Jacco van Sterkenburg

• Erasmus University Rotterdam

In this brief essay, I will highlight and elaborate on some of the main reflections put forth by Cummins and Hahn in their recently published systematic review of 10 years of academic work in Communication & Sport (2013–2022). In the first part, I will elaborate on some of the shortcomings the authors identify in the use of theory in the sampled ar...

Televised football is still one of the main ways in which football fans consume football. Earlier studies into audience receptions of televised football often used focus group interviews with football fans and generally concluded that majority ethnic audiences tend to be engaged in ‘football talk’ that reproduces already existing racial/ethnic ster...

A wide body of research has focused on representations of race/ethnicity in sport media content, because of its central location in popular culture. These studies found that sport media content serves as a site where hegemonic and reductive discourses surrounding racial/ethnic identities are habitually reproduced. So far, these studies have predomi...

It is commonly accepted that sports media and televised football in particular are sites where ideas about race/ethnicity are (re)produced. However, less is known about how audiences deal with these messages: do they assume these ideas are true or do they negotiate them and if so, how? Using cultural studies as our theoretical framework, we conduct...

International football can be considered the main site for meaning-making processes related to national and racial/ethnic diversity. Various scholars have argued how international football, with the World Cup as its apex, can be seen as a barometer for understanding dominant attitudes towards societal diversity. A key domain where this diversity is...

This paper examines online expressions of rivalry and hate speech in relation to antisemitic discourses in Dutch professional men’s football (soccer), with specific attention devoted to how this has developed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyses football-related antisemitic discourses in the Dutch-speaking Twittersphere...

The aim of this study is to analyse online expressions of rivalry and hate speech in relation to antisemitic and philosemitic discourse(s) in Dutch professional men’s football (soccer). We collected data from Twitter using the Twitter API and scraped Tweets relating to a match between the supposedly ‘Jewish’ club Ajax and its rival Feyenoord on 17...

The present study aims to identify the societal implications of the first-ever Iranian female medalist in the Olympics to date. We explored the meanings given to Kimia Alizadeh's success within Iranian society. We collected data through an examination of online news agencies and social networking sites using Leximancer software, a computer-assisted...

This study explores the meanings given to race/ethnicity by Polish commentators covering games of the Polish national football team on TV. There will be an explicit focus on how such patterns of representation might intersect with those given to national identities in the context of international football. Our analysis reveals that commentators hab...

Our study analyses media audiences of football within the English context. The research question can be formulated as follows: How do young people at a Northern-England university interpret and (re)construct discourses surrounding race/ethnicity in men’s televised football? Results from our focus groups with young football media audiences show how...

Purpose The aim of this article is to examine how professionals within Dutch sports media give meaning to racial/ethnic diversity in the organization and reflect on the use of racial stereotypes in sports reporting. Design/methodology/approach Ten in-depth interviews with Dutch sports media professionals have been conducted to obtain the data. Res...

Elite sport success in international tournaments is supposed to play an important role in shaping national identity. In this article, we explore if and how this applies to the Iranian context. The current study made use of a Google alert with the title of ‘Iran Men’s National Football Team’, and a general content analysis of Iranian national and sp...

The racial/ethnic diversity that can be seen in televised football, together with its wide audience, makes it an interesting place to study meanings given to race/ethnicity. Previous research on the content of these discourses has found that televised football in different countries reproduces a variety of racial/ethnic stereotypes. These discourse...

The aim of this study was to examine discourses about race/ethnicity in Spanish football commentary, where this type of research is scarce. Previous research in other countries has found that football commentators tend to draw on racial/ethnic stereotypes when commenting on players. This, combined with the large audiences that televised football at...

This study explores how televised football in Poland serves as a site for the (re)construction of discourses surrounding race and ethnicity and to what extent this squares with previous studies on sport media conducted mainly in Western countries. In our analysis, we identify the discourses surrounding race and ethnicity that the commentators in te...

The inclusion of foreign-born sportspeople in national sports teams has become increasingly common. At the same time, the assumed increase in diversity within national football teams has turned into a major subject of (inter)national controversy and debate. This applies, in particular, to the football World Cup, as the assumed increase in foreign-b...

2017 was a significant year for women’s football in the Netherlands. The Dutch women’s team won the Women’s European Champions football (WEURO 2017) for the first time in history. The screenings of their matches attracted massive audiences. This article explores the meanings given to gender and sport and the impact of WEURO 2017 by turning to two w...

While the presence of foreign-born footballers in national teams has a long history, it is often believed that the World Cup has become more migratory over time. The presumed increases in the volume and diversity of foreign-born footballers have, however, remained empirically untested. In this article, we empirically test whether the presence of fo...

Although there is a common belief that more footballers are representing countries other than their native ones in recent World Cup editions, a historical overview on migrant footballers representing national teams is lacking. To fill this gap, a database consisting of 10,137 football players who participated in the World Cup (1930–2018) was create...

Earlier research has shown how football media use specific racial/ethnic stereotypes, thereby reinforcing certain hierarchies along the lines of race and ethnicity. We use a cultural studies perspective to explore the discourses surrounding race and ethnicity in football among Dutch multiethnic football media audiences when they talk about football...

The borders of Europe are erected and guarded through cultural practices as much as through border control and security technologies. Cultural Studies have been crucial in revealing how everyday, particularly media-oriented practices, make and unmake this ‘Fortress’. Yet, until now, the focus has been mostly on how migrants use or are represented t...

This article will examine the previously under-researched area of the under-representation and experiences of elite level minority (male) coaches in (men’s) professional football in Western Europe. More specifically, the article will draw on original interview data with 40 elite level minority coaches in England, France and the Netherlands and iden...

Most people today watch football by way of the mass media, sites that reproduce and transform ideologies and ideas surrounding racial/ethnic and gender identity. However, still little remains known as to what extent actual football viewers take up or resist these ideas. Drawing on a cultural studies perspective, this study tries to identify the dom...

This section of the journal encourages discussion between several authors on a policy related topic. The same question may, therefore, be addressed from different theoretical, cultural or spatial perspectives. Dialogues may be applied or highly abstract. This Dialogue starts with Hylton and Long's original paper doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2015.111595...

Mediated football is one of the most popular global cultural practices. Within this cultural practice, meanings given to race/ethnicity, gender and nation are naturalized often in an implicit and unacknowledged manner. In this article, we build on existing literature to critically examine the often implicit discourses surrounding race/ethnicity, ge...

In this article, the author examines how the FIFA World Cup broadcast on Dutch television informs its viewers around understandings of race/ethnicity and nation. International sport contests may provide a sense of national belonging that overrides other markers of difference such as ‘race’, ethnicity or gender. As such, the football World Cup can b...

The purpose of this study was to expand on current research about ways in which race and ethnicity are socially constructed through popular media culture. In this article we explore to what extent broadcast commentary of televised soccer in the Netherlands reproduces and challenges hegemonic discourses about race/ethnicity and is congruent with fin...

In this article, we draw on key concepts from cultural studies, post-colonialism, whiteness theory, and sport media studies to search for and discuss shared processes of racialization/ethnization in three sport-related cultural practices – soccer commentary, sport media viewing, and sport policy making. Our analysis reveals how discourses surroundi...

Due to its multi-ethnic character and popularity, television coverage of sport can contribute to people’s beliefs and ideas about race and ethnicity. This role of the sport media is however, often overlooked or downplayed by the general public, by policy makers and by many scholars. This research project addresses this neglect and discusses the oft...

This chapter will be about how race and ethnicity are considered social constructs in scholarly discourses about sport, but are often treated as essentialist categories in popular and governmental discourses about sport, with consequences for racial and ethnic inequalities in society at large. A cultural studies perspective, along with social cogni...

In this article we draw on a cultural studies perspective to reflect critically on the racial and ethnic categorizations that are used by those who employ content analysis to study the sport media and to demonstrate how such categories naturalize racial thought and erase ethnic distinctions. We use examples of content analyses of the sport media to...

This paper explores choices and (non)identifications related to race/ethnicity in team sport careers. Two elite sport careers – that of a white basketball player and a black football player – are analysed from a biographical perspective and compared to sport biographies and (changing identifications) of other team sport athletes with varying social...

At the beginning of 2005 the famous football player Thierry Henry kicked off a new European campaign against racism in football: Stand Up Speak Up. As part of this campaign, Henry's personal sponsor Nike has marketed millions of black and white wristbands bearing the campaign slogan. These wristbands are not just intended to give the right-minded a...

At the beginning of 2005 the famous football player Thierry Henry kicked off a new European campaign against racism in football: Stand Up Speak Up. As part of this campaign, Henry's personal sponsor Nike has marketed millions of black and white wristbands bearing the campaign slogan. These wristbands are not just intended to give the right-minded a...

Vergelijking van de sportdeelname in de 25 landen van de Europese Unie, met een systematisch overzicht van de beschikbare sportparticipatiegegevens per land. Ook besteedt het boek aandacht aan de 'key drivers' van sportparticipatie en aan de kansen en valkuilen van beleidsinterventies gericht op verhoging van de sportparticipatie.

Although it is generally assumed that the (sport) media play an important role in the meanings readers/viewers give to gender and race/ethnicity, relatively little is known about the way ‘the public’ deals with hegemonic (media) representations about race/ethnicity and gender. The purpose of the present study is to describe the dominant discourses...