Abstract Summary
In FIFA men’s football, two ideologies clash: the practices of fans as celebration of local identity and big business. We explore the role of new media and digital technology in these competing discourses with regard to (re-)namings of stadia (e.g. St. James Park to Sports Direct Arena in Newcastle).
Abstract :
In FIFA men’s football, two ideologies clash. The practices of league club fans often represent a celebration of local identification with their city or region with the stadiums usually constituting the homestead of a tradition. On the other hand, big business takes precedence in decision making within the clubs and governing bodies. These competing discourses are seen in the naming of leagues, clubs and stadiums.
As past studies have found, stadiums can serve as sites for identity construction, commemoration (Boyd 2000), and as public memory (Browne 1995). Traditionally, stadiums have been named after local sites or regions (e.g. Ruhrstadion (VfL Bochum)). Such toponyms are increasingly being replaced by company or product names (e.g. bet365 Stadium (Stoke City)). The role of new media and digital technology in this development has not been analysed yet.
Starting with an onomastic enquiry, we trace (re-)namings of stadiums in the Bundesliga (Bering 2007, Stellmacher 2010) and the English Premier League. We use corpus-based and text-analytic approaches to explore this development in the new media. We use both specialized (e.g. Meier 2017) and big general corpora (e.g. Davies, 2013) as well as clubs’ websites, fan sites, and media reports on the internet to analyse the discursive construction of renamings from different perspectives.
References
Bering, D. (2007). Die Kommerzialisierung der Namenwelt: Beispiel: Fussballstadien. ZgL 35(3), 434-465.
Boyd, J. (2000). Selling home: Corporate stadium names and the destruction of commemoration. JACR. 28(4), 330-346.
Browne, S. H. (1995). Reading, rhetoric, and the texture of public memory. QJS81, 237-250.
Davies, M. (2013). Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 3+ billion words from 20 countries, updated every day. https://corpus.byu.edu/now/
Meier, S. (ed.) (2017). Korpora zur Fußballlinguistik (Release 2017-05), Fachgebiet Allgemeine Linguistik, Technische Universität Berlin, www.fussballlinguistik.de/korpora.
Stellmacher, D. 2010. Vereinsnamen - was sie sind und was sie aussagen. Deutschunterricht 62(3), 58-65.
