A Game of Three Halves Radil, Casper Publication date: 2020 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Document license: CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Radil, C. (2020). A Game of Three Halves. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 01. okt.. 2021 A GAME OF THREE HALVES Casper Radil 1 Publication: University of Copenhagen, 2020 Main supervisor: Klaus Bruhn Jensen Commercial supervisor: Christian Vermehren Acknowledgements: I want to express my gratitude to my main supervisors for their continious support for my dissertation, even though it took far longer than expected. Also, I thank David Morley and John B. Thompson for their feedback on writings and ideas. Lastly, finishing this dissertation in my spare time was only possible thanks to my supporting family. 2 CHAPTER 1: BEING PART OF THE GAME 5 Introduction 5 Dissertation overview 11 CHAPTER 2: A REVIEW OF FOOTBALL AND FANDOM 13 Football and its fans 13 Football fandom as communication 26 CHAPTER 3: THE COMMUNICATION OF FOOTBALL CULTURE 34 What is communication? 35 The symbolic forms of football culture 43 CHAPTER 4: THE WEB AS MEDIUM 63 The web and medium theory 64 The web as a medium of communication 72 CHAPTER 5: FIELD ANALYSIS: METHODOLOGY AND METHODS 74 Methodology 75 Methods 84 INTRODUCTION TO PART III 94 CHAPTER 6: THE RISE OF DANISH FOOTBALL CULTURE 96 Between amateurs and professionals: the differentiation of the field 97 Football fandom in Denmark 105 Football media in Denmark 109 CHAPTER 7: NEW MEDIA, NEW OPPORTUNITIES 114 3 Introduction 115 The background stories: embedded football sites 115 Another perspective: the football portals 119 Behind the scene: the club sites 122 We are united: the fan sites 124 New forms of communication about football 128 CHAPTER 8: THE THIRD HALF 132 Broadcasting as key differentiator 133 A typology of Danish football fans 146 The web in the life of a fan 165 The cultural practices of Danish football fans 199 CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION 217 An agenda for football fandom research 218 The momentum of old media 219 The emergence of a new form of football fandom 220 Old and new media: the failure of partofthegame.tv 222 LITERATURE 223 APPENDIX 230 DANSK RESUME 231 ABSTRACT 232 4 CHAPTER 1: BEING PART OF THE GAME Abstract: How will football become digitalised? What once seemed like a question about a possible future, now seems more like a reminiscence of a particular state of being where we thought digital technology would change all existing cultural practices. Yet, we see that digital technology does impact, if not all, then most cultural forms in society. Not necessarily by transforming the cultural object itself, however, but rather the communicative practices by which the meanings and discourses preconceive and form the object. For now, football has proven to be one of those cultural forms for which digital media have shaped the future, but not in any linear or predetermined way. To really understand how digital media are important to football, and perhaps also to other similar cultural forms, we must ask how communication or communication media are important in forming the cultural context in which football exist. This chapter begins by asking why the strategy of the commercial football website, partofthegame.tv, failed. I will then take on the discussion about digital technology and digital media, and attempt to debunk the almost inevitable impact that digital technology is often ascribed – without attention to context and prehistory. Instead of seeking any simple answer to how digital media transform football culture, I ask how we can develop an empirical approach to studying digital media in relation to a specific cultural form like football. I end the chapter with an outline of my approach to studying football and digital media, and how each subsequent chapter in the dissertation will follow and expand the thread of research questions and arguments. INTRODUCTION In 2008, by coincidence, I went to a presentation where the CEO of a media company presented a new project: ‘Partofthegame.tv’. The project, financed by Carlsberg, had a strong agenda; it was supposed to become the main platform for sharing football fandom – throughout the entire world. As part of Carlsberg’s marketing campaign towards football fans, the website was not supposed to be biased towards any nation or any specific football club. Fans were supposed to share, talk and chat despite cultural and national differences; they were supposed to create a global fan community. In 2009 the website was launched and I began writing my PhD on this new and exciting form of community in the making. At that time, large companies were already beginning to withdraw money from experimental marketing projects. Nevertheless, considerable resources were spent on banner ads to ensure a steady flow of visitors to partofthegame.tv, and the main concern to the people in charge of the project was rather one of too many visitors than too few visitors. I talked with both the CEO and the project manager from the company in charge of making and maintaining partofthegame.tv, and we agreed that I would get access to data, and they would get feedback from me about my insights into the behaviour of users on the website. 5 When the tracking software was set up correctly, I sat down with the project manager to look at the data. However, when we began to look at the tracking data, we had one major concern. A huge number of visitors were drawn to the website through different ad networks, but the engagement and loyalty of visitors was worrying. What is more, very few visitors signed up for the newsletter, and the newsletter was supposed to be the main channel of communication whereby Carlsberg could connect different marketing platforms with partofthegame.tv. At some point in the analysis of tracking data, we calculated the price for each newsletter signup to be around £2.000! And this amount was calculated on online advertisement money only, without taking into consideration the money spent on developing the site and hiring professional journalists to make video clips for the site; and not in any way considering the actual loyalty and engagement of those sign-up visitors – which was not impressing to say at least. By the end of 2010, Carlsberg decided to cut down the financial support to the project to a level which only allowed the site to continue as a YouTube channel (no longer updated). In attempting to understand what went wrong, I began to reflect on the relation between football fandom and media, and I realised that partofthegame.tv might have failed because the project did not succeed in thinking about the relation between old media practices and new media practices. To put it more bluntly, partofthegame.tv failed by trying to create an online visual spectacle based on the communicatively naïve assumption that the new digital environment would abolish all existing fan practices and create entirely new ones. We should of course not conclude that the web and other digital media cannot in any way change and transform existing practices, but partofthegame.tv demonstrated indirectly that new cultural practices almost always take their departure in existing ones. As a consequence of these insights, I began to wonder whether the web is really a ‘part of the game’ at all and if so, which practices fans then use the web for. While partofthegame.tv was not a huge success, my research into the early documentation of football fans’ use of the web shows that the use of the web for communication about football dates many years back in web history. Already in 2002, German journalists gave us an interesting historical testimony to the widespread adoption of the web in communicating football. In the publication “Fuβball im Internet: 5000 von Sportjournalisten recherchierte Fuβball-Internetlinks” (Brendel, 2002), the authors divided existing football websites and links into different categories. If we take a closer look at the different categories inside the book, we see that these websites are divided into subjects as for example ‘Football in Germany’, ‘International tournaments’, ‘Football in TV’, ‘Football organisations’, ‘Persons’, ‘Transfers’, ‘Stadia’, ‘Fun zone’, ‘Chat / Forums’, ‘Rules’ and ‘History / Archives / Specials’ (Brendel, 2002, p. IV). While these categories do not tell us anything about what these websites are used for and whether they are used at all, other sources document that football websites, even in the early history of the Web, were used by a huge number of people. I shall mention a few sources to document this trend. In 1998, the official website for the World Cup in France had a daily 68 million page views, and the numbers for the 2000 Euro Championship show that these page views were not generated by a few visitors, since the official website had 129 million unique visitors (Lappe, 2005, p. 31). Yet, while these numbers are a clear testimony to the popularity and interest for using the web for communication about 6 football, they tell us little about why fans use these sites. And even if we assume that fans use these websites for communication about the same things they have always communicated about, we still need to investigate how and why these practises are digitalised and what consequences this process will have for their continuous reproduction. Only in this perspective can we begin to understand how partofthegame.tv took the wrong direction and failed to support existing football practices. THE DIGITALISATION OF GRASS AND BEER Until now, I have spoken about the web as a means of communicating football. However, many of the first studies on the impact of the Internet and other digital media focused on how digitalisation would change football culture and fandom in a much more encompassing direction.