the Guardian). The resulting sense of disappointment and disillusion can be very strong, and though I can state from personal experience that the theory is valid for North Americans of my age, I would be willing to guess that it may also apply to Scandinavians and East Asians, who tend to have a similar vision of English football and rely on British sources. It also probably isn’t as true as it was when I first started caring about all of this in the ’70s, what with the banalities of Sky Sports News now being available on the Fox Soccer Channel, works like Galeano’s having been translated, virtually everything being available on the internet, and the much wider availability of intelligent analysis from other sources through blogs such as this one (and yours, and Spangles’ and Jennifer’s . . . ), but I think that the effect is far from having disappeared completely.
‘ think that may be because football is more deeply rooted in all aspects of Italian society than it is the UK (the “middle classes” here have always cared), and because there is an essential mysoginist element to the “laddish” culture whose rise to prominence in the UK overlapped with that of the football boom (with football itself being an essential element of that “culture”). There’s also the fact that Italian football conversations tend* to be more focused on tactics than on “passion” and “playing for the shirt”.’
See that’s not my experience at all. Every woman in my family has an interest in football in some capacity or other and nearly all of them grew up in south London council housing of some form or another. My late mother was a die-hard Chelsea supporter (in fact my dad once told me they went to the Bridge together on an early date and shouted ‘fucking cunt!’ at the referee at the exact same time – love or what?) and my nan on both sides of my family were regular match goers, particularly my dad’s mother, who used to go and watch Arsenal with my granddad every other week.
Echo all the positive Spangles’ stuff. You rock sista etc.
It’s funny how hard it is to accept the idea that gender might be the issue.
The incident I described was limited: it was the eurostar, and all the people involved in this little scenario were solid middle class university educated types – so I’m not talking about walking up to strangers on the tube, or inserting myself into a conversation at the Holloway Pub in the middle of an Arsenal match. I’m refering to guys engaged in small talk about something they consider their territory. It could be guys in a pub talking sports, it could be, as I said above, guys in grad school talking about Marxist theory, or film buffs talking about Quentin Tarentino. It’s a form of male bonding – and it transcends class.
I was trying to describe the very subtle unwritten, unspoken codes about what men in general consider appropriate ways of thinking and talking about men. Looking at Yrsa’s watercolors, I found myself thinking that they seemed in a way to represent a different point of view on the men who play this sport than the one offered by sports journalism, and also by sports photography. That’s why I like them. I don’t know why she paints those images the way she does – but it’s hard to imagine that gender (esp. the gender of the people in the paintings, and the people looking at them) would be irrelevant to such a discussion.
I’m sorry, but guys here read about football – mostly histories of teams – and they sure read the newspapers, and they buy those books. Not comparative economic analyses, but they read things like David Peace’s excellent ‘The Damned UTD’, a best seller I saw on the tube I don’t know how many times in the hands of I don’t know how many different sorts of people. And maybe ‘lads’ don’t talk about whatever books they might read, and acknowledging that you’ve read ‘a book’ can be a real wet blanket in certain conversational settings – but it’s not quite right to say that in England, guys don’t read about football. There is, though, as Sam says very tight social regulation on how you talk about it, and how you present yourself publicly – definitely not as an intellectual, and not as a leftist: there’s that whole graeme le saux thing, for instance – showing that what happens when you do present yourself like this, is that people ‘accuse’ you of being gay.
Back though, to the idea that when I got here I might have been rosy in my ideas about English football. I have had few illusions about that – I didn’t follow the Premiership much at all until I came over here in fact.
I was shocked, though, by the intensity of sexism in the UK when it comes to sports. Let me make that case more plainly: Walk into the Nike and Adidas flagship stores around Oxford Circus, and ask them where you can find football boots for your sister, your daughter, your girlfriend.
Answer: Nowhere. In fact, there are no products in either store – or in Footlocker or in Lillywhites – for women who play football. (Plenty for gender appropriate sports like yoga and tennis.)
Ask them why, and you may get as a reply (as I have), ‘Who would we sell them to?’, or ‘Why do women need women’s football boots?’ To which I ask ‘Why do men need to wear football boots designed for their feet?’ (Answer: because in 90 minutes, you can run anywhere from 2 to 6 miles, and your feet – your sense of touch and lightness of foot – are everything!)
Nearly 150,000 women played last year in FA league games – more women than that play. Women’s football is by far the fasted growing sport (for any gender) in the UK (and probably Europe). From the FA’s website: ‘The Active People survey in 2006 highlighted that 250,000 women and 1.1 million girls play some form of football [in the UK] and there are 26 million females playing across the world, of which 4.1m are playing affiliated football.’
Nike, Adidas, Lotto, Umbro, Kelme, Nomi, and Puma all manufacture football boots for women but as far as I can tell in the whole of London not one store carries a single pair by any of these companies – including the company stores! (A salesman at Lillywhites phoned up a friend of his who played on the English NWT and asked her where she gets hers – answer – ‘the internet, because nobody in London sells them.’) Why is this? Because there is a willfull blindness in the UK to women’s interest in the game.
And on this next point, I don’t write about football to compensate for some sort of professorial shame for my love for something fun and popular, or because I need to convince others it’s a ’serious’ subject (as RW suggested) in order to be taken seriously. I write about football *because* it’s fun and popular, and I love it. I write about all of my subjects with the same enthusiasm – be it Melville, Thomas Eakins (a painter), Tracey Emin’s drawings, Andy Warhol’s films, or my favorite soap opera General Hospital (see http://ohindustry.blogspot.com/2007/12/special-guest-stars-jasbir-puar.html for me in dialgoue with a Rutgers professor on this last topic).
It’s important to me that people understand that not all scholars devote their lives to sucking the joy out of their subject: A great number of us are closer to evangelical preachers – we are moved by the spirit, and can’t help sharing our passion with anyone who’ll listen. I indeed can’t imagine why anybody would become a scholar or teacher with any other attitude.
Thank you Spangly Princess for getting this crazy discussion going with your most excellent cross, and Ursus – I am still reeling from your comments re: Kristeva! In general, like Spangly Princess, I’ve found this conversation really engaging and challenging.
I notice my name’s been absent from the back-patting on this interesting exchange so sorry if I was a bit of a wet-blanket, but I have to say I can’t think of anywhere else you could name drop Julia Kristeva on a football blog and get three great responses! As for the sexism in England, my experience there has followed similar lines to Jennifer’s. And never have I been on the wrong end of a discussion about ‘foreigners,’ especially among followers of football, more often than when I’ve been in the UK.
While I do maintain the belief that much of what goes on in the halls of university arts departments in North America and Europe amounts to sophistry, a view not entirely foreign to some prominent writers on the left (Terry Eagleton comes to mind), I don’t mean to tar everyone with the same brush: I really enjoyed reading through your blog Jennifer, and I find your passion for football has a universal appeal…
sorry RW, my bad. that was you with the absolutely brilliant kristeva question! i actually think, upon reflection, that if she cared about english premiership teams, she’d be a Tottenham fan. Berbatov is a walking Black Sun all by himself. I think Lacan is more appropriate to Arsenal, what with Wenger’s diagrams and statistics. As for Adorno, one of my favorites, I am open to suggestions. Liverpool? Adorno could be awfully sentimental – a German sociologist told me that Adorno would play the panio and sing show tunes when among friends. That sounds like Liverpool to me. I totally disagree about some of the things you say, but then you go and invoke my favorite cranky philosophers and make me read your very interesting blog!
Ah, Adorno…something contrarian, against the jargon of phenomenology, generally highbrow, with a hint of American influence to round out his years in sunny LA. Fulham? My old German Studies prof Karen Bauer was a huge Adorno person, she would likely have a ready-made answer…she would have loved a paper on Negative Dialectics and modern football come to think of it.
The reality is, like jazz, he would probably would have dismissed the whole enterprise as kitsch.
Some great artwork there. You should give it a shot on Nike’s new ‘art of Football’ project 1/1.
You can info about here.
http://www.footballshirtculture.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1296&Itemid=145
That was an enlightening piece, Jennifer. Most of the women whom I’ve had conversations with over the years have not been fans of the beautiful game. Times are definitely changing, but the general impression that’s been impressed on me is that women tolerate football, rather than actively follow it. One girl who is a family friend said recently that she could never be in a relationship with a man who loved sports.
Looks like I’ll have to change my social group! My wife is definitely not a football fan, but we do have some interesting conversations about the wider issues surrounding the game, such as its history and culture. She even came with me to watch the Barcelona derby a couple of years ago. Perhaps some men have made the mistake of centering their football conversations solely around what happens on the pitch.
I strongly agree with Sam’s comments about the football culture in the UK (and Ireland). The majority of fans in this part of the world are passionate about their teams, but generally have little appetite for discussing the game in its wider context. For example, one friend of mine can recite all the latest team news and developments at Man Utd, but as soon as I bring up a relevent point from the club’s history, then his eyes glaze over and the conversation soon reverts back to the latest injury scares.
If you mention to folks that your hobby is football history, and that one day you’d like to make a living from it, then after a few minutes chat, that avenue of conversation often peters out. I have noticed a gradual change, but only very slowly.
The television broadcasters must share some of the blame for reinforcing the stereotypical view that females don’t get football in its own right. Why else, for example, did viewers have to put up with David Ginola’s punditry during the 1998 WC in France? The ‘female factor’ of course! Women would never dream of watching the WC solely for footballing reasons would they?
Funny about your comments on females talking footy. I find the same thing. It would be different, I think, if I were young and single and using it as a way to connect with a male for other reasons. As it is I just love the game, and this generally makes me feel a bit…outside. Or more than a bit.
The fact that I write for a soccer blog is not something I discuss when I’m out and about. I’m married. I’m a mom. I’m an American. People just don’t get it. Only a tiny portion of the people who know me know what I do, and even fewer know the name of the site.
A somewhat related story: A few weeks back I was in Heathrow with my husband, sitting in a little pub-type-place to kill a couple of hours. Portsmouth was playing West Brom on the TV, so we moved our seats to sit where I could see. A forty-something guy sits down at the table behind us to have a pint. He and my husband start chatting. He goes off on how Americans don’t know football. My husband asks him who’s playing. He says, “Oh, it’s Portsmouth and…” He hesitates.
“West Brom,” I say, quietly.
“What?”
“West Brom. It’s the FA Cup semis.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think… I believe it’s just…” He loooks at the field, where the words “FA Cup” are everywhere. “Well, perhaps you’re right.” Grudgingly.
My husband starts to say, “Yes, she writes for a soccer site,” but I cut him off. There is no point to bringing this up. I have already violated some sort of unspoken rule, and continuing the conversation won’t accomplish anything. I’m not upset by this. It’s just the way things are. The two of them continue chatting, the game ends, the man leaves.
When I go to games, I drag along family members as shields, because women alone at sporting events are…odd. Nobody understands that we can just…love the game.
And so I think we miss out on a lot of the social aspect of the game that guys experience. And not necessarily by choice.
That story is EXACTLY the sort of thing I was trying to describe. Thanks for sharing – and for telling the tale so well.
Indeed, thanks Laurie, for sharing your (sad) story.
This has been a very interesting discussion which I have to say I personally have found really challenging. People often tell me that I’m more like a man than a woman, in character, which maybe “helps” in this scenario. I have been especially thinking about Jennifer’s question above: why is it so hard to accept that gender is the issue? I haven’t really got any answers for that other than a wholly unsatisfactory visceral reaction of my own which I can only imagine rings even more true for people who are actually male. I have been brooding on this all week now! Perhaps I shall try to write a follow-up post.
Well, if we want to talk about gender issues, let’s consider this. Women certainly can and do play real tackle football. There are women’s leagues that provide a place for women to play football. The women’s season is off-season for the men’s teams, so women play in the heat of the spring and summer which means that more endurance and stamina is required than for their male counterparts. Women play with just as much enthusiasm and vigor as men, and their sport is up and coming.
-Steve
As a follow up to the previous post about issues of gender in football, there have been important studies with significant conclusions in this area.
One such study found that women who participate in sports such as football demonstrated higher self esteem in addition to enhanced self perception and self worth. This in turn led to improved sense of accomplishment and self empowerment.
-Steve
Nice football drawings. I can draw but not that good
greats