On and Off the Pitch: Diversity policies and transforming identities?

This article examines the operation of diversity policies and practices in the sport of football using textual material from Government initiatives, club websites and interviews with club community based workers to suggest that new identity positions are being put into discourse. Sport and in particular football has become a site at which, rather than being classified as dangerous territory where fans have to be controlled, new, responsible, self-regulating citizen selves might be created. However, identity positions that I suggest are emerging both conform to and resist the apparatuses of governmentality which generate them and my research indicates that while there is some transformation taking place, the possibilities of new identity positions cannot be simply read off from the policy statements. Transforming identities are accommodated through discourses of charity, utilitarianism, and human rights, ranging from more paternalistic understandings of community within charity discourses to the political activism and equality based practices of human rights. Sport has long been the site of regulatory practices, involving different lines of intervention framed at particular historical moments by discourses of the healthy body as well as those of social control through the diversion of energies into sporting rather than political and possibly socially disruptive practices, allegiances and identifications. More recently, sport has become the target of policies and interventions categorized within the framework of cultural diversity, social inclusion and social cohesion. This paper addresses some questions about how identities might be transformed and what identity positions might be being made available through the introduction of strategies for promoting diversity in the context of sport using the example of football. Football, as a popular, high profile sport, continues to offer enormous possibilities for the reconfiguration of identities and production of transformed citizen selves, as well as for the regulation and control of dissent, dissidence and excess. In the late nineteenth century, with the arrival of mass (male) sports participation and the enthusiasm with which the sport was greeted by fans in the 1880s and into the twentieth century, football was promoted as an activity to divert the energies of working class men from political engagement in which they might challenge economic inequalities and exploitation, leading to the redefinition of sport as commercial entertainment (Hargreaves, 1986, Giulianotti, 1999, 2005). British football culture, often localized in areas of high urban density and industrialization, developed in the market place as well as through spontaneous community activity. As Neil Taylor argues, most football clubs came out of works teams run by factory owners, ‘established in law as private concerns with boards of directors’ (2004: 48). Later in the twentieth century, football became the site more specifically of direct government control through the targeting of fans as ‘hooligans’ (Williams and Wagg, 1991). The disaster at the Heysel stadium in 1985, when 39 Juventus fans died was probably a watershed in the transformation process, as expressed by the Football Supporters’ Association (which later became the Football Supporters’ Federation) in challenging unfavourable views about football fans and providing an argument against the government’s unpopular football policing policies. This construction of the fans is also illustrated, not only by analyses of media coverage of the particularly conflictual decades of the 1970s and 1980s, (Giulianotti and Williams, 1994), but also by the responses of official inquiries into a series of football