Games of Belonging: Football, Boundaries and Politics between Germany and Turkey

Stefan Metzger,Özgür Özvatan

doi:10.1017/nps.2019.4

Abstract

AbstractInternational football is a field for national identity performances in which narratives of national belonging are articulated. Games of belonging capture discourses on and debates over national belonging. Up-and-coming national football team diversity, and its public promotion, was expected to facilitate boundary blurring in the politics of belonging; however, it caused highly contentious debates revolving around the question of who belongs to Germany and Turkey and who does not. For this reason, we ask how (ethnoculturally) diverse national football teams challenge established narratives of national belonging and, thereby, trigger debates over national belonging across time and space. We compared the media discourse on national team diversity in Germany and Turkey with a special focus on players who disrupt conceptions of ethnic and cultural homogeneity, namely Mesut Özil and Nuri Şahin. Our study illustrates that upcoming international football events constitute games of belonging. Actors from the media, football associations, and politics largely demanded unilateral national belonging from the disrupters, Özil and Şahin. Both players’ reactions, however, draw on conceptions of (trans-)national belonging which challenge and conflict with established narratives of (ethno-)national belonging.

Highlights

International football generates a strong emotional response in terms of national belonging among spectators in stadiums, at home, or at public screening events
We argue that international football is an arena for national identity performances, and articulates, and to some extent challenges, narratives of national belonging
Empirical Results Tracing Newspaper Discourse The newspaper discourse on Özil and Şahin in the last decade is mostly linked to the players’ choices to play for either the German or the Turkish national football teams. Once they had opted for one team or the other, debates re-emerged during periods of international football events involving the national teams

Summary

Introduction

International football generates a strong emotional response in terms of national belonging among spectators in stadiums, at home, or at public screening events. In order to determine our research focus, we compare debates over (ethnically) diverse national teams from Germany and Turkey with a special focus on football players who disrupt ethnically homogeneous conceptions of national belonging, in our case Mesut Özil and Nuri Şahin. 738 Stefan Metzger and Özgür Özvatan decade 2005–2015 in Germany and Turkey in order to explore (dis-)continuities in both nations’ debates about belonging in international football In those debates, we aim to cover the perspectives of mainstream media, public actors, national-team officials, and the aforementioned protagonists, Özil and Şahin, to the matter at hand, both cross-temporally and cross-nationally. We argue that symbols of national-team diversification (“the protagonists”) provoke conflicts over narratives of national belonging and, cause reflection on wider immigration-policy approaches

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion