New directions in South African sports history
Published in the International Journal of the History of Sport. 28:1 (2011), 181-185.
Citizens, cities and sports teams.
Policy Options, 18:3 (1997), 9-12. [Reprinted in P. Donnelly, ed. (2000). Taking sport seriously: Social issues in Canadian sport. 2nd ed. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing].
Coauthored with Peter Donnelly and Phil White
A Man’s Game?: Women Playing Rugby Union in Australia
Published in Football Studies (1999). Coauthored with Alison Carle.
Women have had a long history of participation in modern sporting activities though they have faced countless barriers... more
Women have had a long history of participation in modern sporting activities though they have faced countless barriers to sporting competition, particularly in ‘contact’ sports. As we
move into the twenty-first century, many more doors are opening for the sporting woman, and games previously thought to ‘belong’ to men are becoming attractive options for women. One
sport that is enjoying increasing popularity amongst women is rugby union. Since the 1970s women have taken up rugby union and significant numbers of women now play the game in
the British Isles, Europe, North America and Australasia.
Although many may delight in the apparent breakdown of the masculine exclusivity that traditionally has been maintained
within rugby, a thorough investigation of the emerging female rugby culture reveals a sporting site that still reinforces and echoes historical, masculine-orientated stereotypes. This
case study examines women’s rugby culture through an analysis of an Australian rugby club and the culture that surrounds the women’s team, as well as the questioning of the culture that emerges around the playing of such a hyper-masculine sport. This will be done in an attempt
to understand why women are playing football when they face strong societal opposition based on historical, social and physical perceptions about the relationship of women tocontact sports.
Playing fields to battlefields: the development of Australian sporting manhood in its imperial context.
Published in Journal of Australian Studies No. 56 (1998), co-authored with Daryl Adair and Murray Phillips
(Special Issue: Australian Masculinities: Men and Their Histories, ed. Clive Moore and Kay Saunders), pp. 51-67.
Kelly, J. (in press) Popular Culture, Sport and the 'Hero'-fication of British Militarism
by john kelly
Soon to be published in Sociology.
A number of culturally significant practices have become incorporated into promoting and normalising British... more A number of culturally significant practices have become incorporated into promoting and normalising British militarism in the face of increasing controversies surrounding Britain’s role in the “War on Terror”. Utilising a critical discourse analysis, this article draws on Goffman’s deference and demeanour work and asserts that in conjunction with other popular cultural practices, sport is being co-opted into a multi-agency strategy that positions the military, government, media and citizens in a joint ceremony of supportive affirmation of UK militarism. A discursive formation, which circumscribes legitimate discourses around the “War on Terror” is shown to symbolically annihilate critical opposition to British aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan whilst normalising the joint ceremony of support.
Download (.pdf) Sport, manhood and empire: British responses to the New Zealand rugby tour of 1905
This article analyzes British responses to the successes of the 1905 New Zealand All Black rugby team in the context... more This article analyzes British responses to the successes of the 1905 New Zealand All Black rugby team in the context of fears of racial degeneration in Britain. It further explores how the British viewed the New Zealand team's innovative style of play including changes to standard formations used in the game as well as specialized positional play. Finally concepts of colonial robust masculinity suggested to British experts that the British "race" was not necessarily in decline in the colonies of settlement as evidenced both by troop performance in the South African War of 1899-1902 and on the playing fields.
Writing and reading American football: culture, identity and sports studies.
Published in Sporting Traditions, 13:1 (1996), 109-127.
The end of sports history?: from sports history to sports studies.
Published in Sporting Traditions, 16:1 (1999), 5-13. Issue devoted to "The End of Sports History?" posed at the ASSH Conference held at the University of Otago in 1999.
The 1999 conference of the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH)
sparked interesting and lively debate... more
The 1999 conference of the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH)
sparked interesting and lively debate before, during and after the
proceedings. Some ASSH members appeared uneasy discussing the ‘end’
of their field which, as an academic enterprise, is younger than most of
the participants. Yet, beyond the obvious reference to Francis Fukiyama’s
‘The End of History’, the topic is certainly relevant for a number of
reasons. Sports historians have not extensively debated the impact of the
postmodern assault on ‘History’ as either a tool of modernist discourse
and discursive power relationships,2 or a set of practices that follow what
Appleby, Hunt and Jacob call ‘the heroic model of science’.3 Many
postmodern critics have called for, or announced, the ‘end of history’. If
history is at an end, then surely the implication would be that there is also
an end to sports history as we know it.
For those who have been following the ‘mainstream’ historical
literature over the past decade or so, it is readily apparent that the
challenges of postmodernism and poststructuralism have been debated
extensively amongst historians, and between historians and critics of
‘(H)history’ who do not classify themselves as ‘historians’ (and who
‘historians’ reject as members of the historical profession). These debates
are perhaps best summarised in The Postmodern History Reader edited by
Keith Jenkins.4 Brian Palmer’s Descent into Discourse, published in 1990,
offers the best sustained critique from the left of the postmodernist attack
on history.5 For some, the end of history is to be welcomed; for others the
‘descent into discourse’ is problematic and serves only to obfuscate the
continuation of society and global capitalist development.
Mediated nostalgia, community and nation: a case study of print media representations of the Canadian Football League in crisis and the demise of the Ottawa Rough Riders 1986-1996.
Published in Sport History Review, 33:2 (2002), 120-135. Coauthored with Phil White.
This article examines the position of the Canadian Football League (CFL) in the context of 1990s Canada, the popular... more This article examines the position of the Canadian Football League (CFL) in the context of 1990s Canada, the popular discourses surrounding it of a nostalgia for an idealized Canada, and the crisis of Canadian identity as the Continent became increasingly integrated after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Our focus is on a case study of the decline and eventual demise of the Ottawa Rough Riders, a CFL club located in the national capital that traced its roots to 1876, thus being almost as old as Canadian Federation. We examine the media framing of the decline and fall of the Rough Riders, laments for distinctive forms of Canadian sporting culture and the nostalgic frames in which the story was presented.
White man’s burden revisited: race, sport and reporting the Hansie Cronje cricket crisis in South Africa and beyond.
Published in Sport History Review. 35:1 (2005), 61-75.
Betting scandals shook the world of international cricket during the
1990s with players from Australia, India,... more
Betting scandals shook the world of international cricket during the
1990s with players from Australia, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Sri
Lanka being implicated or indeed involved. The most notable case was
that of then South African national team captain Hansie Cronje, who was
to that point noted for his competitive but clean and gentlemanly approach
to the game.
This article examines South African and international media responses
to the crisis as it unfolded, focusing on the themes of the historically constructed “purity” of cricket, the supposed morality and “purity” of white
Western athletes, and then, as the truth was revealed, “shock and horror”
that this “purity” was betrayed as Cronje confessed. Press reports from
South Africa, Australia, and England were examined for their coverage of
the scandal as international and national issues overlapped. The article
discusses the ways in which the scandal was framed as it unfolded, then
briefly explores the beginnings of Cronje’s rehabilitation, his subsequent
death in a plane crash in 2002, and his “resurrection” to cricketing immortality.
Smash and Thunder
How a change of approach helped Newcastle cast of their chokers tag in the 1910 FA Cup Final
Published... more
How a change of approach helped Newcastle cast of their chokers tag in the 1910 FA Cup Final
Published in the Blizzard, Issue Three
http://www.theblizzard.co.uk/
Sports fan movements to save suburban-based teams threatened with amalgamation in different football codes in Australia.
Coauthored with Murray Phillips. Published in International Sports Studies, 17:1 (1999), 23-38.
During the late 1980s and 1990s there has been an international acceleration in the rationalisation and relocation of... more
During the late 1980s and 1990s there has been an international acceleration in the rationalisation and relocation of professional sporting teams and competitions. While this process has had a long history in the United States, it has occurred much more rapidly in other societies. In Australia, there has been a dual process of national expansion of professional sporting competitions and pressures placed on historic suburban-based clubs. In addition, there has been a massive infusion of international capital in the form of television interest in Australian professional sports. In rugby league this caused a temporary split in the national competition. In rugby union it has led to open professionalism and greater integration with South Africa and New Zealand. And, in Australian Rules football, the governing
body has worked to protect itself against an outside takeover such as has plagued rugby league. At the same time, both the Australian Football League (AFL) and the National Rugby League (NRL) and their predeessors have worked to rationalise the number of suburban Melbourne and Sydney-based clubs respectively while promoting a policy of national expansion and for rugby league even international expansion to Auckland, New Zealand. We examine fan responses to these changes
particularly when their club is threatened with merging with other clubs, We discuss the dynamics of this process that are unique to the Australian context in our analysis of global capital and local audiences and suggest how this connects with a theoretical understanding of such processes more generally and comparisons that can be made between Australia and other countries.
‘Like fleas on a dog’: New Zealand and emerging protest against South African sport, 1965-74.
Published in Sporting Traditions, 10:1 (1993), 54-77.
Myth and reality: reflections on rugby and New Zealand..
Published in Sporting Traditions, 6:2 (1990), 219-30. This was my first publication in a refereed journal.
Bafana, Bafana Spitzensport soll die Identifikation mit dem neuen Südafrika fördern Nationenbildung durch Spitzensport in Südafrika
Abridged material from my larger work on South African sport and national identity published in 1998 for a German speaking audience.
The South Carolina – Clemson Football War of 1902
This paper was originally published in the American football history magazine GRIDIRON GREATS in 2005.
Sport, community, class and religion: Rugby league and cultural identity in the Lockyer Valley, Queensland
co-authored with Damian Topp. Appears in Sporting Traditions 21:1 (2004), 53-65.
Rugby league's history in the Lockyer Valley of Queensland in Australia has been characterised by challenges and... more
Rugby league's history in the Lockyer Valley of Queensland in Australia has been characterised by challenges and changes over time that are emblematic of wider trends in Australia as a whole during the first century of Federation. Little has been written about sport in rural Australia and less still is known about the Lockyer Valley, an area that has produced many great players. The main town of the Lockyer Valley is Gatton, which lies 100 kilometres west of Brisbane. The larger centres of Ipswich and Toowoomba lie 40 kilometres to the east and 30 kilometres to the west respectively.
The story of rugby league in the Valley is emblematic of the changes that have taken place in Australian sport over the past century as leagues grew within local communities during the first half of the century, only to fall victim to increased migration to the capital cities, depressed rural economic conditions, sport on television, and the perceived shrinking of distance through improved transportation infrastructure.
Manchester City victory threatens to strengthen Middle Eastern autocrats
By James M. Dorsey
Manchester City, by winning the Premier League for the first time in more than four... more
By James M. Dorsey
Manchester City, by winning the Premier League for the first time in more than four decades, has defied warnings that money cannot buy soccer success and set an example for Middle Eastern and North African autocrats and wealthy businessmen who employ the beautiful game to strengthen unpopular regimes in what an Egyptian democracy activist describes as the new opium of the people.
The Premier League title crowns the investment of an estimated $1.5 billion that the Abu Dhabi United Group headed by United Arab Emirates royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan pumped into the club since it acquired the struggling team in 2008. The investment was used to acquire high profile players, including Argentinian Carlos Tevez, Robinho, Gareth Barry, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor, Kolo Touré and Joleon Lescott for a total of approximately $330 million.
Funds were poured into upgrading Manchester City’s facilities: a new office block was built with bars and an entertainment arena for supporters; the Carrington training ground was revamped. The club’s stadium was renamed Etihad Stadium after Abu Dhabi’s premier airline signed a ten-year, $475 million sponsorship agreement with Manchester City.
The Guardian sports writer David Conn notes in a book to be published early next month, ‘Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football And Growing Up,’ that the deprived neighbourhoods surrounding the club ‘s stadium have benefitted little if anything from Sheikh Mansour’s largesse.
Nonetheless, Manchester City fans enthusiastically greeted the Middle East’s first acquisition of a major European club, by wearing Arab headdress and waving British pound notes with the picture of the queen replaced by a Gulf sheikh at the team’s first post-acquisition match. A picture in The Guardian this weekend shows Sheikh Mansour’s portrait featuring on a fake GBP 500 billion note that Manchester City supporters waved at fans of rival club Chelsea.
Fans have at times also been willing to accept cultural changes that have accompanied Arab acquisitions in Europe. FC Malaga’s new owner, law by its new owner, Qatari royal Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Thani, last year replaced bookmaker William Hill Plc the club’s jersey sponsor because gambling is banned under Islamic. United Nations culture agency UNESCO took the place of the bookmaker.
On the other hand, Real Madrid’s recent decision to remove a Christian cross from its official logo in what it described as the cost of doing business in a globalized world has sparked ire, particularly among anti-Muslim right-wingers. The removal came as Real Madrid embarked on the construction of a $1 billion sport tourist resort in the United Arab Emirates scheduled to open in 2015.
Elsewhere, fans have expressed fears that commercial investment such as new funds that invest in players - Dubai’s United Investment Bank last year launched the Middle East’s first alternative investment soccer fund modelled on similar controversial European funds -- undermines a club’s ability to generate funds of its own and often favours vested interests. Opposition last year by fans of Istanbul’s Besiktas to third party acquisition of three Portuguese players -- Hugo Almeida, Simao Sabrosa and Manuel Fernandez -- was fuelled by unsubstantiated suspicions that the fund involved was a front for club president Yildirim Demiroren, a wealthy businessman who had lent the club just under $100 million.
For Middle Eastern and North African autocrats who have long seen support and control of soccer as a tool to improve their tarnished images, divert attention from widespread grievances and manipulate national emotions the message from Manchester City is that investment in soccer pays political dividends, particularly at a time that the region is wracked by popular unrest. The message is likely to reinforce a tendency to hire and fire managers and coaches depending on how a team performs in its last game rather than in a long-term bid to build a squad’s culture and cohesion. Performance on the pitch is reduced to the prestige of a regime or nation in what to autocratic rulers is a zero sum game.
The message threatens to distort a trend towards professionalization, commercialization and the creation of a proper football industry as a key to unlocking economic opportunity in a world where the soccer pitch is often a battlefield for political, ethnic, religious and gender rights that was sparked by Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 World Cup.
For many in the region, last year’s Asia Cup final in Doha, in which half of the competing teams hailed from the Middle East with not one reaching the semi-finals, constituted a wake-up call. It is an experience, Middle Eastern and North African leaders and soccer officials do not want repeated at the Qatar World Cup for political reasons as well as a sense of pride and realization of what soccer can do for their prestige as well as that of their nations.
Manchester City’s victory threatens to send out the message that money rather than political reform, divorcing soccer from the political control of often unpopular regimes and building a strong, cohesive team over time can do the trick.
Similarly, for European clubs there is risk inherent in dependency on wealthy benefactors and in association with Middle Eastern autocrats.
Michel Platini, the head of Europe’s soccer body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) warned his week in the wake of the Manchester City title win that that clubs dependant on the largesse of wealthy benefactors could face oblivion if they failed to maintain a realistic level of spending.
Mr. Platini defended UEFA’s new Financial Fair Play rules developed in response to an influx of wealthy club owners that require clubs to balance their soccer-related expenditure over a three-year period by telling Fox Soccer America: “We have to protect the clubs, because until they pay Manchester City will be happy but if they (the owners) leave Manchester City what is going to happen with this club?”
Under the new rules, clubs will initially be allowed to make a loss of $60 million over the first three years, falling to $36 million from 2015–16. Mr. Platini reiterated that despite the Manchester City success, money was not a guarantee. Clubs that violate the Financial Fair Play rules could be excluded from European competitions.
The experience of some European clubs illustrates the risk Mr. Platini was highlighting. Emirati Sheikh Sulaiman Al Fahim , barely three months after acquiring Portsmouth FC several years ago, sold the bulk of his stake to Saudi property tycoon Ali Al-Faraj amid reports that his flagship Hydra Village project in Abu Dhabi was floundering. Mr. Al-Faraj too had no intention of staying involved for long. Soon after the takeover, he announced that he was selling the club. But with no buyer on the horizon, Portsmouth FC went into receivership.
Geneva’s Swiss Super League club Servette FC and Austria’s Admira Wacker haven’t fared much better. Servette is on the brink of collapse after Iranian businessman Majid Pishyar who acquired it in 2008, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Mr. Pishyar, who managed the club on a shoe string, tried unsuccessfully to attract government funding by last year appointing Robert Hensler, a former top civil servant for the canton of Geneva, as vice-president. His earlier efforts to salvage Admira, his first European acquisition, failed too. Servette’s problems come on the heels of the bankruptcy in January of Neuchatel’s Super League team Xamax whose Chechen owner was arrested on charges of fraud and financial mismanagement.
Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak in an interview in
Mr. Conn’s book, an excerpt of which was published in The Guardian this weekend, illustrated the benefits as well as the risks of wealthy ownership. Mr. Al Mubarak expressed surprise at the lack of professional administration that Manchester City’s new owners encountered when they took over the club and described how he had introduced a more professional approach. "One of the big surprises was how amateurish it was. I found it shocking in the famous Premier League, to be without such basic
functions" as a personnel department, he said.
Mr. Al Mubarak appointed former Arsenal winger Brian Marwood as head of administration. Mr. Marwood showed Mr. Conn a 30-page, colour-coded analysis produced by Manchester City's new inter-departmental analytic system for a 15-year-old that was being eyed by the club. For major signings, Mr. Marwood said, the dossiers could run up to 50 pages. Before, he said, "it was in people's heads" Now, it is a spreadsheet that. “that detailed, not left to chance," Mr. Marwood said.
Manchester City is unlikely to be able to comply with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules without Sheikh Mansour. The club’s losses for 2010–11, the year before their finances were assessed under the new regulation, were $294 million, the highest ever by an English football club and five times the total the club is allowed in the coming two years.
In Mr. Conn’s book, Mr. Platini’s concern about an evolving unhealthy relationship between money and soccer seemed lost on Mr. Al Mubarak. “Whichever way I asked Al-Mubarak about the instinctive repulsion many people in football have for this kind of "project" – for a rich man to just buy a club, then pour in as much money as it took to buy success – he did not so much defend what they were doing as fail to understand the question,” Mr. Conn wrote.
“If you said football was not supposed to be about which ‘owner’ had the most money, so who could pay the most to players, thereby seducing them to their club, he (Mr. Al Mubarak) wondered aloud how United had won the Premier League so many times, and how anybody could compete with them without money. If you tried to argue that a club should be a club, belonging to the people who support it, that a sporting competition does not seem sporting if it is owned by one rich man spending whatever it takes to stockpile the necessary mercenary talent, you would be describing an abstract idea with which he was unfamiliar, and which did not match reality as it was, and as it was viewed from Abu Dhabi,” Mr. Conn said.
To Sheikh Masour and Mr. Al Mubarak buying a soccer club may be more fun than the oil and gas industry, the mainstay of Abu Dhabi’s economy, but at the bottom line it remains a business. To them clubs are business. "There is an opportunity we have identified and taken hold of. A mid-tier club will move to become a big club because of the financial resources we are able to make available. Because we see value in making that transition. And that is the bottom line," Mr. Conn quoted Mr. Al Mubarak as saying.
Beyond the financial dependency risk, European acquisition targets also run the risk of being associated with regimes potentially capable of using brute force to suppress popular demands for greater freedom. The UAE has nervously reacted to the mass protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa by cracking down on dissent and freedom of expression at home and investing more than $500 million in the creation of a mercenary force headed by former Blackwater security company head Eric Page for the eventuality of an outbreak of protests at home.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a consultant to geopolitical consulting firm Wikistrat.
An African-American football pioneer in Iowa: Theatrece Gibbs of Dubuque
Published in Gridiron Greats
Discusses the first African American high school football captain known to date, Theatrece Gibbs of Dubuque High... more Discusses the first African American high school football captain known to date, Theatrece Gibbs of Dubuque High School in Iowa. The paper is a shorter version of a longer work examining race and sport in Iowa in the 1930s.