Conclusive remarks and implications

Many sports attractions have become an integral part of many destinations’ tourism portfolios. It seems to be a compelling case that the construction of sport spectatorship is firmly entrenched in the search of authentic sporting experience, where outcomes of competition are genuinely unknown. Tourism and commodification may help people open a door to a new industry which they don’t know how to sustain it.

Paradoxically, there are more and more people who choose to experience the comparative quietness linked to well-scripted tour visits which seem to amplify the personal and collective recollection that hold deep meaning for those who visit. The research is not aimed at the dialectics of whether stadium tour can be as authentic as live sporting events, which have always been problematic and probably always will be.

After all, all kinds of event are staged in a sense, by definition; there must be some certain elements of manipulation and politics of memory involved.

There is little doubt that commercial expansion of sport is not new, the global appeal of football fuelled by the media have substantially accelerated such development in football industry. In spite of this, there is surprisingly little written about the character of both stadia and clubs displayed in stadium tours. Much of the debate concerning stadium tours is framed around whether an authentic experience can be achieved by

empowering visitors with the power of backstage, where how the collective gaze functions as a means of construction and reinvention in producing sporting memory is largely sidelined. In fact, stadia have produced not just footballing passions, but the very sense of place and identification central to the social meaning of sport, the entanglement of family and sporting memory. It would be wrong to conclude that stadium tours are inauthentic, because in the context of commodification of place, a degree of orchestration and staging is well expected. Moreover, stadia are the vessels that house these experiences in which construction and re-invention, are guiding with history, memory, nostalgia and heritage in a fairly manipulative way. To sum up, the research intends to fill the academic paucity of stadium tour as a new creative genre of football heritage tourism and to see how the symbolic features of Liverpool FC is constructed and re-invented through Anfield, tour guides and visitors.

Overview of the study and key findings

The symbolic power of the stadium, however, has not been limited solely to sporting contests. It seems that football stadia were being called to produce tourist experiences and stage performances legible to wider spectrum of visitors. The highly important relationship between the two social practices of sport and stadium remains at the periphery of the discussion. My goal here is to offer the foundations of a new creative genre of football heritage tourism and engage critical examination on the triad of stadium, club and supporters/visitors and the textures of memory related to them.

First of all, as I have addressed in previous chapters, it is problematic to classify Anfield as football heritage since its instrumental function and iconic image seem to dominate the cultural meaning of football as a kind of social practice, especially in the hyper-commodified age where everything about football, including players, has reduced to sheer commodities, even for the intangible memories we hold about the club. The outrageous creep of commodification spread from kit logo to kit advertising, from advertising hoardings to stadium naming now turns the stadium into a machine for wringing every possible cent of profit from the produced spectacle in which the expression of fandom and allegiance is evaluated and encouraged by how much one spends rather than how much they genuinely care.

Plainly, stadium experiences have been produced and re-invented en masse in recent years. Sporting attractions, with its encompassing appeal, have displayed their lucrative potentiality at the nub of tourism. Undoubtedly, sports events have been treated as commodities for many years, but there now seems to be more and more re-invented events to fill up the void of live sporting melodrama when the sporting season has come to an end. Make no mistake, there are still plenty of other sports to choose from when one type of sport is in recess. Even if they only watch one type of sport, they will still be bombarded with those questionable and iffy transfer rumours.

Football stadium is probably one of the most manipulated destinations on a regular basis in our daily lives and is very likely the earliest memorable childhood experiences one may have. For many people, sport holds great meaning and personal

significance through their continuous participation, so it infiltrates memory, shapes the sense of belonging and serves the quest for something unique. However, based on the fact that sports have become fairly prevalent in our daily lives, finding or producing uniqueness turns out to be a hassle. For tour operators, a well-organised tour has the potential to be a reinventing filter for reproducing the cleansed history and constructing a popular sporting memory.

In the modern era, global fans can be just as serious as local fans by virtue of the advent of technology. They may possess different versions of sporting memory for a myriad of reason, which could be a challenge for tour organisers, because the media coverage can be truly unpredictable sometimes and they barely know if the potential visitors are equipped with the same amount of fan capital. They would never want to upset the non-local visitors with the knowledge that is too hardcore to perceive. In the meantime, they need to consider if the local fans are satisfied with what they see, listen and feel since the interaction between participants and guides is also part of the performance.

Premier League has ushered in a new age of personal enrichment for professional footballers playing all around the world. As shown in the research, sporting memory can be constructed through something trivial, such as the unwitting exposure to the media coverage, satellite TV, family gathering and etc. either locally or internationally, but it is the kind of constructive power that creeps in and stays for a

of identity, nostalgia and sporting memory. Together the visitors and the guides think back to a specific time in the past and re-invent the chosen piece of history, forming an intermingled version of sporting and family memory. Through stadium tours, the symbolic features and constructive authenticity in the making of football heritage will be produced and elevated by visitors and tour guides alike. The creativity involved is not as much as the club claims, but in fact, is very limited since the visitors only receive the one-way stimulus. After all, they hardly have the chance to be in charge of the experience production.

As much as lots of pundits and supporters criticise about commodification sport, we have to admit that without commercialisation, sport would not be as omnipotent as it is today. Every year sporting events are hosted and won by communities and nation-states. Every year people do sports or watch sports in different kind of spaces: sports grounds, fields, back streets, parks or even pubs. Every year, there is always political struggles over funding that goes to the development of sports spaces, whether it is global events such as the World Cup, or informal spaces such as walking and cycling routes in national parks. The truth is, football’s hegemony is almost terrifying, which unsettles the investors and supporters.

Stadium tour as a type of football heritage tourism is not a brand new phenomenon, but it has been put aside for far too long. A lot of discussions about stadia have dedicated to the macro-scale kinds of sport commodification in events,

sponsorship and broadcasting, while the heritage value represented in the comparatively micro-scale stadium experience is underestimated.

In the era dominated by capitalist globalisation, football is not only seen as a type of sports, but is equated with prestigious clubs and their celebrity employees playing on the pitch. When everything about football has resorted seriously through consumption, something like which jersey one chooses to put on or which game one decides to go to becomes an embodied proof showing others their allegiance towards the football club. A successful global football brand is probably the ultimate goal for every club in modern era, but somehow this kind of hue let people wrongly believe that their behaviour will only be calculated by conducting visible consumption to emphasise their bonding to their football club.

Generally speaking, there is a double commodification going on in sporting venues: one has to do with the event, and the other has to with the place in which the events take place. The stadium is, as a result, considered and sold as the vehicle for identity, belonging and history. In Anfield Experience, there is a third commodification going on, which I would like to propose as a new springboard to analyse stadium experiences: the commodification of sporting memory construction.

Instead of reading stories from the brochure or hearing the guides recite what has been memorised in their heads, Anfield Experience had replaced their story-tellers with the legends that have literally lived through the era, sharing their memories directly

related to them and the club. Apparently, their past has given them a solid identity to produce and reinforce the authenticity and uniqueness, which seems to perfectly fulfil what visitors are looking for － a peering of the authentic sporting memory. Yet, if we look deeper into their roles, their roles are beyond the story-tellers. In fact, they have turned themselves into new constructive power to produce the club-endorsed version sporting memory and come up a popular version of the club brand in a scripted fashion.

Legends were asked to perform the club-accredited history, mostly something popular and cleansed, because chances are that every encounter with a general tourist could potentially transform him/her into a new fan. In a sense, modern football has lost its original social meaning due to the constant production and re-production caused by the hyper-commodification.

The club is likely, moreover, to want to encourage the view that, for footballers, wealth carries responsibilities and the club, along with their employers, are giving something back into society. Indeed, the plain stardom itself is already a lucrative commodity; however as the competitiveness struggles between the new commercialism, football’s social purpose have become more intensely entertainment-driven. What appears to bind the array of visitors is the desire to see the unseen, not only to experience football stadium when not in use, but also to gain an insight of the unfamiliarity in the familiarity. The backstage areas shown in the tour are, in fact, prepared for visitors and nowadays there are more and more non-football activities and planning such as wedding day, party, catering etc. taking place inside the football

stadium.

Once the football club enters in an individual’s life, it constructs a dominant bonding between the self and the club. The club holds an idiosyncratic power over constructing the memory and decides what parts of history should be remembered. It seems that fans have little agency to get to know the real club history, because the difficult parts of history tended to be concealed by celebrating the glorious and grieving for traumatic parts of history. How could the past wounds ever be healed if we keep pretending not to know the truth?

Over-stressing of this specatating culture somehow deprives supporters of the agency of constructing their own memory. On the other hand, body is, in fact, restrained greatly under the football culture, which somehow encourages the passive participation and blind worshipping in football.

To what extent a stadium experience is truly creative in such a scripted and produced representation is of course a moot point, because actions such as watching, choosing and remembering would not have happened if there is no mediation involved.

Exposed to cultural, spatial and performative contexts, the intimate relationships between people and the things have become important signifiers of an authorised fan identity. People domesticate, customise and situate objects, reaching out to gain something memorable, but they do not realise that they are actually the reinvented reason why the experience is memorable. Also, sensory mediation also lies in the continuous interaction between objects and co-participants, guiding the senses and

makes the body remember. Sadly in this mediation-saturated world, what has left to sustain such kind of brand loyalty to the football club is to have one’s memory commodified in a popular fashion.

Be that as it may, the characteristic of heritage is something that we should never sell short. The value of heritage is closely related to time and it will not reveal if the individual never comes across the place. Football heritage is exactly the case. As time changes everything, the related memory is weaved closely with the stadium and so is the fan identity. Individuals locate their own sporting memory in the stadium and footballers also locate their professional sporting memory in it, too. However, the club-produced memory has made the textures of sporting memory fairly perplexed. The social meaning of football for modern crowds might not be as traditional as it used to be, but a football heritage tour as Anfield Experience certainly provides an insight into the role of production of sporting memory in football heritage site and how the ways of history and culture representation impact on the development of the merging football heritage and creative tourism.

Being creative does not mean that we have to completely put the past aside and add original and innovative ruses as many as possible. From the research, we can observe that the ‘creativity’ people are looking for actually lies in the past, when we start looking for the tiny bits of difference in our previous experiences and that is when the whole experience becomes memorable.