Sport Tourism

Sport Tourism as a new genre of tourism

Sport tourism is a comparatively new concept in the light of contemporary academic field, but its scope of praxis is, in fact, far from a recent phenomenon. Since 1990s, sport and tourism have merged and proliferated notably, depending on the two facts that sport activity is regarded as a part of our social world and tourism is predicted to become the most lucrative industry (Kurtzman and Zauhar, 1993, 2003; Gibson, 1998).

Sport tourism is as all forms of active and passive involvement in sporting

business/commercial reasons that necessitate travel away from home and work locality (Standevan and De Knop, 1999). There are plenty of possibilities to define types of sport tourism, and the definition of sport tourism is often open to be reinterpreted. To begin with, generally speaking, sport tourism could be defined as leisure-based travel that takes individual temporarily outside from their home communities such as participating in physical activities [Active Sport Tourism], watching physical activities [Event Sport Tourism], or venerating attractions associated with physical activities [Nostalgia Sport Tourism] (Gibson, 2006). However, sport tourism is not a unitary phenomenon. The variety of sport tourism is always going to carry weight when it comes to defining sport tourism. Between different types of sport tourism, it seems to be impossible to clear cut between genres, as it is not the case that one can choose to take sides with. The style-changing happened within sports tourism has allowed sports attractions to bolster the collective sense of embracing the sporting heritage in a culturally-driven fashion (Redmond, 1991). Before moving on to the more detailed discussion in sport tourism, it is important to understand what kind of the collective sense permeates within football that drives people to travel.

Football Culture in England

During the last quarter of the 19^th century, association football has become the most popular (spectator) sport among the working classes in Britain in the wake of the increases in wages and free time (Taylor, 2011). There is no single explanation for

sport’s cross-cultural appeal. Like art, music and cinema, sport is a kind of human medium that unites people, at least for a certain period of time.

Different sports facilitate different interaction with particular landscapes. In British sporting culture, class is striking both by its presence and by its absence. Class cultures are prevalent in the following sports, such as Wimbledon tennis, Royal Ascot, Rugby League, squash, Greyhound racing and of course, Association football.

Association football used to be clearly marked by class culture, but the classification seems to be slowly shifting in the epoch of football globalisation. Tracing back to football’s traditional period, football is rooted in a strong, masculine and

working class culture (Giulianotti, 1999); while nowadays football seems to be embraced by all sections of the British, and much of the world’s population. Sport

globalisation allows different cultures to explore old and new identities and conflicts.

Ensued the celebrated and overflowing worldwide coverage of sport, it helps football industry grow into a potential leisure commodity for consumers to play or watch their favourite sports, but meanwhile the tendency leads on criticism of sport inflation.

As the century proceeds, the commercial world pays more attention to sport’s cultural capital value to raise the global profile and appeal of corporate brands (Smart, 2007). The popularity of watching football increased, but it has somehow turned football into a pure profit-driven leverage to run a successful business. Namely, everything about football, the club, football culture and the past, has all been exploited

in branding. Back in the days, football was popular for the way in which it symbolised a two-day holiday for mill and factory workers whose annual holidays totalled only eight days and as well as for the catalyst of reunion of family and friends (Horne et al., 2013) but it is not until the early 1870s that football had finally arrived as a spectator sport (Taylor, 2011). Although modern sports have retained the ritual parallels such as league matches, cup finals and championship seasons, the modern football in the UK was wrought by massive, new capital injection from pay-television stations, merchandise outlets and advertisers from the late 1980s.

Thus, as a nation saturated with the strong class culture like Britain, going to a football game is more than a straightforward leisure choice but an articulation of identity. This may start at a very young age and pass down as the social habit generations after generations. What has passed becomes tomorrow’s history. Sport is not stagnant, but is always evolving with time.

Spectacles that hark back to a purified version of the sporting past become highly desirable and produce positive and strong emotions such as nostalgia and it has been used as the sanitizer of the complex and problematic sporting past, which is largely ignored in the public displays. Shields has addressed that consumption is a form of social exchange through which commodity has become valued for their aura of symbolic meanings and values, rather than their use or exchange value (Shields, 1992).

It is the occurrence and texture of the collective gathering of football crowd that

fascinate people the most, and nostalgia has played an extremely critical role in the destination making.

Construction of nostalgia and destination

Nostalgia has been integrated into tourism greatly, both in terms of marketing materials and the way destinations have been renovated all around the world (Dann, 1994), based on the fact that the present we claim to own proudly today depends greatly on the sporting past. Urry explicates in his work on how people’s popular memories of a place, industry or social practice mould into a prevalent sense of nostalgia and transform from a potential documentation of remembrance into a commodified site in order to attract the majority of people from the society (Urry, 1996).

Recognising the fact that sport attractions are not simply about celebration and veneration but also sites of education and memorialisation. By leveraging the history, the gaze is constructed through signs in various cultural styles. In conjunction with tourism, an industry features the collection of signs and the cognitive work of interpreting, evaluating, drawing comparisons and making mental connections between signs and the referents (Urry and Larsen, 2011).

For people who have passion for sports, they are no stranger to the associations mentioned above. People may travel for plenty of reasons, but for sport tourists, something matters much more. Their destinations seem to be comparatively easier to be predicted and foreseen, comparing to the general travelling public.

Recognising the fact that sport tourists always have the yearning to return or relive a past period somehow cultivate an omnipresent and lucrative possibility of in sport tourism, to be more specific, nostalgia sport tourism. Nostalgia sport tourism provides sport tourists outlets to allege their identification by visiting, venerating and indulging themselves in an evocative shared-experience in sport museums, halls of fame and stadia (Gammon, 2002; Ramshaw and Gammon, 2005; Fairley and Gammon, 2006).

What’s more, nostalgia sport tourism need not to be generated solely from fixed monuments and artefacts, but also from social experiences evoked in a manner to solidify group bonding (Fairley, 2003), because the latter relies more on the intangible factors which people assume that money cannot buy. Going back to where everything starts, the monetary investment is actually the very first thing that people contribute in.

Even there is a strong linkage between nostalgia sport tourism and the cultural heritage of sport, the heritage is not necessarily to be admission free.

The growth of sport-based tourist attractions depends heavily on the construction and representation of the sporting past, no matter how those sport tourism attractions are packaged, whether in the form of museums, halls of fame, stadia tours, or sporting events. The possibility of sport tourism is always undergoing a sea change. As has been mentioned above, the construction of those sport tourism attractions is based on a shared social or cultural purpose, categorising them as sport heritage and each of them is potentially complementary for one another.

Let’s weigh up the forms of sport tourism attractions in the general run of things:

1. The sports museum is a significant contributor to the broader tourist attraction market and a persuasive instigator of nostalgia by displaying all kinds of miscellaneous heritage connected to sport (Fairley and Gammon, 2006). Not far from the arrangement of sports museums, sports halls of fames are also the consequence and instigator of nostalgia.

2. Unlike museums, hall of fame focuses on more about exhibiting outstanding players, glorious record and sporting paraphernalia. Both forms of sport tourism attraction with historical framing can generate and mitigate the nostalgic motivation that decides who choose to visit (Fairley and Gammon, 2006). Underpinned by my observation, it is not uncommon to see the integration between these two attractions incorporating characteristics from one another. The all-in-one kind of exhibitions that combine both regular museum exhibits and halls-of-fame is a prevailing phenomenon in construction and representation of sport attractions nowadays.⁴

The reason why I want to put an emphasis on the stadium tour is based on what I have observed from a majority of the present-day football clubs that are inclined to brand their stadium tour as all-encompassing nostalgia-based sport tourism experience.

Club policy makers are totally aware of the fact that stadia represent huge emotional receptacles and contain highs and lows of spectators’ memories and this sort of

4 Such arrangements are seen in every sports-related museum that the author had paid a visit to, as listed below: Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum: London, UK; The Arsenal Museum: London, UK; LFC Museum: Liverpool, UK; National Football Museum: Manchester, UK; Manchester United Museum:

attachment is irreplaceable for those who have emotion anchorage to the club. A multi-textured backstage access is intentionally designed to attract the outsiders and generate profits as much as possible. Sport tourists or fans don’t fancy visit every stadium in the city, but the stadium they identify with. Thus, it is credential for a club to have an accredited brand image in the global context, but that really depends greatly on the meditation and the reinterpretation. According to Gammon and Fear, the stadium tour represents an opportunity to be reminded of the great deeds of yesterday while offering an authentic insight into areas normally reserved for the very privileged (Gammon and Fear, 2007). The idea of going behind the scenes coincides with the appeal of tourism, because tourism permits our ‘everyday masks’ to be discarded, offering opportunities to explore different identities and take on new roles. As Edensor has observed, the kinds of postmodern staging have proffered a realm of improvisation and contestation for tourism, where tourist practices and attractions synergise to theme the tourist space in highly commodified ways (Edensor, 2001). Additionally, the notion of synergistic theming coincides the term of creative turn (Richards, 2011) in tourism studies, which will be further discussed in the next section.

Creative football tourism in bloom

The emergence of creative tourism reflects the growing integration between tourism and place-making strategies. In football industry, the once known as passive fans have become more and more spectacular in expressing their allegiance in commodification of sport. Ostensibly, the commodity gives football fandom new meanings, memories

and values, as the football culture is always being produced, reproduced and relived, but the truth is that a lot of the times, people are set to see what has arranged to fit the tourist gaze of heritage in the first place. Is it possible for a tourist to be fully detached from the politics of representation? Since tourism is understood as manifestations of the relationships between tourists one way or another, what they see and how their interaction relationships evolve could be a key factor to connect disparate experiences (MacCannell, 1999), because the assumption is often made that football provides the common languages and motifs, required for expression of identity. How to retain football club’s distinctiveness in the era of football commercialisation becomes an art of manipulation, especially for those elite league clubs.

The generation of extended cultural tourism and creative tourism dedicates to the employment of creativity, which shifts focus from the tangible heritage towards the intangible heritage and in the meanwhile, find greater involvement and interaction with the destinations in everyday lives (Richards, 2011). Stadium experiences are being produced in mass forms of consumption, making everything purchasable in an appalling fashion.

Stadium as Janus-face creative space

The initial motivation for travelling has never changed. Tourists always pine for getting involved with the society and experiencing a new culture in a deeper level (MacCannell, 1999). However, owing to the fact that moving between countries and countries is not

as arduous as it used to be, the distinction between tourism and everyday life is obscuring. MacCannell has suggested that tourist attractions are signs which are formulated through the relationship between a sight marker and tourist (MacCannell, 1999).

Take the football stadium as an example, the building itself is an instrumental architecture, but it has slowly turned into a touristic spot for its growing iconic appeal.

The architecture in the system of capitalism is a pure product just like any other commodity that promotes the generation of profit, the increase of production and the stimulus of consumption (Klingmann, 2007). Stadium becomes a medium connects the face-to-face interaction and the construction of memory. Even the experience inside the stadium has grown to be a form of mediation wherein human interaction is regulated and sold as a leisure commodity.

Popular culture is defined as essentially contradictory and paradoxical, where semiotic conflicts or sign warfare never cease in commodification of sport. To rail against the profit-driven tendency, Smart has proposed that sports are more than universal signifiers which not only ‘travel across borders’, rise above difference of politics, culture and religion, but also promote a positive feeling of a shared experience and a sense of common meaning (Smart, 2007), but unfortunately, the meaning has become an utter sign-generator, turning almost everything about football for the sake of making profits.

Architecture has become part of the system of signs that perpetuates distinction among different lifestyle attitudes, creates or moulds identities through the consumption of visual and emotional stimuli (Klingmann, 2007). In addition to the features mentioned above, football stadium also functions as a means to conduct people’s behaviour. As such, it is often acknowledged that football stadium serves more than projecting a place to people, but at the same time it provides a potent vehicle for collective identification in which modern rituals take place (Bale, 1993). Making a trip to an empty stadium when there are no sporting events seems to be enigmatic for sports lovers, not to mention for those who barely have interest in sports. How the ‘place myth’

is formed in a socially selective way requires a fair amount of cultural capital to find pleasure in the dead scenery (Urry, 1995), because the destination brand is no different than the other brands. The destination image has to be introduced in the first place where structured power relations are always accorded to the football clubs and its city, reflecting football’s complex structural relations to wider social system.

The destination’s brand is not solely about its name, logo, or slogan, but refers to

the overall impression which is evoked in the minds of potential tourists with its functional and symbolic elements (Chalip and Costa, 2005). Structures of buildings, representations of power and cultural capital embed altogether in the fabric of architecture and lead to the formation of a prevailing ideology mediated through bricks and mortar. Fiske also shares what he has noted, almost all popular audiences engage in varying degrees of semiotic productivity and produce meanings and pleasures that

pertain to their social situation out of the products of the culture industries (Fiske, 1992).

However, the representation and over-mediation of sport have over-generalised the stadium and have made every stadium look almost identical. Giulianotti (1999) suggests that contemporary association football stadia have been subject to a process of

‘mallification’ that coerces football into exploiting their supporters by turning them into loyal consumers.

If that’s the case, what kind of the linkage identifies Anfield as a visitation-worthy destination in Liverpool? Why is Anfield the destination that one travels to, instead of visiting the other football clubs? How does the visitation worth value unfold during the stadium experience? In an epoch that people are always hungry for uniqueness, how does Anfield attempt to endow visitors’ with autonomy by providing a seemingly exclusive experience, but, in fact, a sheer scripted orchestration?

Frankly speaking, Anfield is not a modern and fanciful stadium as other newly-built stadia in Britain, such as Wembley Stadium⁵, Emirates Stadium⁶, and so on. How to pinpoint Anfield remains to be discussed further, because on the one hand, Anfield is yet to be a heritage and on the other hand, Anfield is not necessarily defined as the iconic architecture. How is Liverpool FC and its supporters’ history woven into the

5 The old Wembley Stadium got demolished in 2003, and the new stadium finally got completed in 2007.

Wembley Stadium is, after Camp Nou (home ground of FC Barcelona), the second largest stadium in Europe and the standard playing venue of the English national team.

6 To expand its home ground of Highbury, Arsenal FC began its relocation in Ashburton Grove in 2002.

Due to financial difficulties, the relocation took extra years to finish. Finally, with the sponsorship from

fabric of Liverpool and the way how Anfield is being displayed are to be further explored in the later chapters.