Who am I if I am not a Footballer? 'Doing' Identity through the Sport Experience, an Anthropological Perspective

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when I started my degree I did not want to stop, I was keen to carry on; in the end I had rediscovered 
'the pleasure' for the game. I became a player for Goldsmith College 1st Team and found the rest of 
the team highly committed to the game.  
   To play for Goldsmiths College became almost the equivalent of playing for a city-town like I 
did in my country: the results of each match became more and more 'socially' important, beside it 
was interesting to see how players would take the pre-match build-up and post match conversation so 
seriously. These would cover all sorts of things, from the importance of the match coming up, who 
deserved or not to play, a wide range of after-match commentary – from underscoring someone’s 
excellent performance, shape, strength, to hilarious comments on someones’ mediocre performance, 
mistakes, awkwardness -  so-called 'taking the piss' ! 
  However, what particularly struck me were the connection I would make between my previous 
semi-professional career and the amateur one I was engaging with: the passion, excitement, 
fascination for the game was exactly the same, good skills and physical strength would be highly 
regarded whenever one had the opportunity to do it. What did football mean to all of us? What was 
so unique about 'the practice' of football? How could a game create such an adrenalitic rush?
1 
 
 
     1.2  The Argument  
     When I started reviewing the literature on football I noticed the recurring themes of 
hooliganism, crowed behaviour/psychology, community-fan culture, masculine identity, appearing to 
be the only 'issues' relating to this sport. Only recently has a new academic focus explored themes of 
nationalism, xenophobia, and racism stemming from the football scenario. By contrast very little 
seems to be examined in relation to the actual 'practice/doing' of this wide-spread sporting activity, 
its phenomenological status; in other words what is peculiar to this game that creates so many 
followers, and so much passion. Hence in this paper I intent to bring to light some 'hidden facts' that 
could enlarge our view of why football has become so popular throughout the world (beyond the fact 
that it is embedded in national and international socio-political, economic matters) coming to be 
defined as the ‘new’ opium of the masses.   
                                                 
1
  One may argue that it is not only football that is so captivating and highly entertaining, therefore, in order to answer 
these questions the stance I take considers the ontological relevance of football, how football provides an ontological 
security for the practitioner, a ‘characteristic’ of any sport charged with highly emotional momentum.  In  other  words I 
intend to explore the game of football as representative of sport and/or team-sport in general, therefore by referring to 
football it is not my aim to make unique claims for it. I am aware that the sorts of analogies and associations one can 
make by looking at any form of sport that involves two teams and a crowd are manifold and might say much the same 
thing.  
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   I will start describing the pre-match scenario, the ritualistic experience that, as it will be 
argued, activates a powerfully affective sense of collective identity. I shall then explore the cross 
cultural variations of the 'manners of Being' constituted in the football environment (in my case 
between England and Italy). The notion of habitus  - its  'relation' to the past - and practical mastery 
will help to clarify the differences in approaching and interpreting the football match. By contrast, I 
will analyse the similarity of experience involving the practitioners, the kinds of 'emotional reactions' 
the game provokes.  
  At this stage I shall attempt to deconstruct the football 'game', tracing its genealogy. We will 
see that the game is nothing but 'serious play', the latter regarded as a spontaneous trait of human 
personality. Finally I will try to unravel those aspects of the embodiment of the football experience 
that relate to 'the importance' of expressive existence (in this respect I draw analogies to art and 
drama relating to the football 'spectacle'), and identity revealing; it follows that the realm of the 
'religious' become less a matter of 'faith' than a transcendental lived experience. In other words, the 
thick  semantic character investing the world of sport, its transcendental pursuit, the very practice of 
football - how it is learned embodied and interpreted by its actors, both male and female - aim to get 
at more general insights on the importance of studying sport as an anthropological phenomena.   
   I hope that this will enable me to accomplish my aim: with the use of my personal 'experience' 
of the subject and a constant engagement with it, supported by  My  acquired anthropological 'pair of 
glasses', I will attempt to generate two interrelated arguments. First, to give voice to the 
‘practitioners’ and explore how they/we
2
 relate to the actual 'practice' of the sport and the football 
'experience' as a whole; to somehow give the 'insiders perspective' that brings to light what may not 
always be the simple spectator's visual experience; this will automatically lead to my second aim, 
which is, an attempt that explains why football is one of the phenomena of today's popular culture, 
with which practitioners 'identify' and become very passionate.  
  By focusing on 'the practice' of football I shall try to unravel how it shapes, especially via the 
‘force' of emotions involved, the human mode of consciousness and identity. In order to do so I will 
try to put into (my) perspective notions of embodiment, practical consciousness (as elaborated by 
                                                 
2
 Great !... the disappearence of 'the other' through his engagement with us/we - sense of we-ness. This was made explicit 
in my interviews that I defined as 'interactive questionnaire', where I was involved as much as my interviewees. This 
ambivalence will be explained later on when I will talk about My anthropological ‘pair of glasses’ and my 
phenomenological approach. 
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Bourdieu, 1980) and see how these processes become central in the construction of identities of 
those people engaged with their own identification with the post-modern era.   
   For the sake of brevity I will not deal with issues of social change, post-modernity, post-
Capitalism and how these articulate with sport/football and how the latter are manipulated by them.
 
By contrast, by focusing on the football scenario, I will deal with its phenomenological aspect, that 
is, with how my thoughts and perceptions have shaped a view of the topic. Football will work 
symbolically  to observe and 'understand' the people I live with and, of course,...myself!  
   One may ask: what sort of 'understanding'? My research could be described as an in depth 
analysis of the game of football, a journey through the football environment - changing room and 
football stage - where I stopped 'reflecting on the unreflected' (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), trying to cast 
light on those aspect that I value as anthropologically worthy of observation. Hence this paper 
[re]presents an anthropological analysis of what people ‘do’, that I hope, adds to the body of 
knowledge accumulated by Social Sciences on Sport. I do believe that football, the sense of 'the 
game', the passion for sport, are innate human reactions - emotion arousing - that constitute life and 
culture out of which ‘knowledge’ can be retrieved. 
  One might ask: what sort of 'knowledge'? Since the issue of Identity has become the buzz word 
within the discipline of anthropology, my final reason for exploring football and sport is to see how 
these work as  socially meaningful anchors for the Self. My focus is on the ontological status of the 
forms of identity and consciousness bound up with the football/sport experience; I hope also that my 
descriptions can be regarded as much as valuable observations as self-evident proofs of how football 
generates  such forms of identities.   
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  My primary source materials are people from different social backgrounds, male and female, 
who were interviewed in relation to my themes-selection; these people are from the male and female 
football-teams of Goldsmiths College. It includes several players I have been playing with for the last 
three years at Goldsmiths College, and several players from the womens side. 
3 
 
   The way I propose to explore the key problems to be addressed will be from a subjective-
engaged and anthropological perspective. In doing so I will first refer to how I felt  about and related  
to particular issues characterizing my fieldwork experience - i.e. being myself part of the team under 
study; second I will try to interpret player's behaviours and views according to what may be called 
'shared feelings and attitudes/emotions' arising in the football scenario (dressing room, the pitch). 
The Geertzian notion of 'thick description'   - "the anthropologist striving to read over the shoulder... 
the culture as a text..."! - might be the best paradigm that describes my approach to those themes I 
intend to explore,  merged with  Rosaldo's (1993) focus  on the 'cultural force of emotions'.
4
 Further 
Bourdieu's notion of practical consciousness  and his use of the body  as a site of cultural expression 
and identity-revealing, Robson's (1998) stress on the importance of studying those spheres of social 
life typified by recursive-practical elements, will constitute the bulk of my theoretical framework. 
(see following CH.) 
   My primary method of research seems quite clear at this stage: information will be gathered 
from my 'participation and observation', the two 'pillars' of the anthropological tradition. My 
movements 'in and out' of the scenario, the revisiting of a recent past experience (my semi-
professional career), my  informant' s feelings and views (interactive questionnaire), different 
anthropological sources to be linked to my focus, will constitute my research-method.  
                                                 
3
 Although my case study is Goldsmiths College Football 1st team, the reason I have considered interviewing female 
footballers is due to the increasing participation of women in this sport and a personal desire to break down, despite the 
re-known association  of football with masculinity and male working class culture, a common (male) belief: the opposite 
sex is incapable of playing football to a significant / high  standard and incapable of understanding what is really going 
on throughout a football match. The women's participation in football could be the subject of various dissertation in 
itself: the cultural conditions which leads to football being a predominantly 'female sport' in contemporary America, the 
popularity  of women's football in wartime Britain and subsequent decline, the entire topic of differences between 
male/female participation in and attitude to sport. However, for the purposes of my research, I will be be unable to do 
justice to any of these topics and shall therefore be examining  the 'phenomena' of football with football participants of 
both sexes without detailed reference to 'gender issues'.  
 
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 'Thick description' implies distance, detachment, objectivity, whereas  to grasp  the 'cultural force of emotions' implies 
involvement, subjectivity. Are the two incompatible? As Rosaldo reminds us, normally, cultural analysts use not force but  
such terms as thick description, multivocality, polysemy, richness and texture; however he advocates that cultural 
descriptions should seek 'force' as well as 'thickness', and they should extend from well-defined rituals to less 
circumscribed practices (1993: 15).