The mediated nation and the transnational football fan

Abstract

This article draws on preliminary findings from a qualitative study of the relationships between sport, media, identity and national cultural citizenship in Greater Western Sydney, Australia’s most dynamically diverse urban region. It addresses the place of sport, including association football (soccer), in the lived experience of those who, under conditions of intensifying and proliferating ‘mobilities’, engage in the quotidian process of negotiating their orientation to nation and, especially, to national culture. It explores, in interviews with Australian residents and sport fans from a range of backgrounds, the interplay of sporting taste, media sport uses, affectivity and orientation to the national. The article concludes with the analytical observation that Australia’s historically-inherited ethnic hierarchy extends to Anglo-Australians a certain licence to play with or even repudiate national sporting loyalty, while subjecting citizens and residents from non-Anglo (especially Asian) backgrounds to a stricter test of demonstrating loyalty and obedience to nation through sport.

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