U.S. Ambivalence Toward the World Cup and American Nationalism

Given the preeminent role that mass media plays in both the formation of national communities and dissemination of international sporting events, it is not surprising that this well- developed body of literature on sport and national identity has often taken texts created by the media as a primary source of data.

Reaction: Mass media is very important to nationalism because everyone watches television or reads the newspaper so it is easy to build nationalism.

National Identity and Sport

Sports helps you to express yourself in a public place which makes you feel like your part a larger community when you see others who are routing for the same team. Media helps by to enhance this feeling by the language that they use along with the visual.

Question: How can sports provide a particular potent site for national groups to articulate the way they prefer to represent themselves and to be seen by relevant others?

National Sporting Styles

Nationality is often invoked through the allocation of sporting style. This comes with the playing style, tactics and skills that differentiate teams.

What binds the representation of teams and fans together is the tendency to present style as a characteristic of that nation more generally. In this sense, collective performance and shared understandings of sport become framed as indicative, or “indexical” (Blain & O’Donnell, 1998, p. 369), of broader behavioral and mental patterns thought to be rooted in national identity.

American Exceptionalism

the reason for soccer not being popular in the united states can be because of the other sports that crowded it out. Another is that soccer does not hold the same cultural significance as it does in many other parts of the world.

TIFO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iLL57puZPM