ABSTRACT
The most popular sport in the world, football occupies a politically loaded place within the South African cultural psyche. Football was a marker of the ethnic, historical, and ideological distinctions within the white South African community. Afrikaners read football's preeminence amongst the oppressed as the most culturally explicit evidence of black, coloured, and Indian "anglicization." Football represented disenfranchised South Africa's cultural "theatre of dreams," to borrow the endearing nickname Manchester United Football Club (F.C.) fans have given their team's Old Trafford stadium. English-speaking South Africans who supported metropolitan football clubs without the intention of replicating them, working-class coloureds engaged in a deeper cultural imitation. English football's greatest cultural impact registers itself in a complex fashion: a negotiation between the ability of the metropolis to make its own names resonate on the Cape Flats and the capacity of township residents to appropriate those names for their own use.
