ABSTRACT
Men’s football is one the most popular sports in the world in numbers of participants and spectators. It plays a big role in the everyday life of many people and this applies especially to football on TV, which attracts massive audiences in many countries worldwide. The FIFA men’s football World Cup 2010 in South Africa, for instance, established an impressive number with a combined media audience of 26 billion viewers worldwide. And although televised football at first glance functions as ‘only’ a sheer form of entertainment, the influence of the game reaches much further than that. Televised football can also be considered a prominent space for ideas about nationality, race, ethnicity and gender to circulate. The great diversity of racial/ethnic groups that is visible on the football field combined with the extensive reach of televised football, makes men’s football a powerful site for articulating and forwarding ideas about racial/ethnic diversity in contemporary multiethnic societies. As such, the cultural practice of televised football can be seen as a catalyst in the (re)construction of meanings given to race and ethnicity.
