Identity, football and Croatian national team members from the diaspora

Abstract

In this paper the author briefly presents his fieldwork results, with an emphasis on studying the relationship between football and the construction of children’s, grandson’s and great-grandson’s national identities in first-generation Croatian migrants. Specifically, the research focuses on Croatian national football team members from the diaspora who rather choose to play for their “imagined homeland” than the national team of their country of birth. If we agree that one of sport’s functions is, among other things, to act as a mechanism of national solidarity - promoting the sense of identity and unity - football proves to be an ideal field for studying the symbolic dimensions of ethnicity, discursive shaping of identity and practices trough which athletic (and) national loyalty is manifested. Through the coding of interview transcripts, organizing data into categories and analyzing conducted interviews, the author examines the dynamic relationship between expressing national identity and personal choices of the individual as to which national team he should join.