足球遺產作為文創運動觀光：以利物浦足球俱樂部為例

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學國際與社會科學學院歐洲文化與觀光研究所碩士論文. Graduate Institute of European Cultures and Tourism College of International Studies and Social Science. National Taiwan Normal University Master Thesis. 足球遺產作為文創運動觀光：以利物浦足球俱樂部為例 Football Heritage as A New Creative Genre of Sports Tourism: A Case Study of Liverpool Football Club (LFC) 邱珮雯 Peiwen Chiu 指導教授：賴嘉玲博士 Dr. Chia-Ling Lai. 中華民國 104 年 6 月 June 2015.

(2) Acknowledgment “Throw your heart out in front of you, and run ahead to catch it. Whatever you desire, imagine it’s in front of you, and grab it.” This thesis is, indeed, a piece of my heart. I never thought I would begin my acknowledgment with the cliché phrase that I tend to avoid, but this is truly happening. For whoever has been there for me whenever I need, I can never thank you enough. I have to admit that sometimes I could be fairly romantic and expressive. I’m sure a lot of the times that my family and friends need to have a high tolerance towards my active emotions. As I always believe everything happens for a specific reason and passion is something that will keep us moving forward, giving me every reason to be grateful for what I have encountered in my life. First of all, I would love to express my gratitude to my mentor, Chialing. Thanks for letting me be true to myself in these fruitful and wonderful master years of study. Doing the research based on my passion definitely feels like dream-come-true. Thanks for supporting my ‘passion theory’ by allowing me to carry out a research like a fan’s pilgrimage memoir. There is a quote that says, “Happiness is answering your calling.” Once again, thank you for assisting me in answering my ‘football calling’. I am indebted to my family who gives me the complete freedom of chasing after my dream and is always tolerant with my ‘cave woman mode’ during the whole writing process. The love and caring let me understand the importance to be an encourager; after all, the world has enough critics. Thank you my dearest friends for your all-time support. I genuinely feel lucky to have you guys in my life. No matter how busy you guys are, no matter how many hours of time difference, you can always fuel up my power engine whether with an inspirational talk, a lovely email or just a brief but caring text message. Sour, Xuan, Shalu, Bill, Jimi, Max, Yun, Alice, David, Long, Geoff, Chenfang, Lisa, Hugo, Maurice…The list can go on and on, but as I’m running out of the space here. I think I’ll stop here. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to the faculty and all the members of GIECT, Professor Wei and Professor Wang in the committee. Of course, the core of the thesis: Eddy, Joel, Steve, Ruth, Stewart, Vincent, Mathilde, Adam and Derek. The thesis won’t be accomplished without your participation.. Keep calm and carry on because you’ll never walk alone! i.

(3) 足球遺產作為文創運動觀光：以利物浦足球俱樂部為例. 摘要. 在現代消費社會中，足球遺產已經被形塑為一種高度規劃後的消費模式。透過運動觀光，觀光客親身參與觀看(spectating)、崇敬(venerating)足球遺產，重新詮釋屬於他們的運動記憶(sporting memory)。在運動觀光中，參觀足球遺產，並不是一個全新的現象，但在運動觀光中和球場觀光有關之研究往往卻忽視了再現政治(representation politics)和記憶政治(memory politics) 在景點製造(destination making)中發揮的影響力。利物浦足球俱樂部(Liverpool Football Club)遺產，包括：球場觀光、球隊博物館、紀念碑，在一個生產建構的框架(produced framework)中伴隨著參觀者、導覽和球場的演出(performance)和中介(mediation) 成為一個再造的(re-invented)足球遺產觀光產品，使得運動記憶成為一種人們購買的運動商品。因此，球隊歷史經由運動商品化的過程，將歷史包裝過後再現 (representation)，到頭來只有淨化 (cleansed) 後的歷史記憶得以傳唱下去。針對利物浦足球俱樂部相關遺產及其相關之運動記憶建構(sporting memory construction)，筆者透過田野調查、質性訪談以及文獻分析進行資料收集及分析參照，本研究旨在探討足球場如何在運動觀光的脈絡下，成為運動記憶和家庭記憶構連上一個重要的媒介(mediator)及平台。除此之外，本研究也深入詮釋此特定類型的足球遺產觀光，論述參觀者和導覽有意識地將自己變為演出者以便重現及延續討喜的大眾記憶(popular memory)。筆者以利物浦足球俱樂部做為個案研究，試圖對足球遺產觀光，以及運動記憶和文化創意的結合樣貌，提出一個更脈絡化的分析方式與批判詮釋。. 關鍵字：足球遺產、足球場、運動商品化、記憶政治、文化創意 ii.

(4) Football Heritage as A New Creative Genre of Sports Tourism: A Case Study of Liverpool Football Club (LFC). Abstract. Football heritage has become intensively stage-managed and constructed as modes of consumption in contemporary society. Through the lens of sport tourism, visitors participate in spectating and venerating football heritage both mentally and somatically to re-interpret their own sporting memory. Paying a visit to football heritage sites as a type of sports tourism is far from a recent phenomenon, but recent research pays little attention to examine how representation politics and memory politics are involved in destination-making. Liverpool FC heritage (stadium tour, museum, memorial sites) exemplify a reinvented product of football heritage tourism in a fairly produced framework concomitant with the performance and construction from co-visitors, guides and the stadium, making the related memories the commodities for people to buy into. As a result, the club history is represented and constructed in the forms of story-telling and commodities. In the end, it is only the cleansed memory that gets to be passed on. Through fieldwork, interviews, document analysis on the making of Liverpool FC heritage and the construction of sporting memory, the research targets on illustrating how the stadium becomes a mediator where sporting memory and family memory are compounded and produced. In addition, by delving into the specific type of football heritage tourism, it is worth noting that how visitors and guides both turn themselves into performer in order to keep the popular memory alive. With the case study of Liverpool FC, the research aims at providing a critical interpretation of the football heritage tourism as a combination of sporting memory and creativity in modern era.. Keywords: Football heritage, football stadium, sports commodification, memory politics, creativity iii.

(5) Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 I.. Research Background ....................................................................................... 1. II.. Problematiques ................................................................................................. 7. Chapter 2 Literature Review............................................................................................. 9 I.. Sport Tourism ................................................................................................... 9. II.. Heritage and Memory ..................................................................................... 21. III. Sport Tourists and Fans .................................................................................. 32 Chapter 3 Methodology .................................................................................................. 40 I.. Research Object .............................................................................................. 40. II.. Methods .......................................................................................................... 49. Chapter 4 Liverpool FC Heritage as A Collective Construction .................................... 63 I.. Stand Still and Deliver: The 21st century Anfield .......................................... 65. II. Representation and Memory Construction in Liverpool FC Heritage production ............................................................................................................... 72 Chapter 5 Visitors as the ‘Creativity Amplifier’ ............................................................ 96 I. Liverpool’s twelfth man .................................................................................... 100 II. The immaterial textures in Anfield and the memorials ................................... 107 III. Visitors as the linkage in stadium experience and beyond ............................. 133 Chapter 6 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 146 I. Conclusive remarks and implications ............................................................... 146 II. Research limitations and recommendation for future research........................ 155 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 157 Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 170. iv.

(6) List of Figures Figure 3.1 Kop Stand at Anfield ..................................................................................... 44 Figure 3.2 The Shankly Gate .......................................................................................... 47 Figure 3.3 Hillsborough Memorial ................................................................................. 47 Figure 3.4 Statue of Bill Shankly ................................................................................... 47 Figure 3.5 The Paisley Gateway ..................................................................................... 47 Figure 3.6 The interior design of Boot Room Sports Café............................................. 48 Figure 3.7 Boot Room Sports Café online advertisement .............................................. 48 Figure 3.8 Hillsborough Stadium ................................................................................... 55 Figure 3.9 View seen from the specific area for media and broadcasters Hillsborough Stadium ........................................................................................................................... 55 Figure 3.10 Hillsborough Memorial in Sheffield ........................................................... 56 Figure 3.11 Hillsborough Memorial in Sheffield ........................................................... 56 Figure 3.12 A painting hung in the lobby at Lord Nelson Hotel, Liverpool:UK ........... 62 Figure 3.13 A street publicity near Albert Dock, Liverpool:UK ................................... 62 Figure 4.1 Top 20 of annual revenue in 2013/14 season ................................................ 67 Figure 4.2 Anfield Stadium Plan .................................................................................... 74 Figure 4.3 Anfield Road Stand shot from The Kop ....................................................... 74 Figure 4.4 Crowds at Liverpool v.s. Stoke City match .................................................. 75 Figure 4.5 Plaque of The Centenary Stand ..................................................................... 78 Figure 4.6 Reception at The Centenary Stand ................................................................ 79 Figure 4.7 Club Guest Lounge ....................................................................................... 80 Figure 4.8 Press Room ................................................................................................... 80 Figure 4.9 Home Dressing Room with the guide ........................................................... 80 Figure 4.10 “This is Anfield” Sign ................................................................................. 83 Figure 4.11 Managerial Dug-Out Area........................................................................... 84 Figure 4.12 Pitch overlooking from Executive Box ....................................................... 90 Figure 4.13 Table setting in Executive Box ................................................................... 90 Figure 4.14 Kitchen inside the box ................................................................................. 90 v.

(7) Figure 4.15 Placemat for each guest ............................................................................... 90 Figure 4.16 Jimmy Case and Alan Kennedy in the Q&A session .................................. 90 Figure 4.17 Participants at Q&A session........................................................................ 90 Figure 4.18 Ian Callaghan delivered anniversary gift to the wife .................................. 92 Figure 4.19 Jimmy Case at the signing session .............................................................. 92 Figure 4.20 Shankly’s passport ...................................................................................... 93 Figure 4.21 Private farewell dinner menu for Bill Shankly’s retirement ....................... 93 Figure 4.22 Board of Bill Shankly ................................................................................. 93 Figure 4.23 Hillsborough Memorial inside the museum ................................................ 93 Figure 4.24 Trophy room in the new museum ............................................................... 94 Figure 5.1 Alan Kennedy and Ian Callaghan ............................................................... 111 Figure 5.2 Souvenir photo from Anfield Experience ................................................... 111 Figure 5.3 Simon Mignolet showed up in the stadium mega-store .............................. 116 Figure 5.4 The Vines .................................................................................................... 118 Figure 5.5 Legend’s Talk at The Vines ........................................................................ 118 Figure 5.6 Hillsborough Memorial Mosaic in the club museum.................................. 123 Figure 5.7 Pennant of Celtic FC in aid of Hillsborough Disaster Fund ....................... 123 Figure 5.8 Fans’ tribute to 25th Hillsborough ............................................................... 124 Figure 5.9 Fans’ tribute to 25th Hillsborough (Close-up) ............................................. 124 Figure 5.10 The route of 96 mile trek from Hillsborough to Anfield .......................... 125 Figure 5.11 The ritual of laying of roses ...................................................................... 127 Figure 5.12 The final display on the 96 mile trek arrival day ...................................... 127 Figure 5.13 The Kop creates a mosaic saying "Amicizia" ("Friendship") ................... 129 Figure 5.14 Heysel Memorial ....................................................................................... 130 Figure 5.15 A kid won a signed jersey from Alan Kennedy ........................................ 132 Figure 5.16 A random kid walked in Liverpool FC jersey in Birmingham ................. 132 Figure 5.17 The old boot room ..................................................................................... 137 Figure 5.18 Father-son talk at the dressing room ......................................................... 137 Figure 5.19 A little boy wearing his LFC jersey to the stadium tour ........................... 137 vi.

(8) Figure 5.20 A simulated movie poster for 2005 UEFA final ....................................... 139 Figure 5.21 Fans watching A.C Milan vs. Liverpool FC Champions League final in 2005 .............................................................................................................................. 139 Figure 5.22 Kop scene on a match day......................................................................... 142. List of Tables Table 3.1 The English football league systems .............................................................. 41 Table 3.2 Types of stadium tours offered by Liverpool Football Club .......................... 50 Table 3.3 Itineraries of two Anfield Experience the author has participated in ............. 53 Table 3.4 Sources of data collection from media ........................................................... 57 Table 3.5 Profile of Interviewees ................................................................................... 60 Table 5.1 Reviews of Anfield on Trip Advisor .............................................................. 98 Table 5.2 The Legends line-up ..................................................................................... 109 Table.5.2 Itinerary of the 96 mile trek .......................................................................... 125. vii.

(9) Chapter 1 Introduction I.. Research Background. Liverpool Football Club’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, is probably one of the most famous football songs in the world. People from all around the world might speak different languages, but when it comes to football, a song like "You'll Never Walk Alone" is able to transcend language barriers, geographical frontiers and beyond. Football is congested with mass media production and mediation. It has been assumed by sports sociologists with interests in sporting policy that professional spectator team sports are only driven by marketing, profits and becoming a global system. The argument is still open to question, but football certainly has the most salient portfolio.. Having taken advantage of football's global broadcasting, I was captivated by its pure passion and charm, even though I was thousands of miles away. It was the 2006 World Cup that ignited my devotion for football and for Liverpool Football Club, as Steven Gerrard scored his first ever World Cup goal with a thunderous effort in a 2-0 win over Trinidad and Tobago. The sounds and images of players and fans cheering, both on the pitch and outside the stadium, was enough to transform an audience like me into a sports lover through live broadcasting and media coverage alone. After the World Cup tournament in 2006, I traced back Gerrard’s roots to Liverpool, and that was the commencement of this ‘overseas sweetheart’ relationship.. 1.

(10) Spending so many sleepless nights watching football games became my motivation to go to Anfield ever since and the motivation has become stronger and stronger as time goes by. If it hadn’t been for my passion for Liverpool, I wouldn’t have travelled far and wide to create and collect as many memories related to Liverpool Football Club as I can. For Liverpool FC supporters, Anfield is not only the place that houses those sporting events, but also the vehicle of identity which is one of the essential power of football heritage, attracting people all around the world with multifaceted purposes.. Finally the years of waiting have come to an end in summer 2013. The moment at which I stepped into Anfield struck me with a feeling beyond description. Hearing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” resound in the stadium and being surrounded by ‘the Reds’ was, indeed, magical. As a global fan, being at Anfield is surreal already, not to mention the ‘Scouser touch’ once you are in Liverpool. I believe that people who have been to Anfield are definitely no stranger to the situation which I just mentioned, but a lot of the times we just let the on-site emotion slip away. That’s why I would love to use this research to capture the fleeting moments, explore and illustrate what kind of memory is being produced through the representation of football heritage and how fans interact and identify with the sporting memory in the context of sport tourism.. 2.

(11) Re-evaluation of sport and tourism. Sport has a Janus-faced value in modern life. On the one hand, millions of people choose to play sports or become supporters of sports. For these people, participating in sports-related activities is something which brings people together for a shared purpose and provides a sense of belonging. On the other hand, there is an over-generalisation happening in sports, especially in association football. Football clubs used to be a celebrated traditional working-class sport that repays its local community by providing a focus and a source of civic pride. However, the advent of technology has turned football into a banal entity as people have access to almost everything.. Nowadays, football clubs are becoming international corporations. Fans may feel sickened by the way their favourite sports have been tainted by global commerce, but the truth is that they have no choice. Despite the fact that the globalisation of football has generated a much bigger and better picture for the global football industry, it is a bittersweet feeling for local fans who may now struggle to maintain their connection to their football clubs.. Tourism has become a widespread and a protean practice that occurs in mundane settings, everyday routines, home cities and as well as in far-flung places (Edensor, 2011). The fact that people are in a constant state of departing and arriving makes tourism nothing but a routine procedure of borders and hotel receptionists. The scale and influence of commercialisation in sports is also immense. As regional and 3.

(12) global events have made sport one of the world's most profitable and globalised products, the use of sport as a touristic endeavour has been taken into account from the perspective of philosophical and entrepreneurial development since the 1990s (Kurtzman and Zauhar, 1993). The scope of sport tourism is fairly broad, including sport tourism attractions, sport tourism resorts, sport tourism cruises, sport tourism tours and sport events tourism1.. Leisure and sports are both seen as important forms of cultural expression, as it is often suggested that football probably has the most universal demographic appeal because of its huge global exposure all over the world. This occurrence perfectly provides an incentive for me to draw on some debatable and contested struggles happening in the football industry as a newly emerging leisure commodity.. The use of heritage as both motive and provider for tourism is widely adopted and appropriated in tourism, yet sport heritage is surprisingly less documented. Sport heritage may include just about anything, from old sports equipment and other related paraphernalia, to museums and halls of fame, choosing what pieces of sporting history contemporary society should inherit and pass on.. Sport in England, like in so many countries, represents heritage on a number of levels, which has probably taken on an almost global heritage appeal. A particular sport can be representative of a nation or a community’s identity. Sports stadia are one type 1. The categories identified used here are extracted from Kurtzman and Zauhar’s serial work on sport tourism. Detailed definitions see: Kurtzman, J. & Zauhar, J. (2003). 4.

(13) of sport heritage evolve from being functional utilitarian buildings to places that hold meaning and instant recognition to both fans and non-fans alike (Bale, 1994; Gaffney and Bale, 2004). We can assume that stadia are the containers of important socioeconomic, demographical and psychological issues that can produce interactions and memories. Gammon also points out that sports museums and halls of fame are arguably the most obvious examples of where heritage, sport and tourism meet, and in England are mostly situated within sports clubs (Gammon, 2007). As the emotional attachment to football is slowly giving way to the commercial practicalities, nostalgia is not what it used to be. Yet, for one thing is clear, the understanding and perception of an object, performance or social practice as football heritage lies in the eye of the beholder. The development of modern football: Liverpool and its ‘Liver bird’. With the foundation of the Football Association in 1863 and the growth of football professionalism in the 1870s, football has expanded both geographically and socially to encompass the industrial, working-class heartlands of London, the Midlands and the North (Crolley and Hand, 2002). It might be the moment when people start recognising football as a major element of working class culture in England, but how was has this stereotype been constructed and imbedded in our minds to the modern day? How did the success of 11 men running around the pitch in short trousers stimulate such passionate and wider view of ‘Englishness’? How does association football distinguish itself among all other spectator sports in England? Before starting to tackle the issues mentioned above, I want to take a look at Liverpool, a city known as a 'football city'. 5.

(14) Some may have suggested that football is mediated as an extension of social structures, values and ‘organised religion’. In Liverpool, the assumption is affirmative based on the mutual support between football and religion. Football and religion are essential components of the social fabric that provide focus and shape in the lives of countless individuals and communities (Davie, 1993). Since both religious practice and football attendance take place on a regular basis in a collective form, they are capable of producing and enforcing bonding constantly. Since the 1960s, the performance of Liverpool Football Club fans on the ‘Kop’ stand at Anfield has become a fundamental part of the spectacle and has maintained its hallowed reputation till now (Taylor, 2011). The fact that Liverpool Football Club has directly involved in two significant disasters, Heysel (1985)2 and Hillsborough (1989)3, has triggered an emancipation of differentiation one and the other emic and etic. It certainly mitigates the struggles with contested power relationships between fan rivalries. With such a rich historicised identity of Liverpool FC supporter, the emotional investment, identity formation, community cohesion and political economy generate conflicts between one another is gradually on the rise in a global context when putting into the sport tourism context.. 2. A stadium disaster happened in Brussels, Belgium. On 29 May 1987 when Liverpool FC met Italian football club Juventus in the European Cup Final. A large group of Liverpool fans breached a fence separating them from a "neutral area" which contained mostly Juventus fans and resulted in the collapse of the wall. 39 supporters of Juventus were crushed to death. 3. A stadium disaster happened in Sheffield, England. On 15 April 1989 during the FA cup semi-final match between Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest FC. A human crush resulted in the death of 96 people. 6.

(15) II. Problematiques. Sport and sport mega-events have become an increasingly central rather than peripheral cultural form in the growth and spread of capitalist consumer cultures, including tourism, consumerisation and global visitor destinations (Horne, 2006. Cited in Horne et al, 2013). Consequently, the sporting event has become a destination people travel to far and wide, galvanising local and national identities as well as giving visitors a ‘unique and authentic’ insight into a place’s cultural past and present.. Liverpool FC heritage (stadium tour, museum and memorial sites) is neither a sport mega-event nor a match-day experience. In fact, it is well-choreographed and the site is re-invented for visitation purpose. Since everything is constructed, what makes Liverpool FC heritage worth spending time on? How does Liverpool FC heritage brand itself as a rewarding site to visit? That said, how can a visit to Liverpool FC heritage truly unveil what is behind the scenes when everything is manipulated and re-invented in the first place? Why do people have to go all the way to do Liverpool FC heritage tour to re-experience the cleansed and self-congratulatory history that they have already known? What kind of production of representation is involved in the construction of sporting memory?. Therefore, it is worth shedding light on why and how Liverpool FC heritage sites contrive the sporting landscape in Liverpool and how those sites make anticipated destinations, sum up the city and boost up its visitation potential. It seems to be a 7.

(16) paradox if a tour of empty stadium would offer a more authentic perspective than, say, watching a match at the same venue with the terraces full of screaming and cheering fans. Thus, it is intended that this research aims at spelling out how Liverpool FC heritage (stadium tour, museum and memorial sites) produces a certain piece of history and memory. What are the roles of guides (Liverpool FC legends) in representation of Liverpool FC heritage? How is Liverpool FC heritage-scape produced and constructed?. The primary problematiques are:. 1.. Among all types of sport heritage, how does football heritage capitalise its related constituents in the destination making?. 2.. Under the construction of representation of football heritage, what kind of the politics of representation and memory are involved in sporting memory construction? How does the tour operator manage that it is only the cleansed history get to be presented? How do the representation and production of history engage in the construction of sporting memory?. 3.. On the making of Liverpool FC heritage, how is the club-history being constructed and reinvented? Judging on the filtering role the guides (Liverpool FC legends) play, what kind of the sporting memory visitors will obtain after their visit to Liverpool FC heritage?. 8.

(17) Chapter 2 Literature Review The chapter has several goals, which centre on reviewing the literature surrounding the main constructs used in this research. Firstly, I tend to bring attention to the new emergence of sport tourism in football industry and explore how British football culture synergises with its supporters that generates a highly symbolic value on the destination making and further enhances the heritage value of the site. Next, the representation of heritage is considered. Critical issues on the ways of representation of heritage and politics of memory will be discussed and how those threads connect to the collaboration of creativity will also be reflected on. Finally, the literature sheds light on the human dimension to explore how visitors and guides perform and mediate in the representation of heritage and the production of creative tourism experience.. I.. 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 activity, whether participating in casually or in an organised way for non-commercial or 9.

(18) 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 19th 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. 10.

(19) 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 11.

(20) 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. 12.

(21) 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. 13.

(22) 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: 14.

(23) 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: Manchester, UK. 15.

(24) attachment is irreplaceable for those who have emotion anchorage to the club. A multitextured 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 16.

(25) 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 17.

(26) 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.. 18.

(27) 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 19.

(28) 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 newlybuilt 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 Emirates Airline, the stadium finally completed relocation in 2006. 20.

(29) fabric of Liverpool and the way how Anfield is being displayed are to be further explored in the later chapters.. II. Heritage and Memory. The section will first discuss the representation of sport heritage and explore how the representation of heritage changes as time goes by, memory fades out and identity builds up in the epoch of commercialisation. Last but not least, it is worth delving into what kind of values are being displayed and transmitted through the heritage and the memory related to it. As the past has become a profitable selling commodity, the following discussion will unfold how the mechanism of creativity is embedded and applied assumingly to ameliorate the homogenised representation of sport heritage by constructing of a home from home from social and cultural perspectives.. Representation of sport heritage. History has been gathered up and presented as heritage because it is often acknowledged that meaningful pasts that should be remembered; and more and more buildings and other sites have been called on to act as witness of the past (MacDonald, 2009). In the face of the world full of plurality, heritage sites endeavour to claim themselves as qualified heritage worth seeing by various ways of mediation and display. As such, Ashworth et al. indicate that there seems to be a basic difficulty in authorising discourses of heritage, because heritage and its messages could be multi-vocal, relayed simultaneously from many sources and both public and private at many scales 21.

(30) (Ashworth et al.,2007). Heritage can be, contradictorily, an instrument for social fragmentation and as well as social cohesion. However, in the particular context of heritage tourism, the past is excessively sanitised to meet the demand of the contemporary world service economy and what people perceive and see might be a completely scripted spectacle with the staged authenticity as the sanitizer.. Entanglements between identity and memory raise the questions about practice of selection, preservation, cultural comparison and witnessing (MacDonald, 2009). Despite of the increase interest in the heritage from the travelling public, sports heritage attractions are still the other, receiving too little attention for its interpretive complexity.. The growing body of sports studies helps us to understand how sport is often put to work as an expression of recent political economic transformation towards the construction of sporting experience which has also become a vehicle of mediation. Sport heritage is part of the wider cultural landscape that often seeks to remember, enliven, teach, create personal/collective legacies and enhance the value of places for communities and society as a whole (Ramshaw, 2005). Landscape elements act as, as suggested, specialisation and compartmentalisation of power and memory, resulting in the fluctuation of power relationships when it comes to maintaining the discourse of sport heritage.. As it is often suggested, sports constantly evolve with social involvement and time. We have arrived in an era of standardisation where our daily routines, desires and 22.

(31) leisure activities synchronise with the rhythms of the machine. Museums, as a result, have become the demonstrative chronicles that help people to relive the memory and be in the past once again. According to Moore, museums of sport are generally a relatively recent phenomenon in the UK (Moore, 2008). In the 1990s, British football has witnessed a noticeable increase of the practices of commemoration and memorialisation, which have become central taken-for-granted features of British football culture within the last two decades. It was also the period that museums have become the natural home for the collections so as to help the public remember the past. This situation typically involves the promotion or valorisation of a specific history, but also the politics of memory and representation of heritage. The debate of ways of seeing the stadium is more than the exhibition displayed in the museum and the politics of representation does not end at the doorstep of the museum. Therefore, I intend to open up the discussion about those little considered establishments such as the naming of grandstands and roads, the erection of statue, the practice of living memorials, the building of informal shrines, the frequent holding of minute silence and other rituals. We have ignored the cultural meanings behind those rituals for far too long in the late modern football culture, because normally we just do as what others do.. To locate sport heritage in a cultural context, I have drawn upon on the notion of the cultural landscape. The cultural landscape, together with the signs and symbols, plays a crucial role in legitimating particular political and social orders, and in 23.

(32) contributing to narratives of group identity (Whelan, 2005), but chances are that sites may find themselves being interpreted and mediated not the way they want in the representation of heritage sites.. Sport heritage attractions are not only potent tourist attractions in their own right, but also powerful creators and protectors of particular heritage values and outcomes by addressing themselves as sites of organisational propaganda, sites of worship and pilgrimage, and sites of cultural and economic consumption (Ramshaw, 2009). One man’s Utopia might be another man’s dystopia and stadium probably exemplifies this metaphor the best. In Bale’s opinion, it is often understood that most of the people regard the stadium as a religious shrine and a mediator to contextualise their love of the place and their sense of the place-loyalty in order to strengthen their bonding with places, but we cannot underestimate that football could possibly constitute a nuisance and sometimes generate real fear (Bale, 1993).. In the 1980s, the public, within and without England, had a strong inclination to see the English football stadium as a place of violence and social malaise rather than a place of the social solidarity. Indeed, the fan-generated violence in England from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s created occasions of weekly social unrest to a degree almost unknown in a politically and economically stable state (Robinson, 2010). The patterns of popular commemoration emerged since the 1980s, which problematizes the impression of football stadium. It can be seen as a salient and quasi-religious position in urban city landscape where modern rituals and pilgrimages take place, but on the 24.

(33) other hand, it may be a place of trauma, especially in Britain, the world hub of football memorabilia. The following section will move on to the discussion about memory politics and how the memory politics affects the ways of perception.. Always on your mind: Selective remembering. History and heritage are cultural products and social constructs that conjoin our received identities and imagined affinities of time and place (Hollinshead, 2002) and the memory derives from which, stays with us ever since. The sporting past is part of our here and now, intertwined with the complex fluidity and inter-textuality of remembering and memory accumulation. Research in tourism studies shows that tourists travel not only seeks for the experience, but also for the sake of making every moment counts.. The ways to display is never just representations of incontestable facts, but always involves the cultural, social and political implication to be presented and gazed upon (Macdonald, 1998) and prepare us with the pursuit of what never really was, a longing for becoming nostalgic. The commercialisation of nostalgia teaches us to miss the things we have never lost, alluring us to beautify everything in the past, no matter how dreadful the situation was back in the days. Through consumption, we seem to forget the trauma when all the sorrow evaporates in an instant with the expense and what remains with us is the soothed feeling and the commodity we have bought for pastevoking.. 25.

(34) What we keep in our mind is unlikely to be a plain truth, because history always undergoes a process of tenderisation for a wider or fresher mixture of contemporary uses and consumption, connecting to the broader socio-political concerns (Hollinshead, 2002) and people could be quite selective on remembering and forgetting.. The notion of home is powerful and widespread in sport. In the scope of sport tourism, the concept of home is both culturally and economically important in the representation of sport heritage. Robinson has drawn attention to examine the role the stadium has played in transforming perceptions of English football from outside the game, as well as how practices and rituals that occur inside the stadium have extended beyond football (Robinson, 2010). It would not be an exaggeration to say that, at least in England, football stadium is considered as home to its supporters in a metaphorical way. Referring to what Ramshaw and Gammon have indicated, the construction of sport heritage and stadium tours might have become the most obvious and structured experiences for visitors to engage with (Ramshaw and Gammon, 2010) and probably the easiest access to take part in. The notion of home, sports-wise speaking, often combines both the literal and the spiritual meaning, as stadium is a tangible location of bricks and mortar where games, traditions and rituals are actually practised on site (Wood, 2007). Having said that, the construction of home en masse causes more and more people realise that they are encountering troubles in finding the uniqueness in sport heritage tourisms. The television, international transportation and the Internet have suggested that today and in the future fandom can and will exist as a community 26.

(35) without propinquity (Bale, 2000). It seems that the distance is sheer imagined and surpassable without making a physical presence and the community of fans is being liberated from a confined frontier, such as a city.. Served as the analytical lens, the notion of sports commodification has turned the sporting past into a collectible commodity and has transformed stadia from repositories of collective memory to memory-work tools. There is nothing we can do about the past, so why are we so attached to it? What do we obtain from buying a sporting experience? With the more and more increase interest in tourism and the greater recognition of sport, we can see that sport stadium is becoming more readily integrated and accepted as a fundamental component of the leisure industry and tourism (Stevens, 2004), but how does a stadium ensure its consistent distinctiveness and keep its appeal to the public will be something I wish to inquire into in the next section.. Creative turn in representation of heritage. As has been discussed above, meaning and memory have the capability of transforming neutral spaces into sites of ideology and generating a sense of collective identity by the creation of a shared past, whether it exists or not, that stirs up the politics of power and identity (Whelan, 2005). The dominant predilection of consumption put the representation of sport heritage into a limbo, because sport heritage sites start to share no difference between one another.. 27.

(36) Collecting is a significant feature in football fan culture and tourists are equally the same. It is important to collect authentic experiences in which people find meanings and anchorage to make sense of their lives. Football industry has capitalised on the proliferation of consumer goods, but has also suffered from the homogenisation. Thus, the call for the creativity touch becomes an urgent need to ameliorate the inherent opposition between culture and commerce.. Creativity is seen as a process which creates new cultural forms in a position to develop innovatory new cultural products and to nourish the cultural economy (Richards and Wilson, 2006). An enormous range of material has been produced to give football fans the access to display the objects of fandom, such as football replica jerseys, accessories and all sorts of endorsed products. In modern society, MacCannell has pointed out the fact that the commodity has integrated into the fabric of everyday life (MacCannell, 1999), while on the other hand, from the standpoint of nostalgic reflection, Fairley explains that the liminoid social experiences and the focus of associated memoires do not only depend on the sport itself, but also on the important social (or group) relationships (Fairley, 2003), because memories of group experience are also related and anchored to one’s identity.. Group experience includes intangible heritage practised at the stadium, such as club anthems and particular chants, legitimises specific heritage discourses that are important for the commercial success of the stadium. Through the particular discourse of power generated from those new cultural forms, sport heritage sites are constructed 28.

(37) and developed once again in the context of commodification. Football fans are being put in a tricky position: They choose to consume their favourite sport, but at the same time, they are being consumed as they are part of the commodity, the intangible and highly-mediated one. Garnham calls attention to struggles happening in the society doesn’t restrict between economic power and material distribution, but also intertwines with the desire for recognition from sub-cultures groups and legitimation of their entity in face of a society dominated by the strong cultural hegemony (Garnham, 2005). In terms of tourism, the creative turn has turned tourism into a creative arena for the development of skills and performance (Richards, 2011), but creating bias as guides transform themselves into products and services of greater mediation. The symbolic economy of a site relies on the physical assets and also the series of contrived experiences, which result in a paradox of uniqueness that only concentrates on the upscale consumption. Will creativity be the solution to the mediocre (re)production of culture and experiences?. Creative power in architecture. Architecture can be seen as material ideology which attempts to shape bodily comportments and ways of seeing (Macdonald, 2009) and its power over people tends to be disregarded by us. The performative and place-bound character of tourism unfolds considerably through architecture in two directions: spatial production and social production. However, it is not one-sided relying on the hard infrastructure, but also 29.

(38) depends on the inter-mediator. The inter-mediator is needed to tell the audience what is important about, what has happened, what to look for and what to experience so as to (re)discover and (re)construct a cultural heritage or a social identity (MacCannell, 1999). Performative conventions and normative choreography are carried out both by visitors and guides under the power of the organised space.. The role of tour guide is seen as a performance, which requires the collaboration from the tourists in order to complete the performance. However, the existence of the guide could be a filter that decides what should be seen and remembered in advance. Moreover, according to Bæ renholdt et al., they also address that tourist places are produced by the cooperative efforts of territorially defined relations and by mobile interactions among tourist industry, tourist organisations and tourists across places and boundaries (Bæ renholdt et al., 2004). As today the production of experiences does not necessarily depends on the organiser, tourists pick up the role as the co-maker, a dualrole combined with consumer and producer.. The staging of experience will not be harmonised, if it only depends on either guides or visitors. As tourism is seen as a distinct complex of services, tour guides have become speakers of referential discourse about sight features and motivations for tourists to get more involved with the engagement in expressive and phatic discourse (Fine and Speer, 1985). The making of the experience cannot be accomplished if either of them doesn’t exist, because the texts need to be consumed and deciphered by the people with the right cultural capital with politics involved. 30.

(39) Experience economy as commodified products. Following by the examination of hard infrastructure and human dimension in producing of experiences in last section, I would like to open up some ideas on consumption whether the socialisation has surrendered to the pure commercialisation of culture. This is not a recent phenomenon as Crang points out in the end of twentieth century, in an image-dominated post-modern society, tourism-related employment performances of commodified products are not simply imagined constructions, but also are temporally and spatially constituted constellation of embodied social practices (Crang, 1997). The exterior outlook becomes way too decisive on sorting out the identity crisis, as people always seek for being different from others but at the same time they still want to be identified with like-minded people to gain the sense of belonging through a great deal of conspicuous consumption.. Still we cannot underestimate that the architecture has become part of a system of signs that perpetuates distinctions among different lifestyle attitudes by reflecting and promoting social values (Klingmann, 2007). Consumption shows who you are and what sort of lifestyle you are leading. In connection of football, stadia have been endowed with the prowess to evoke and summon the crowds as the prevalent usage for an articulation of identity, in which we can see that the stadium has become a social tool to connect with the society. In the next section, I will delve into two groups of people: sport tourists and fans, and how they leverage their influence on the making of experience. 31.

(40) III. Sport Tourists and Fans. The last section of this chapter begins with the debate on the transformation of fandom and further connects to the autonomy of sport tourists and fans, which they seem to be endowed with the ability of being the co-producer with both their on-site and off-site presence. Last but not least, the discussion ends on the exploration of struggles between fans and consumption from cultural and social perspectives.. Transformation of fandom. Spectatorship practice has spread out into everyday life. Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) suggest that there are three types of audience, the simple audience, the mass audience and the diffused audience. Living in the information-saturated era, the boundaries to classify the audience begin to dissolve. A football fan is possibly to crosscut all three audience types.. Everyone is all fans of something. Stereotypically, fandom is seen a psychological symptom of a presumed social dysfunction with the obsessed individual and the hysterical crowd (Jenson, 1992). However, this sort of impression of fans might be outdated in the present day.. Fans are, in fact, active producers and consumers, who always decode, encode and appropriate their fan knowledge in the whole meaning-creating and value-enhancing process. Bale also argues that a community of fans is a social network of interacting individuals but it is not necessary for such a community to be concentrated in a defined 32.

(41) territory such as a city (Bale, 2000). Without fans, football will be completely different, because much of football’s appeal as a spectacle comes from the crowd itself. However, a lot of their behaviour has become a sheer mediation, of their garments, singing, cheering, swearing etc. Gradually, these spontaneous and individual gestures have become more and more organised but also have been appropriated in the context of sports consumption. It certainly has set up a stage for amplifying a commonality of emotions in actions, but unfortunately, all the performances are not admission-free.. Transnational social relations have come to be routinised within football. Most football clubs have greater interconnections with other nations, such as through the recruitment of migrant players and the attraction of foreign fans (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007). Intensified dependency between the local and the global changes the demography of football fans drastically. Clubs endeavour to create a carefully constructed series of thematic and branded consumption experiences to boost their revenue. Supporting a club somehow becomes a lifestyle-maker.. Sport tourists and fans on the move. Tourism is considered as a range of performances that tourists bring particular contexts to enact the roles to display, transmit the cultural power and inculcate the ongoing process of (re)construction of self in touristic space (Edensor, 2000). According to Gammon and Robinson, they have classified sport tourists to either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ participants: A hard sport tourist travels for either active or passive involvement in 33.

(42) competitive sport while a soft sport tourist is primarily involved with sport tourism as a leisure pursuit (Gammon and Robinson, 1997). A hard tourist participates in active activities such as parachuting, rowing, running etc while a soft tourist is involved with less active activities such as spectating a sporting event, visiting a stadium etc. Active or not, as we have mentioned earlier, tourists seem to be entitled with autonomy on the making of experience. The essence of creative tourism appears to lie in activities and experiences, as some may suggest, but the crucial part would be the display of selfrealisation and self-expression in which tourists become co-performers and co-creators during their visitation (Richards, 2011). Sport tourists and fans are growing to be the off-site marker, suggesting wherever they are; there is the atmosphere that one is looking for. Also, global football fandom is facilitated principally by media connectivity or indirect socio-symbolic ties, such as when a favoured foreign player joins a specific club and has made the interconnecting ties between football clubs and fans.. The changing structure of society has changed the historic working class football club relationship and has led to an increase in middle class occupations, with some football fans becoming obsessive in consuming, producing and even transforming themselves into texts (Cleland, 2010). The conspicuous consumption is, in reality, a rather complex and critical issue in fans’ behaviour, because fans seem to push themselves to strengthen the appeal of stadia and cast an enticing form of personal and collective meanings to attract the pilgrims and the sport tourists unwittingly.. 34.

(43) To date, the overlapping roles of fans and sport tourists have developed stadia into hospitable venues where spontaneous comings-together spring up, since stadia endeavour to satisfy as many visitors as possible. It shares a great resemblance to the conventional touristic spots, as more and more stadia start attracting visitors in a similar fashion in the context of sport consumption (Gammon and Fear, 2007) in the world full of events and performances for those who are either gazers or gazees (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998). Moreover, Urry and Larsen have also proposed that gaze can take two forms, the romantic and the collective, and this distinction leverages how these tourism-related industries are developed to meet and guide different kinds of gazes (Urry and Larsen, 2011). That is to say, whoever is involved in the stadium experience, the representational and performative role will always be signalled, formed and negotiated through bodily movement and emotion exchange. Individuals under mediation have become diffuse audience performing in their quotidian lives and observing the performances of others at the same time, both in a material and an immaterial way.. Indeed, football stadia have mutated as stages where conspicuous consumption happens such as image-selling and experience-packaging on site and off site. It is one of the reasons why I try to put forward a re-evaluation on football consumption in the context of football heritage tourism.. 35.

(44) Football club and its communities. Historically, football clubs in England have deep roots in their communities based on mutual support, but professionalism of football creates friction between football clubs and communities. Those critical issues derive from the complication of the ownership of football clubs and the commodification of football.. Football clubs and their stadia are connected to their home city intrinsically, because, to some extent, the pride of the city and its surrounding area may rest on the success of its team(s). Home, as Bale terms, is a construction of fan identification that is tied with a particular team and the loss or change of ‘home’ is akin to losing part of oneself (Bale, 2000).. Being exposed to overflowing global mediation, fan communities are far more diverse and community representation has become more and more complicated. According to Taylor, fan communities refer to groups of fans who identify themselves with the football club, although it does not depend on the area where the club is based as much as it used to be (Taylor, 2004). No fandom is territorially confined in the city anymore and fans are no longer expected to live close to a club or to attend matches in order to feel part of the club. What makes a group of like-minded people as a fan community is open to question. On the one hand, the emancipation from boundaries is beneficial for the clubs as they will not feel confined to the territorial boundaries. 36.