‘Best run club in the world': Manchester City fans and the legitimation of sportswashing?

Kearns, Colm; Sinclair, Gary; Black, Jack; Doidge, Mark; Fletcher, Thomas; Kilvington, Daniel; Liston, Katie; Lynn, Theo; Santos, Guto Leoni

doi:10.1177/10126902231210784

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

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“…To take one example. The phrase "sports washing" has now entered the public lexicon as a term that enables a broader discussion of the role of the State in the use of sporting spectacles to pursue their own ideological ends (see Fruh et al, 2023;Grix et al, 2023;Kearns et al, 2023;Skey, 2023). Previously only those students taking a graduate class in Sport Studies would have learned about State power and the ideological effects of the sports spectacle and known what those words meant.…”

Section: Does Sport Studies Still Matter?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies”: Rethinking Sport Studies After the Cultural Turn

Carrington

2024

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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This article addresses the (inter)disciplinary parameters and political possibilities of Sport Studies by providing an overview of the state of Sport Studies after the cultural turn. The cultural turn is defined as the influence of linguistic models on cultural analysis and the associated impact of poststructuralism and critical theory on the social sciences. I argue that the cultural turn, especially as developed within the academic field of Cultural Studies, resulted in the elevation of culture as central rather than epiphenomenal to our understandings of how society works. Drawing on the work and ideas of Stuart Hall, I warn against decontextualized forms of cultural analysis, that privilege discourse analysis and descriptive content analysis. Instead, an argument is made for more critical conjunctural analyses, broadly defined as the analysis of socio-economic forces that shape power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time. The article then maps six key forces reshaping the current conjuncture. Sport, I argue, is entangled in complex ways with these emerging and changing formations, and in some areas, sport is at the forefront of the cultural-ideological revolutions taking place. As a key site of meaning making, a powerful space where bonds of attachment are forged, a space of fantasy and play, and a place for identity construction and human creativity, I show how sport is now central to current struggles to remake the world system into a more humane, less toxic and more egalitarian space.

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Section: Does Sport Studies Still Matter?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies”: Rethinking Sport Studies After the Cultural Turn

Carrington

2024

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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‘Fog on the tyne’? The ‘common-sense’ focus on ‘sportswashing’ and the 2021 takeover of Newcastle United

Crossley,

Woolf

2024

International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics

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The Fetishization of Sport: Exploring the Effects of Fetishistic Disavowal in Sportswashing

Black,

Sinclair,

Kearns

2024

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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Is it possible to remain a sports fan when prominent sports teams and events are utilized to “sportswash” human rights abuses and other controversies? Indeed, while there is an abundance of analyses critiquing different instances of sportswashing, the exploration of the role of sportswashing and its connection to the “sports fan” presents an essential and necessary area of investigation and theoretical inquiry. To unpick this dilemma, this article proposes the concept of “fetishistic disavowal” to help theorize the impact of sportswashing, as well as its relation to the sports fan and critical sports academic. This argues that, as spectators and fans of sport—and, moreover, as critical academics—we often acknowledge and accept that sport is used to perpetuate and even maintain a variety of social, economic, and political inequalities. Yet, while we are aware of such knowledge, we nonetheless remain fully capable of disavowing this very knowledge as an accepted part of sport. Given this, it is argued that the fetishization of sport can provide a suitable conduit for the fetishistic disavowal that sportswashing requires, with the concept offering a unique way of approaching sport's inherent contradictions, while also theorizing how subjects relate to these contradictions as part of their involvement in and with sport. Where sportswashing directly implicates the fan in its implementation—relying upon a level of fetishistic disavowal between the fan and their club and proffering a disavowed acknowledgement of the effects of sportswashing and its interpellation through sport—this article outlines how applications of fetishistic disavowal provide a unique theoretical lens through which analyses of sport, and its ethical significance, can be critiqued.

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‘Best run club in the world': Manchester City fans and the legitimation of sportswashing?

Cited by 3 publications

References 37 publications

“There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies”: Rethinking Sport Studies After the Cultural Turn

“There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies”: Rethinking Sport Studies After the Cultural Turn

‘Fog on the tyne’? The ‘common-sense’ focus on ‘sportswashing’ and the 2021 takeover of Newcastle United

The Fetishization of Sport: Exploring the Effects of Fetishistic Disavowal in Sportswashing

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