Having explored my fieldsites through the lens of deviant leisure, attention can now be turned to my participants’ motivation to consume IPEDs. This exploration is divided into four interconnected chapters, spanning several levels; from a psychoanalytic account of lack and bodily dissatisfaction, through to a broader recognition of the meso and macro cultural contexts that shape my participants’ world.

The first of these aims to address the current lacuna of deep theoretical engagement with the motivation to consume IPEDs and build the body that exists within the academy (van de Ven et al, 2020). This therefore answers Kotzé et al’s (2020) call for psychoanalytic engagement with the concept of lack within spaces of hardcore bodywork, alongside an acknowledgement of the politico-economic backdrop to IPED use and gym culture in the Global North. The central questions that this collection of chapters sets out to answer are why the sample of men to whom I spoke risked long-term health issues and myriad aches, pains, and strains, to build their physiques, and what compelled them to haul their engorged bodies to the gym when most of us would prioritize rest, ease, and comfort. In pursuit of an answer, this initial consumption chapter draws on psychoanalytic theory to interrogate the role of deficit and desire in driving compulsive bodywork and explaining the allure of IPEDs.

Lack, desire and the objet petit a

As set out in the previous chapter, the starting point of the ultra-realist conception of personhood is Lacan’s contention that the subject is governed by a sense of lack and deficit (Žižek, 2000; Hall and Winlow, 2015; Ayres, 2022). Lacan contends that all human behaviour can be understood to be motivated by an attempt to overcome this innate lack and reach a state of satisfaction that never, and can never, truly exist (Gammon and Palan, 2006; Flisfeder, 2014; Raymen and Smith, 2017). This imagined sense of satiation is understood by Lacan as the objet petit a, or the lost object, and describes an intangible thing that ‘orients the subject’s desire even though the subject has never had it’ (McGowan, 2016: 26).

Introduction

English association football (soccer) has typically been a hostile environment for sexual minorities (Dunning, 1986). Through its historical association with physical strength, skill and power, professional football has promoted an orthodox form of masculinity, excluding and marginalizing any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality. Even in relation to the contemporary game, there are claims among some sections of media that a highly homophobic environment remains (see, for example, Jones, 2014; Myers, 2020); this is supported by the fact that Kick It Out – English football’s most influential equality, diversity and inclusion organization – have documented an overall (though not entirely consistent across all seasons) increase in reports of hate crime related to homophobia, biphobia and transphobia (HBT) at professional games – and indeed all types of discrimination across the different levels of the game and online – since they began collecting this data, during the 2012/13 season. It is tempting to interpret these statistics as evidence of increased hate crime, and discrimination based on HBT specifically, in the men’s game.

Countering these perceptions, however, there is a significant, and growing, body of evidence that suggests this may no longer be true. Indeed, research on football fans (for example, Cashmore and Cleland, 2012; Cleland et al, 2018, 2021; Magrath, 2018, 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Pearson, 2012; Cleland and Cashmore, 2016), elite footballers (for example, Magrath et al, 2015; Magrath, 2017a, 2022) and sports media (for example, Cleland, 2014, 2018; Billings and Moscowitz, 2018; Gaston et al, 2018) has shown increased levels of acceptance. Moreover, in recent years, there is a growing number – albeit still small – of ‘out’ gay male professional players across the world; these include Josh Cavallo (at Adelaide United, Australia, when he came out), Zander Murray (at Gala Fairydean Rovers, Scotland) and Jake Daniels (at Blackpool, England).

Against this somewhat paradoxical backdrop, this chapter explores the contemporary relationship between men’s football and homosexuality. To do so, we first explore the historical context of the professional game’s emergence (in the mid-19th century), including its cultural significance. Then we document how improved attitudes towards homosexuality in the United Kingdom (UK) have parallels in football. We then interrogate, in more detail, the statistics for hate crime reported to Kick It Out before concluding with some important considerations regarding their significance.

Introduction

For me, 1986 was an important year. In that summer, the final of the English FA Cup (the Football Association Challenge Cup) was won by Liverpool, as the ‘Red’ half of the city triumphed against the ‘Blues’ (Everton) and led to the cup double (Liverpool also won the English Football League that year). Some readers might also remember that year for the infamous divinely inspired ‘hand of God’ goal that sent the English national team home from the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup at quarterfinal stage; their opponents, Argentina, went on to take victory in the tournament. During this era, post the Falklands War of 1982 and the Heysel Stadium disaster in Brussels in 1985, there was a renewed tribal, national and international dimension in football. A five-year banning order was in place for English clubs, preventing them from playing in European competitions, and rampant hooliganism had become part and parcel of football, and part of my early experiences of being an England-born boy of Pakistani heritage who had his own divided loyalties and issues around identity.

After the summer holidays of 1986, I had returned to the hallowed turf of Breckon Hill Primary School playing fields in Middlesbrough, where I recalled hearing the names of famous footballers like Diego Maradona and Jorge Burruchaga. They may have sounded strange and alien to us at the time, but they helped me as a youngster to identify with football and become the person I am today. I wanted to be like them and play the beautiful game.

I was only eight at the time, and my knowledge of football, racism, religion and other historical events was minimal. Unlike many of my friends’ experiences, my father had never taken me to watch ‘the Boro’ (Middlesborough) at their home ground, Ayresome Park, so I had no allegiances in the context of patriotism, loyalty and identity. My father was from a generation of Pakistanis that had been in the United Kingdom (UK) since the 1960s, and at that time, he and his friends and cousins were too busy working long shifts as taxi drivers, at British Steel, at ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) or at the docks to make any time for or care about a team or a sport they really didn’t know anything about.

Introduction

Transgender communities have gained increasing media, political and social attention and visibility internationally in recent years due to a range of political and social factors. In England and Wales, one of the most significant contemporary factors was the government public consultation launched in respect of reforming the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which generated substantial online discussions. In those discussions, transgender people are regularly interrogated and delegitimized (Colliver et al, 2019; Colliver and Coyle, 2020). While there is a growing body of literature that explores violence against trans people (Jamel, 2018; Colliver, 2021), less attention has been given to discrimination against trans people experienced within sport. Sport is an important area for discussion, as professional sports are predominantly sex segregated. This is maintained through the perpetuation of two primary assumptions: first, human sex is dichotomous – humans can be discretely categorized as either male or female; and, second, one of these sexes has biological advantages over the other and this affects performance in sport (Heggie, 2014).

Sport became a central feature of discussion around the proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act (2004), and conversation centred on issues such as perceived unfairness and issues of safety and risk. It is important to note that while trans inclusion within football is the focus in this chapter, public dialogue has primarily been concerned with trans women’s participation in sport more broadly. This dialogue has focused on two central ideas. The first is that trans women hold an immutable biological advantage over cisgender women that creates an unfair playing field. Resultantly, it is only when trans women’s participation is average, or unremarkable, that they are accepted into participation (Semerjian, 2019). Second, concerns have been raised that cisgender men may falsely claim to be trans in order to compete with cisgender women and girls (Carroll, 2014). These concerns are problematic for a number of reasons and result in policy development that leads to the exclusion of trans people as well as cisgender people who may fall outside of social expectations of the ‘sexed’ body.

Introduction

The Football League was founded on 17 April 1888, and fans have been attending professional football in England and Wales in their thousands ever since. Football is a game that ignites passion and loyalty that borders on tribalism, and language and behaviour on the terraces has always walked the line between robust and raucous on the one hand and criminal on the other. Nowhere is this more problematic than in the area of chanting and shouting by fans towards other fans, officials and players.

What is now referred to as ‘hate crime’ is not a new issue in the 21st century. Grayson (1999) cites the example of a Swansea fan being jailed for calling a visiting player a ‘black n****r’. It is no coincidence that some of the key officials in the Professional Footballers Association are Black former players who were subjected to vile abuse during their careers in the late 20th century. Beloff observes that football is the only professional sport where engaging in chanting of a racialist nature has been made a specific criminal offence and the only sport to have a ‘special crime’ to eliminate racism. His comment that ‘[a] buse from the terraces still deforms the national game even at a time when half the national team is black’ (Beloff, 2004: 63) is both accurate and still relevant, and a sad indictment on a minority of those attending football matches. In the words of Simon Barnes: ‘You can go to a football match and accuse Arsene Wenger of being a paedophile. You can call Sol Campbell a homosexual, you can sing about your delight in the Munich air crash or the Hillsborough disaster, and that’s all tickety-boo’ (quoted in Beloff, 2012: 1). Unfortunately, some football fans believe it to be their right to be racist, homophobic, sexist, antisemitic or Islamophobic even if some would acknowledge that such behaviour outside a football stadium would carry the risk of criminal prosecution. The development of social media has led to ‘keyboard warriors’ sending hate-filled messages to those involved in football. Fortunately, as will be seen, Parliament has acted to legislate against this.

Introduction

The online racist abuse of Black England players Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho after they missed penalties in the decisive shoot-out at the end of the 2020 UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championship (Euro 2020) final against Italy (held in July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) brought the issue of hate crime in football to the fore. Described as ‘unforgiveable’ and ‘just not what we stand for’ by England manager Gareth Southgate (quoted in Morse, 2021), this was part of a surge of abusive online behaviour directed at England players at the time, which prompted the setting up of a specialist hate crime investigation team as part of the United Kingdom Football Policing Unit (Jackson, 2021). Overall, as it is within society more broadly, the most prominent type of hate crime in football is racist, with these incidents making up 74 per cent of hate crimes recorded by police at football matches during 2021/22 (283 out of a total of 384; Home Office, 2022a). Hate incidents relating to sexual orientation (106) made up 28 per cent of the total recorded for that season (Home Office, 2022a). While antiracism in football has been the focus of active campaigns for many years, and other contributions to this book detail some of the progress that has been made in turning once-normalized racist attitudes into stigmatized minority ones, it is only recently that serious attempts have been made to eradicate homophobia from football and to make football a more inclusive environment for LGBT+ fans. This chapter focuses on those LGBT+ campaigns and aims to identify what progress has been made in tackling homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in men’s professional football in England.

In the last decade, LGBT+ campaigns have developed a momentum of their own. Early antidiscrimination campaigns focused on race and, to a lesser extent, gender and disability. The reasons why football institutions failed to embrace LGBT+ rights have been analysed by Brackenridge et al (2007), who concluded that a lack of financial incentive (that is, ticket sales) meant that this group were not acknowledged by sports professionals, who tended to prioritize a fan base they believed could be monetized more easily.

Hate crime often takes place in the context of sporting events, particularly football matches. Hate crimes are crimes motivated by hostility, prejudice and hate towards the victims’ identities. Definitions of ‘hate crime’ vary from one country to the next and even within countries. In England and Wales, the central point of reference is the operational definition offered by the College of Policing (2014), which earmarks hate crime as offences that are motivated by hostility or prejudice on particular grounds, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender status and disability. From this perspective, hate crime can be understood as any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated wholly or partly by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s protected characteristics. McDevitt et al (2001) observe that ‘hate’ is absent from the vast majority of hate crime. Rather, hate crime may be driven by bias, prejudice or ‘negative feelings held by the offender towards a social group that, in their eyes, have an “outsider status” ‘ (Garland and Chakraborti, 2012: 40). An ‘in-group’ is any group a person belongs to or identifies with; in contrast, an ‘out-group’ is any group a person does not belong to or identify with. A key element of hate crime is that offenders target potential victims because of their membership of despised out-groups. According to Gerstenfeld (2013), it is the fact that the victim is targeted because of their actual or perceived membership of a social grouping – rather than the presence of any bias or hatred – that is the most significant factor when defining hate crime; that is, it is the attack on the person’s identity that sets hate crime apart from other crimes.

Football-related hate crime occurs not only within stadia but, increasingly, also online. During the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championship final between Italy and England in July 2021, three Black English football players missed penalties, leading to a spiral of online hate comments on social media sites; the three Black players were called ‘n*****s’, ‘m**key’ and other racist derogatory terms.

Introduction

A number of controversies in the past decade or so have highlighted the ways in which questions about race and national identity remain an important facet of contemporary football cultures, both in the context of club football and in relation to the England national team. Whether it is to do with individual players, such as John Terry, or more generally football as a whole, we have seen ongoing debates about how best to tackle the question of racism in football at national and local levels (Football Association, 2012a; House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee, 2012a, 2012b). Perhaps because during the 1990s and 2000s there were numerous initiatives to tackle popular expressions of racism in football, alongside evidence of greater representation of Black and ethnic minority players in professional football, there was an expectation that questions about race and racism would gradually diminish in importance. But at key points over the past decade, evidence emerged that meant we could not assume that questions about racism in football would gradually diminish in importance. This is evident in the growing bodies of scholarship that addressed the changing expressions of racism in football, including research focused on fan cultures and research on institutions (Cleland and Cashmore, 2013; Cashmore and Cleland, 2014; Burdsey, 2021; Kassimeris et al, 2022).

A recent event that highlighted the continuing role of racism in football took place in the aftermath of the defeat of England by Italy in the final of the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championship in 2020 (Euro 2020), which led to a wide-ranging public discussion about the use of racist tropes against Black players such as Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, who were blamed by some supporters for the defeat (Back and Mills, 2021).

Introduction

According to Carrington, ‘sport provides a contested arena through which competing definitions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region are articulated’ (2008: 424). In the context of race more specifically, when people speak of racism, they often allude to two distinct social practices – namely antilocution and physical attack (see Allport, 1954). Language is rightly an important social practice (Bourdieu, 1991), which in turns shapes other social practices to do with the expression of racism.

A high-profile example of when this issue reared its ugly head took place in 2004 when former manager Ron Atkinson – who perhaps most famously guided Manchester United to win the FA Cup (the Football Association Challenge Cup) in 1983 – then an ITV football pundit, resigned after making overtly racist comments about Chelsea football player Marcel Desailly. ‘Big Ron’, as he was affectionately known in the football industry, unwittingly believed his broadcast had finished and his microphone had been muted. In making reference to what he perceived to be the poor performance of the French defender, who had been playing in a Champions League match for Chelsea against Monaco, Atkinson said, ‘He’s what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick n****r’ (quoted in Prior, 2004). Atkinson’s conversation was picked up by microphones which ordinarily would have been switched off once the broadcast from the stadium had ended. The remarks were inadvertently broadcast to an international audience. Big Ron was ‘outed’ as a ‘closet racist’, with some expressing disbelief that a manager renowned for having given fledgling Black players a so-called ‘chance’ when others were unwilling to do so way back in the 1970s could express such sentiments.

Those who sought to defend Atkinson the man while at the same time censuring his comments pointed out that at best there seemed to be a level of dissonance between his verbalizations and his social practices, which appeared at face value to be antiracist. In an attempt to defend himself, Atkinson pleaded: ‘I have had Cyrille [Regis] and big Paul Williams both on the phone. I was one of the first, if not the first, to play black players’ (Kelso, 2004, square brackets in original).

Introduction

Racism, racialization and antiracism within football have been extensively studied (for example, Back et al, 2001; Garland and Rowe, 2001, 2014; Burdsey, 2006, 2011, 2014, 2020; Cleland, 2014; Cleland and Cashmore, 2014, 2016; Bradbury et al, 2018; Hylton, 2018; Lawrence and Davis, 2019; Penfold and Cleland, 2022). The focus of that research has tended to be on footballers, coaches and supporters of colour. Antisemitism in football has received comparatively less scholarly attention, with some emerging exceptions (Poulton, 2016, 2020, forthcoming; Poulton and Durell, 2016; Brunssen and Schüler-Springorum, 2021; Seijbel, Sterkenburg and Oonk, 2022; Seijbel, van Sterkenburg and Spaaij, 2022). Among the reasons for this scholarly neglect might be the relatively low number of Jewish professional footballers – in England, about a dozen have played in the Premier League since its creation in 1992 – but also debates pertaining to a hierarchy of racisms and whether antisemitic hate crime should be treated as a distinct form of racism (Kushner, 2013; Feldman, 2016; Hirsh, 2018; Rich, 2018; Gidley et al, 2020; Gould, 2020; Baddiel, 2021a).

Yet antisemitism, as this chapter evidences, is common throughout football, with some high-profile examples in England (Poulton, 2020) – and elsewhere (Brunssen and Schüler-Springorum, 2021; Poulton, forthcoming) – both on and off the pitch in recent years. This has included several antisemitic incidents at the top institutional and occupational levels of English men’s professional football – involving officials, club owners, coaches and players (see Poulton, 2016) – and most frequently within football fan culture, which is the main focus of this chapter. There are also regular incidents in grassroots football, with reports of seven-year-old Jewish footballers being hissed at by opponents aiming to replicate the noise of the Nazi gas chambers (Jewish News Reporter, 2022).

This chapter provides an overview of antisemitism within the context of English football. It first discusses problems related to contested definitions of the phenomenon and then covers the scale of ‘religious’ hate crime in England and Wales. Next, the nature of antisemitism in England is outlined before examining its prevalence and presence within English football fan culture. Finally, the chapter turns its focus to a Premier League club, Tottenham Hotspur (nicknamed Spurs), whose supporters are the target of the majority of antisemitism within English football. This includes a discussion of the different uses and meanings of the controversial term ‘Yid’.