by the invisible force of gravity, their players need not work as hard as those from the blue team to score. In contrast, the blue team’s players have an ongoing uphill battle to score a goal. They may have talent and self-discipline, but they have the bad luck of playing on a tilted playing field. To win, blue team members may need to be especially gifted. Football fans would be outraged if the actual playing field were tilted in this way. Yet this is what social divisions of class, gender, and race that are hard-wired into the structural domain of power do – we all think we are playing on a level playing field when we are not.
The cultural domain of power helps manufacture and disseminate this narrative of fair play that claims that we all have equal access to opportunities across social institutions, that competitions among individuals or groups (teams) are fair, and that resulting patterns of winners and losers have been fairly accomplished. This myth of fair play not only legitimates the outcomes of the competitive and repetitive nature of major global sporting competitions such as the World Cup and the Olympics, it also reinforces cultural narratives about capitalism and nationalism. Mass media spectacles of all sorts reiterate the belief that unequal outcomes of winners and losers are normal outcomes of capitalist marketplace competition. Sporting events, beauty pageants, reality television, and similar popular competitions broadcast on a regular basis the idea that the marketplace relations of capitalism are socially just as long as there is fair play. By showcasing competitions between nations, cities, regions, and individuals, mass media reinforces this all-important cultural myth. As long as they play by the rules and their teams are good enough, 195 or so nation-states can theoretically compete in the FIFA World Cup. Yet because rich nations have far more resources than poor ones, a handful of nation-states can field men’s and women’s teams, and even fewer can host the World Cup. When national teams compete, nations themselves compete, with the outcome of such competitions explained by cultural myths.
These mass media spectacles and associated events also present important scripts of gender, race, sexuality, and nation that work together and influence one another. The bravery of male athletes on national teams makes them akin to war heroes on battlefields, while the beauty, grace, and virtue of national beauty pageants are thought to represent the beauty, grace, and virtue of the nation. Women athletes walk a fine line between these two views of masculinity and femininity that draw meaning from binary understandings of gender.
Why is this myth of fair play so durable? Because many people enjoy sporting events or play sports themselves, sports often serve as the template for equality and fair play. Football is a global sport that theoretically can be played almost anywhere by almost anyone. Children and youth who play football typically love the sport. Football does not require expensive lessons, or a carefully manicured playing field, or even shoes. Recreational football requires no special equipment or training, only some kind of ball and enough players to field two teams. Compared with tennis, American football, ice skating, or skiing, football seemingly creates far fewer barriers between individuals with athletic talent and access to opportunities to play the game.
The fanfare granted to the World Cup is a small tip of the iceberg of how football draws upon categories of class, gender, and race, among others, to shape cultural norms of fairness and social justice. From elite athletes to poor kids, football players want to compete on a fair playing field. It doesn’t matter how you got to the field: all that matters once you are on it is what you can do. The sports metaphor of a level playing field speaks to the desire for fairness and equality among individuals. Whether winners or losers, this team sport rewards individual talent, yet also highlights the collective team nature of achievement. When played well and unimpeded by suspect officiating, football rewards individual talent. In a world that is characterized by so much unfairness, competitive sports such as football become important venues for seeing how things should be. The backgrounds of the players should not matter when they hit the playing field. What matters is how well they play. Mass media spectacles may appear to be mere entertainment, yet they are essential to the smooth working of the cultural domain of power.
The disciplinary domain of power refers to how rules and regulations are fairly or unfairly applied to people based on race, sexuality, class, gender, age, ability, and nation, and similar categories. Basically, as individuals and groups, we are “disciplined” to fit into and/or challenge the existing status quo, often not by overt pressure, but by ongoing disciplinary practices. Within football, disciplinary power operates when some youth are forbidden to play, others are discouraged from playing, whereas others receive top-notch coaching in first-class facilities to cultivate their talent. Many are simply told that they are the wrong gender or lack the ability to play at all. In essence, intersecting power relations use categories of gender or race, for example, to create pipelines to success or marginalization, and then encourage, train, or coerce people to stay on their prescribed paths.
Within athletics, intersections of race and nation are important dimensions of disciplinary power. For example, South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup highlights the obstacles that African boys face in playing professional football. Lacking opportunities for training, development, and even basic equipment, African youth look toward European clubs. European football clubs offer salaries on a par with those offered within US professional football, basketball, and baseball to play for teams in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. The surge in the number of Africans playing at big European clubs reflects the dreams of young African football players to have successful professional careers. Yet the lure of European football also makes youth vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous recruiters. Filmmaker Mariana van Zeller’s 2010 documentary Football’s Lost Boys details how thousands of young players were lured away from their homelands, with their families giving up their savings to predatory agents, and how they were often left abandoned, broke, and alone, a process that resembles human trafficking.
The increasing racial/ethnic diversity of elite European teams that recruit African players, other players of color from poorer countries, and racialized immigrant minorities may help national teams to win. But this racial/ethnic/national diversity of elite football teams also highlights the problem of racism in European football. The visible diversity among team players upends longstanding assumptions about race, ethnicity, and national identity. When France’s national team defeated the Brazilian team to win the 1998 World Cup, some fans saw the team as non-representative of France because most of the players were not white. Moreover, although white European fans may love their teams, many feel free to engage in racist behavior, such as calling African players monkeys, chanting racial slurs, and carrying signs with racially derogatory language.2
FIFA’s gendered rules also reflect disciplinary power in ways that produce significantly different experiences for male and female athletes. An intersectional analysis suggests that the convergence of class and gender translates into pay inequities and differential opportunities after a professional soccer career. Beyond the initial division between male and female athletes, different rules that set FIFA policy reflect gendered assumptions about women and sports. Recognizing the disparity of support for men’s and women’s soccer, on March 8, 2019, International Women’s Day, the US players filed a federal gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), the national governing body for the sport. In response, in a legal filing, the USSF denied unlawful conduct, attributing gendered pay differentials to “differences in the aggregate revenue generated by the different teams and/or any other factor other than sex.” In other words, from the perspective of USSF, any gendered economic inequality reflects marketplace structures and cultural norms that lie outside FIFA’s purview, not gender discrimination within FIFA itself.
The fight for equal pay within US soccer generated considerable attention, especially since the US women’s team had consistently outperformed the men’s team, on the field, in media interest, and in revenue. The US men’s team failed to qualify for the 2018 games, whereas the women’s team won the World Cup in 2015 and 2019. Viewership for the women’s team also outpaced that for the men’s team. In 2015, some 25 million people watched the US women’s team win the World Cup final – at that time, a record US audience for any soccer game, with their 2019 victory breaking that record. But while important, gender-only frameworks
