'Singing Songs, Making Places, Creating Selves:' Football Songs & Fan Identity at Sydney FC
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Keywords:
music, football, songs, place-making
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Abstract
The Australian A-League soccer competition was established in 2004. The creation of a new national soccer league precipitated many changes within Australia’s football culture. These changes were particularly difficult for the supporters because, with a single exception, all the A-League teams were completely new ‘franchises’. The reinvented competition required soccer fans to adopt a new team, to develop new loyalties, new rituals, new places, and consequently a new fan identity. Vital to this act of re-creation has been the collective authorship of a ‘new’ repertoire of football songs. Football songs and communal singing are central to the traditions and performance of soccer fandom. Football song plays a key, perhaps even determining, role in the creation of fan identity. In this paper I examine the way football songs are used create a fan identity for Sydney’s new A-League side: Sydney FC. I argue that the result of Sydney fans’ conscious act of cultural creation is a repertoire of songs and chants that, although derived from an increasingly globalised and commodified football culture, is able to articulate a local identity. Moreover, these songs may even be thought to articulate a local and a global fan identity simultaneously, as fans connect local and distant spaces within global soccer culture.
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Anonymous (2007) This is Sydney Magazine, The Cove: Sydney.
Armstrong, G. & Young, M. (2008) 'Fanatical Football Chants: Creating and Controlling the Carnival', Sport in Society, 2(3):173-211.
Augé, M. (1995) Non-places : introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, translated by John Howe, London, New York: Verso.
Baumann, Z. (1990) 'Modernity and Ambivalence', in Mike Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization & Modernity, London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327690007002010
Back, L. (2001) 'Sounds in the Crowd', in Bull, M. & L. Back (eds) The Auditory Studies Reader, Oxford: Berg.
Brottman, M. (2005) High Theory/Low Culture, New York: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978226
Crawford, G. (2004) Consuming Sport: Fans, Sport & Culture, London: Macmillan.
Dabscheck, B. (2007) 'Moving Beyond Ethnicity: Soccer's Evolutionary Progress', in Stewart, B. (ed) The Game's not the Same: the Political Economy of Football in Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Dunning, E., Murphy, P. & Williams, J. (1986) 'Spectator Violence at Football Matches: Towards a Sociological Explanation', The British Journal of Sociology, 37(2):221-224. https://doi.org/10.2307/590355
Easthope, A. (1990) What a Man's Gotta Do, Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Giulianotti, R. (2002) 'Supporters, Followers, Fans & Flâneurs', Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Feb:25-46.
Giulianotti, R. (2005) 'Sport Spectators and the Social Consequences of Commodification: Critical Perspectives from Scottish Football', Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 29(4):386-410. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723505280530
Giulianotti, R. & Finn, G. (1999) 'Old Visions, Old Issues: New Horizons, New Openings? Change, Continuity and Other Contradictions in World Football', Sport in Society, 2(3):256-282. https://doi.org/10.1080/14610989908721855
Giulianotti, R. & Robertson, R. (2004) 'The Globalisation of Football: a Study in the Glocalisation of the Serious Life', The British Journal of Sociology, 55(5):545-565. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2004.00037.x
Gosling, V. (2007) 'Girls Allowed? The Marginalisation of Female Sports Fans', in Gray, J. et al (eds) Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, New York: New York University Press.
Hassett, S. (2008) 'With Undesirables Now off the Menu, Marinators Left to Stew', Sydney Morning Herald Weekend Edition September 20-21.
Hills, M. (2002) Fan Cultures, London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203361337
Hobsbaum, E. & Ranger, T. (eds) The Invention of Tradition, London: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107295636
Long, C. & Williams, J. (2005) 'Football and Music Cultures in Liverpool', Esporte e Sociedade, 11.
McLeod, K. (2006) 'We are the Champions': Masculinites, Sports & Popular Culture', Popular Music & Society, 29(5):531-547. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007760500238551
Maffesoli, M. (1996) The Time of the Tribes, Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Maguire, J. (1994) 'Sport, Identity Politics, & Globalisation: Diminishing Contrasts & Increasing Variety', Sociology of Sports Journal, 11:398-427. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.11.4.398
Mosely, P. (1997) 'Soccer', in P. Mosely et al (eds) Sporting Immigrants, Sydney: Walla Walla Press.
Marsh, P., Rosser, E., & Harre, R.(2005) 'Life on the Terraces' [1978], in Ken Gelder (ed.) The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., Routledge: London.
Skinner, J., Zakus, D.H. & Edwards, A. (2008) 'Coming in from the Margins: Ethnicity, Community Support and the Rebranding of Soccer in Australia', Soccer & Society, 9(3):394-404. https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970802009007
Small, C. (1998) Musicking: the Meaning of Performing & Listening, Middleton, CT: Weslyean University Press.
Smith, G (2000) Singing Australia: A History of Folk and Country Music, North Melbourne: Pluto Press.
Sydney FC Online Fan Forum (2007)
Theodoropoulou, V. (2007) 'The Anti-Fan within the Fan', in John Gray et al (eds) Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, New York: New York University Press.
Willis, P. (1990) Common Culture, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.