Barnfield, AFR;
(2013)
Sport, Movement, and the Event: understanding the expressivity of football.
Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).
Abstract
Football was codified in Britain in 1863, the Football League was established in 1888, and by 1950 there were 92 professional clubs in England. In 1992 the top twenty professional teams in England broke away from the Football Association’s league programme to establish the English Premier League (EPL). Over the following decade football, the Premier League in particular, has developed considerably. The league now has a global reach with games being broadcast live around the world to audiences of millions. The EPL is the world’s richest and most watched league. Along with games that are broadcast live, coverage of the matches extends into news channels, newspaper reports and comment, fan sites, magazines, and radio programmes. Despite such activities there has been modest academic engagement with the sport itself. This thesis examines a football match from the EPL -- Everton versus Arsenal -- that took place on Sunday the 14th November 2010 to explore the forces and intensities that hold a match together. It uses ethnographic and archival fieldwork approaches to study three distinct aspects of a football match: the playing surface, the footwear of the players, and the live broadcast of the match. Engaging with vocabularies and concepts from contemporary cultural geography, Danish sociology of sport, and philosophies of difference the research examines how the extraordinary setting of elite, professional football is generative of expressive intensity through a mixture of mundane practices, objects, and corporeal techniques. This thesis presents the match as it happens, telling two concurrent stories of the event alongside each other; the match on the pitch and the live broadcast of the match. Presented in a format that aims to locate the research within the animated state of a football match and illustrate a match that moves in all sorts of ways emphasising the complex interweaving of forces and excess that characterise a football match.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Title: | Sport, Movement, and the Event: understanding the expressivity of football |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Permission for digitisation not received |
| Keywords: | Football, Bodies, Movement, Expressivity, Event, Space |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1387539 |
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