Club Foot for football – on the (re)construction of meanings of music and football through a television title sequence

Abstract

This paper explores how music contributes to actualizing meaning potentials in a case of televised football. From the perspective of textual analysis – informed by multimodal discourse analysis and semiotics of music – the paper specifically focusses on the title music and demonstrates how the music contributes to offering impressions of 1) the characteristics of the editorial production of the programme, 2) the type and quality of content of the programme, and 3) for whom the programme and football are particularly relevant. The examination furthermore illustrates how a textual examination of title music should include an exploration of how the title music relates to music from outside the title sequence (transtextuality) as well as how the music relates to non-musical elements throughout the audio-visual sequence (cotextuality). In this respect, the paper presents a text analytical framework applicable to other examples of title music for football and sports programming.