‘The Public Gets what the Public Wants’

Abstract

For at least two decades prior to the 2002 World Cup Finals there had been a widespread tendency for England fans to be castigated by the full spectrum of media vehicles as the embodiment of an unrepentant nationalistic ‘Englishness’. These supporters have systematically been negatively associated with aggressive masculinity, drunkenness, open displays of nationalism, xenophobia and racism. Rather than assessing the extent to which these representations distort ‘the truth’ about ‘England fans’, drawing on popular cultural theory this article is concerned with the ways in which ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1980), deployed in contingent and situation-specific ways, have been constituted through an interplay between media reporting and wider cultural practice. The article utilizes media content analysis, interview material and participant observations collected before, during and after England’s games against Germany in Charleroi on 17 June 2000, in Munich on 1 September 2001 and during the finals of the 2002 World Cup staged in Japan and Korea. This material is underpinned by the researcher’s ongoing ethnographies among supporters of the England national team.