ABSTRACT
The 2010 Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup, held in South Africa, was a mega sport tourism event. In the nation that claims to be the ‘home of football’, following the progress of the English team and their supporters during the World Cup garners exhaustive newspaper coverage and helps shape the national consciousness about English national identity. Accordingly, this study examined how English national identity was (re)constructed through newspaper narratives about the English national football team and their ‘army’ of supporters, many of whom traveled to South Africa as sport tourists, during the 2010 World Cup. Articles in England’s best selling popular newspaper The Sun were examined and interpreted drawing on Guibernau’s [(2007) The Identity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity)] strategies for the construction of national identity, Anderson’s [(1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso)] theory of the imagined community, and Hobsbawm’s [(1983) Introduction: Inventing traditions’ and mass producing traditions: Europe 1870–1914, in: E. J. Hobsbawm ampentity T. O. Ranger (Eds.) The Invention of Tradition, pp. 1–14 and 263–307 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)] theory of invented traditions. The Sun’s narratives about the English team’s and supporters’ performance of English identity drew on selectively favorable aspects of English history. The English team’s failure to live up to the nation’s ‘finest hour’, and justify the patriotic following of their supporters in South Africa and ‘back home’ was met with scathing, vitriolic criticism.
