A Century of British Readings of America through American Football: From the Fin de Siècle to the Super Bowl

Abstract

This paper examines the development of American football and the Super Bowl in the British imagination utilizing data from the British press. Divergent images of America have been present for centuries in British minds, and American football became intertwined with these images in the nineteenth century. Initially presented as a brutalized version of British varieties of football, once American football was seen live in Great Britain and it became a familiar subject on newsreels, some commentators interpreted it as a spectacle and a synonym for American life–modern, exciting, fast, and fun. Others viewed it as a threat that could undermine the British cultural heritage. The regular broadcasting of the NFL by Channel 4, including the Super Bowl live, was a watershed with the game swiftly gaining audience numbers whilst English association football was in a dour period. The increased popularity resulted in more media coverage, including negative images of unbridled capitalism, fixed games, and drug use. By the 1990s, audience numbers declined as English football was rehabilitated and American popularity waned, mainly through unpopular foreign policies. Today, many Britons regard watching the Super Bowl in the same way as a trip to Disney, an one-day holiday to a ‘foreign’ culture.     

‘We Will Try Again,Again, Again to Make It Bigger’: Japan,American Football,and the Super Bowl in the Past,Present, and Future

Abstract

This study is to analyse how the Japanese have traditionally received and currently perceive the Super Bowl, and for this purpose, it aims to locate the position of American football in Japanese history, society, and culture. It explores the game’s history and then examine the degree of its spread among Japan’s sporting population. A two-dimensional approach of historical study and inter-game comparison gives context to the analyses of reference frequency and contents of news media, followed by speculative discussions of what the near future of Japan’s American football would be like. To conclude, it clarifies the ways the Super Bowl has been received and is now being perceived by two groups: The first group is the general people who see the Super Bowl as the convenient and useful medium by which they could learn effectively about American culture through the one-night mania for ‘conspicuous consumption’. The second group comprises American football experts and enthusiasts, including 13,000 athletes and their OBs, coaches, trainers, and other staff members of the leagues and associations as well as the general sports fans. For this group, the Super Bowl is the apex of their favourite sport to which only a selected talented few could join.     

The Super Bowl as a Television Spectacle: Global Designs,Glocal Niches,and Parochial Patterns

Abstract

In the contemporary US, the Super Bowl creates the largest ‘shared experience’ in the nation. More people tune into these spectacles than attend worship services, vote in elections, or celebrate traditional holidays. Super Bowls have become such powerful elements in US national culture that television corporations and the National Football League have sought to export them to the rest of the world. Indeed, executives in the television and football industries tout potential worldwide audiences in the billions and speculate that the Super Bowl might muscle its way into the realm of the Olympics and World Cup soccer tournaments as global mega-events. In spite of corporate bluster, the Super Bowl has not become a truly international event and has not garnered widespread international passion. American pundits have speculated ceaselessly about why the Super Bowl lags behind other US cultural products in terms of global influence and fretted about how the rest of the world sees the game. Their analyses reveal more about American perceptions of the world than they do about the world’s views of the United States.     

‘Superbowling’: Using the Super Bowl’s Yearly Commentary to Explore the Evolution of a Sporting Spectacle in the American Consciousness

Abstract

In the days following Super Bowl III, New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte coined the phrase ‘superbowling’. Consisting of the ‘chatter’ and diverse perspectives voiced throughout the nation in the days surrounding each Super Bowl, superbowling includes the off-the-wall psychiatric evaluations and epic gloating by football fans, political reactions and sociological analyses concerning the game’s affect on the nation’s institutions, as well as the hasty generalizations by alarmed moralists and university professors. This paper utilizes the ‘superbowling’ penned between Super Bowls I and XXXVI as evidence that provides insight into ‘the variety of ways in which Americans understood and enacted their political culture at a specific time’. By investigating the varieties of superbowling topics highlighted within each yearly Super Bowl, one cannot only better understand the evolution of Super Bowl Sunday, but can also understand its relationship to the prominent historical happenings and personalities of the time. It is concluded that by the turn of the millennium, superbowling revealed at least three enduring qualities of Super Bowl Sunday: ‘conspicuous consumption’, ‘shared experience’, and ‘national holiday’.     

The Super Bowl at 50 or L

Abstract

In the short span of a half-century the Super Bowl has grown from a modest championship game between two football leagues into an outsized mid-winter holiday co-produced by the National Football League and the combined efforts of the American advertising and television industries. It has grown from a one-day into a two-week festival featuring a vast range of events, parties, and a championship football game. Fifty years on, half of the population of the United States and a worldwide television audience participate in Super Bowl activities and festivities either live or virtually. Television, marketing, and a wide range of media platforms have aided and abetted the growth of this celebration of football and consumption. Although there are many ways to describe the Super Bowl it is the nineteenth century vocabulary of the economist Thorstein Veblen that best captures its essence. In Veblen’s words it is a case of ‘conspicuous consumption’ now running on steroids.     

‘Super Bore’: The Canadian Media and the Grey Cup-Super Bowl Comparison

Abstract

A closer look at football illuminates some important truths in the Can-Am experience. Central to this discovery is the notion of the Grey Cup as Canada’s anti-Super Bowl. Complete with folksy traditions and understated pageantry, the Grey Cup is emblematically Canadian and has historically served as a sharp rebuke to American cultural imperialism and excess, represented so perfectly by the Super Bowl. Like many aspects of Can-Am relations, however, the Super Bowl experience is not a simple narrative. Many Canadians have not only integrated the Super Bowl into their sporting calendars but prefer it to the domestic product. The growing cultural influence of the Super Bowl north of the border made national headlines in 2015 when ratings revealed that more Canadians, per capita, watched the Super Bowl than Americans. Traditionally the attitudes reflected in Canadian media demonstrate a clear bias that favoured the Grey Cup over the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl’s prominence in Canada was written by Canadian sports scribes as regrettable and undeserved while the virtuous Grey Cup, they asserted, went under-appreciated, not just globally but increasingly domestically. This chauvinistic rhetoric supports and adds to the existing research that focuses on Canadian reaction to American mass culture.     

Virtual Patriot Games: American Football in The Times of London, 1888–1910

Abstract

This study examines the American football press coverage in the Times of London from 1888 to November 1910. The time span covers the paper’s first mention of the game to the first game played in England. This period also coincides with increasing anxiety about the strength of the British Empire and unwanted American influences. During this time, athletic contests between the two nations turned into sites for the construction of national identities. Adapting the sport scholar Emma Poulton’s concept of ‘mediated patriot games’, the author argues that the American football coverage of the Times of London could be considered ‘virtual patriot games’, as the absence of domestic American football teams did not allow for direct competition. Two related narrative elements. The stories in the Times framed gridiron football as the pastime of the ‘other’, including translating rules and comparing the merits of rugby and American football. The reports also focused on the American game’s violence, confirming older traditions in British imaginations of America. Advancements in communication technologies, especially the telegraphic wire, were critical for the immediacy with which British readers consumed American sporting news. Contrary to current scholarship, British interpretations of American culture through gridiron football developed much earlier than the post-1970s information age.     

Fifty Years of Super Bowl Commercials,Thirty-Two Years of Spectacular Consumption

Abstract

This article will explore the role and visibility of advertising during the Super Bowl over the years as a model for strategies of modern advertising and the resulting commercialization of US society. It uses the concepts of ‘spectacular consumption’ derived from Guy Debord and the ‘commodity audience’ from Dallas Smythe to frame the commercials’ cultural transformation and influence. The spectacular nature of Super Bowl commercials and the special commodity worth of its audience were not present in the early days of the event, but gained momentum with Super Bowl XVII and its airing of Apple’s ‘1984’ commercial that became mythologized in the advertising industry. After 1984, both the rising inflation-adjusted CPM (‘cost-per-thousand’) and the increased media coverage indicate an increased spectacularization. This also manifested in such phenomena as the influential, decades-long Doritos user-generated content contests and the Greatest Super Bowl Commercials TV specials, and was a forerunner of such post-millennial advertising strategies as branded entertainment and content marketing, all designed to integrate advertising as a legitimate form of entertainment culture and prevent the avoidance of advertising by audiences.     

Mormon Missionaries and the Emergence of Modern Argentine Sport, 1938–1943

Abstract

In 1938, Mormon missionaries from North America, under the leadership of Frederick Salem Williams, formed an athletic club, Club Atlético Los Mormones (‘The Mormons Athletic Club’, CALM), in Buenos Aires, Argentina. CALM would sponsor professional teams in baseball, softball, and basketball, all bearing the name Los Mormones (‘The Mormons’). Los Mormones won three league championships in the four years they played baseball and four championships in the five years they played softball. Two of their basketball players would become national all-stars, one of whom would represent Argentina at the South American Championship in 1940. Williams served as president of the softball league and vice president of the baseball league. Los Mormones’ story is outlined and situated in relation to the various discourses that, woven together, constitute the cultural context of modern Argentine sport: physical culture and modernity, United States-Argentine relations, amateurism versus professionalism, and the spread of North American sports to Latin America.     

National Sporting Pastimes,Spectacles of Sporting Otherness and American Imaginings, 1880–1920

This discussion focuses on how the rise of America's national sporting pastimes, during the period 1880–1920, was inextricably tied to the ambitions and outpourings of American print capitalism and a concomitant congealing of a sense of modern American nationhood. In examining this thematic, we explicate the manner in which American national sporting audiences during the period 1880–1920 were variously constituted through discourses of national and ethnic sporting difference or Otherness. Hence, we examine the popular representation of turn of the century rodeo practices (as narrated through the spectacle of the western showman William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody's Wild West show productions), the position of early-twentieth-century American baseball in relation to other sporting cultures (graphically depicted by Albert Goodwill, or A.G., Spalding's promotional publications, specifically the 1911 America's National Game) and the national and ethnic differences discerned within the global sporting landscape more generally (explicated within the 1919 National Geographic article ‘The Geography of Games’). These performances and representations of ethnic and national sporting Otherness played an important role in re-inscribing and legitimating the (White European American) normative core of American sport culture (as manifest within and through the dominant practices of playing and/or spectating of football, baseball and basketball).     

Scandinavian women’s football: the importance of male and female pioneers in the development of the sport

ABSTRACT

The importance of female and male pioneers in the development of women’s football in Scandinavia is in focus, where some of the female pioneers’ experiences presented. Sif Kalvø from Western Norway was the first known Scandinavian female football player who played abroad in Italy in 1971, and she was one of the pioneers. She was dependent on door openers in Norway and abroad. The door openers role, in making professional football possible; how the professional contracts came through; and why the Scandinavian female footballers went global in the early phases, discussed. To study this the Norwegian Mother of Women’s football, Målfrid Kuvås, and other female pioneer footballers are in-depth interviewed. Kuvås’ large collection of scrapbooks with media coverage, letters and other correspondence from the 1960s to 2000s are also studied. Qualitative in-depth interviews carried out, with five of the early professionals and five of the leaders involved in the migration processes. Secondary sources are academic literature and sport media. The dream about playing professional football, and to be able to live from football brought female players across the globe. Due to this, migration research is of interest when studying women’s football, and ‘push’- and ‘pull’- factors in migration are discussed.     

Remember the Teutons: English coverage of Germany at the 2010 World Cup

As the German national team prepared for their Round of 16 match in Bloemfontein at the 2010 World Cup, observers noted a different ‘look’. In the words of one Times (London) reporter, ‘Joachim Löw’s side, with their youth and ethnic diversity, are far from “typical Germans”’. This paper examines the reaction of the English ‘quality’ daily press to a less ‘homogenous’ German team at South Africa ’10. It argues that the changing cultural make-up of the Nationalmannschaft prompted journalists to revisit a narrative that traditionally emphasized power, efficiency and confidence. Whilst these clichés were not written out of the media discourse, they were complemented by a new emphasis on illumination and artistry.     

Football and its continuity as a classless mass phenomenon in Germany and England: rethinking the bourgeoisification of football crowds

Considering football’s popular notion of a working-class sport in England and Germany – at least in the 1950s – the shift towards present classless fandom in football is mainly explained by the genesis of a middle-class fan culture induced by the process of football’s accumulating (hyper-) commodification. However, this so-called ‘bourgeoisification thesis’ cannot be verified on the basis of empirical data – neither on the basis of the employment status of people attending football matches in the stadia of the top league clubs in England and Germany between 1977 and 2009 nor on the basis of representative data pertaining to the social-class profile of regular readers of German football magazines carried out in 1954. It is demonstrated that football has enjoyed continuous popularity among all social classes. Hence, the bourgeoisification of football fandom can basically be ascribed to the inter- and intra-generational upward mobility in postmodern societies induced by socio-structural change.     

Behind the Iron Curtain: Football as a Site of Contestation in the East German Sports ‘Miracle’

Sport is employed as a lens through which one can understand better the social and political inner workings of dictatorship. This paper treats sport as a cultural institution within GDR (German Democratic Republic) society and sets out to complement the two broad paradigms used to study East Germany: the first, a broad approach under the umbrella of ‘Cold War histories’ and ‘totalitarianism theory’, usually focusing on the few; the second, a so-called ‘histories of everyday life’ approach generally focusing on the many. Using an in-depth case study of the sport of football, the paper introduces a new paradigm: the ‘contested dictatorship’ approach. This approach rejects the broad totalitarian notion of dictatorship as applied to East Germany and shares many of the underlying assumptions of the ‘everyday history’ approach, in particular by allowing a far greater role for agency with much more room for manoeuvre for actors and institutions within the structures of an authoritarian state than ‘totalitarian’ understandings usually permit. Drawing on empirical archival material, the paper reveals the endemic rivalries between key personalities (and even large industrial enterprises expressing regional identities) in a struggle for influence over the game; rivalries between fans of GDR football teams; fan culture and hooligan behaviour as forms of self-determination; and how these issues contributed to the poor performance of football relative to other sports.     

German fußball—recent developments and origins

Fußball is the most popular sport in Germany. The reasons for this extraordinary status and success of association football in Germany are complex. In this article, answers are searched for in the context of the historical development of German society. After a review of the recent development of German football and football historiography, the paper focuses on two issues relating to the origins of German football. These are the transformation of football in the then dominant body culture of gymnastics, and secondly its impact on the German process of nation-building. Both processes are not only linked, but also related to the concept of manliness in German sport and society. This is the reason why women’s football in Germany was not accepted until the late 1960s in German society—and British as well.     

The Origins of Football Debate: The Continuing Demise of the Dominant Paradigm, 1852–1856

This article presents original and compelling new material in ‘the origins of football debate’, this time from the period 1852–1856, using the British Library's digitisation project of nineteenth-century newspapers. In so doing, it addresses the alleged disappearance of football in the wider community in mid-century, a problem that has troubled a number of scholars, not least because of the rapid expansion in the game amongst the working and lower middle classes from the 1870s onwards. In addressing this allegation it outlines a much broader and more stable footballing culture across the country than hitherto thought, based on games played at church, work and school outings, rural fetes and galas, alongside those played at celebrations and as street football or casual games in meadows, fields or greens, arguing that those historians who have simply looked for formal games were looking for the wrong forms of football in the wrong places, based on twentieth-century notions of what constitutes a ‘game’ of football. Overall, the article has added yet more evidence of the cultural continuity of football across the mid-century and contributed to the continuing demise of the so-called ‘dominant paradigm’ in the ‘origins of football’ debate.     

A Game for Christmas? The Argylls,Saxons and Football on the Western Front,December 1914

Historians know that any mention of football and World War I will involve discussions of the Christmas truces of 1914 and the mythical football match between British and German troops. Many British soldiers denied that any truce had occurred let alone a football match. However, while there is indisputable evidence of truces, triangulating proof of football has been elusive. In this paper, a case study of the British 2/Argylls and the German 133/Saxons is developed. The underlying reasons behind the truce are discussed and why some combatants, in the short break from trying to kill each other, probably played football, even though certainly not as the formal match of popular imagination. It is argued that the truce was a result of unique circumstances and was not an overwhelmingly inspirational moment for the majority of troops involved; they all returned to the fighting. Most participants on both sides of the truce probably regarded it as an unexpected holiday and some availed themselves of the opportunity to play their favourite game. The paper concludes by examining recent commemorative events of Christmas 1914 and how they may have contributed to the myth of ‘The Football Match’.