What Makes a Man in the World of English Football

Photo by Антон Зайцев is licensed for use under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Perhaps I’m taking Twitter too seriously. Seeing some of my favorite soccer (ahem, football) players viciously attacked online after a game can really ruin the mood. Or perhaps it’s the kind of attacks I see, from casual racism passed off as dark humor to dangerous sexism and homophobia, that makes any escapism into the chaos of football impossible for me, an American woman of color who is a fan of the English Premier League (EPL). The culture of English football, rampant with both toxic masculinity and xenophobia, constantly reminds me of how many of us do not belong. In the same way that our culture upholds the Western male as the standard, the EPL upholds the British player as the archetype athlete, deploying traditions of masculinity to outcast anyone who does not conform. In the world of the EPL, masculinity collides with English nationalism to produce a hegemonic conception of what it means to be a legitimate player—and a real citizen.

The English Premier League is the top flight of English football and is currently regarded as the best league in the world. Home to the careers of players like Cristiano Ronaldo, with others calling it Lionel Messi’s playground, the league proclaims that only the best can do it on a cold rainy night in Stoke, a city in central England. A location that the footballing world now looks on as the ideal, the EPL provides a sense of what makes a modern footballer. What emerges is a link between the football that must be performed on the field and the social identities that must be performed off the field. 

League football shows the pervasiveness of structures like racism and colonialism on our everyday identities. When only a few months ago three young Black players on the English national team suffered from extreme racism across social media as a result of missing the penalties that would have won England the Euro 2020 Tournament, how can we ignore it? Adding the layer of masculinity into these discussions of sport demonstrates how masculinity is a tool of colonialism, a set of criteria to mark who does and does not belong. This is not a sports question. It is a question that bleeds into our own feelings of citizenship, and the identity one must assume in order to gain respect.

Perhaps we can identify who an EPL player is by first identifying who he is not. Back in December 2020, ESPN pundit Frank Leboeuf criticized German international Kai Havertz of Chelsea F.C. for his performance in a defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C.. Leboeuf, who is also a former Chelsea player, said in his review of Havertz:

“But I don’t know, it’s something that I don’t like, the way sometimes it feels like he’s not there, that he’s not trying to compensate for a lack of confidence with a desire or just being a warrior, showing us that, 'okay, I’m not good at the moment, but I’m going to fight for the club and not be invisible.”

In other words, players must outwardly prove themselves by how they play and behave on the field. Authors Lindsay Gaston, Rory Magrath, and Eric Anderson describe football as symbolic of “masculine embodiment,” which reproduces hegemonic masculinity through physical strength and power. Indeed, English football culture values qualities like hard work, physicality, and a visible determination and passion over extraordinary technical ability. Masculinity in the EPL, then, is a uniquely British masculinity, where notions of physicality and passion are nationally derived traits with which a player asserts his dominance. Masculinity is not just a matter of gender, but gender performance and external expression of one’s self. If a player cannot “be a warrior” and “fight for their club,” or at least act like they do, they are shot down, deemed unfit to play in the Premier League.

If masculinity on the field is nationally derived, then English masculinity becomes the ideal. The best kind of men are the ones who can play the English way. A consequence of English hypernationalism is that football creates a default identity in England, the one who is taken as normal: the English male. Local fans have a lot of privilege as they can physically attend games, and they assert themselves as “true” supporters the way born and raised English people would consider themselves “true” citizens. Yet in times of increased globalization, many of these local fans feel their traditional football community is fading away, an anxiety deriving from new emerging groups of fans like international viewers and women. As a result, local fans aggressively reassert their authentic English roots that make them the “real” and therefore “superior” fans. This hypernationalism subsumes a history of colonialism, as seen how during the 2002 World Cup, “the tabloids painted their own picture of England’s paternalistic role in teaching other, ‘lesser’ nations how to play the ‘beautiful game.’” Like the “real English” fans who argue themselves to be the superior fans, the English footballing world believes that the English way is the best way, using the sport symbolically to announce England’s dominance and cultural power. But by virtue of asserting the superiority of their own Englishness, the EPL not-so-silently defines who is not English.

Authenticity, then, doubly jeopardizes Black players who are visible outsiders, regardless of nationality. Nowhere is this more apparent than the myth of the lazy Black player. Rarely do critics and journalists praise them as they do for their white counterparts, viewing Black players as lazy and having bad attitudes while white players are selfless hard workers. Where physicality and passion are necessary qualities for the EPL player to have, if the footballing world stereotypes all Black players as “lazy,” then Black players can never be accepted as a player who can represent the modern world of football. The ideal EPL footballer is not just British, but British and white. Such "conditional acceptance," as author Peter Milward calls it, is not unfamiliar to minoritized groups in England, for whom, as Garland notes, "English identity was a temporary, contingent phenomenon that could be given and taken away." Your worth as a citizen was determined by how close to white British identity you were, no matter your nationality.

All of these feed into the ways that fans and critics alike villainize racial and ethnic outsiders in the league. Foreign players are often the first to be blamed by fans for team failures and embody all the negative attributes of their club. It is as if they are a parasite or, as manager Jose Mourinho might call Black Frenchman Paul Pogba, a virus. Pogba, a midfielder for Manchester United F.C. who gets more criticism for his hair than praise for his exceptional footballing ability, is arguably one of the most contested players in the sport. Where pundits like Graeme Souness constantly “expect more” from him, Ian Wright aptly responds, “for him [Souness] to say ‘why can’t Pogba do that every week?’ No one can do that every week.” The targeting of nonwhite or non-British players creates a culture of conformity to a very specific kind of player. Respect is earned only when players mold themselves into what the hegemony expects a perfect footballer to be. When British notions of belonging exacerbate the already suffocating traditions of orthodox masculinity, is there truly any room for diversity, for creativity, for difference?

Regardless of whether one is a lover of football or not, it is necessary to reflect on our conditions of accepting those different from us. Do we only accept them when they perform how we like? I like to think of anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod’s call to “accept the possibility of difference.” It is about changing our expectations for universality. People will be different, and we will just have to let them. While there is no single solution to changing an entire mindset rooted in national pride and identity, one place to start is by tackling discrimination in the places we gather together. This includes holding social media accountable for how it enables racism, among other abuses. With so much vitriol coming from online, platforms like Twitter must be more active in eradicating such behavior. The world, both football and beyond it, must know that there is no place for discrimination and that everyone belongs.

It is quite ironic to imagine how a league full of foreigners constructs so many outsiders. The EPL, for all its diversity and welcoming of foreign talents from leagues across Europe and the rest of the world, promotes conformity. Any player that does not conform to the imagination of the ideal British footballer is excluded from the potential to be a great player. It runs a dangerous parallel to how individuals who do not conform to our imagination are dehumanized and seen as a kind of social “other.” For this I ask the question: exactly who is being afforded our respect?