ABSTRACT
Introduction Writing in 2002, Joyce Woolridge suggested that while the phenomenon had been recognised for its ‘social and cultural functions’, the football star continued ‘to be an elusive subject for sustained critical analysis’ (2002: 51). The crux of Woolridge’s argument appears to be that the literature is punctuated within numerous case studies of football stars, yet lacks an ‘overarching framework within which the football star can be better understood’ (2002: 51). While we concur with Woolridge’s identi cation of the football star as a core aspect of contemporary football culture and intellectual analysis, our pathways diverge when it comes to what we consider to be the existence of established theoretical bases for the interpretation of the myriad dimensions of the football star phenomenon. Indeed, Woolridge’s solution to the theoretical absences she identi ed – we would argue all too conveniently – encompassed a blend of approaches drawn from cultural studies, media studies, and lm studies, that are themselves evident in the contextual and interpretative approaches of those whose work she either repudiated or was perhaps not fully aware of at the time (speci cally Chas Critcher (1982, 1991), Garry Whannel (1999, 2001a), and Richard Giulianotti (1999)). Hence, within this chapter our aim is to foreground key elements uniting these approaches; the extension of which allows us to subsequently develop an understanding of the football star as a necessarily contextual and intertextual phenomenon.
