New York is Blue and White: Social Identity and Ritual at NYCFC

Abstract

This thesis examines the construction of a singing culture at New York City Football Club (NYCFC) over the course of its inaugural season in Major League Soccer (MLS). An atmosphere of New York soccer fandom is sung into effect and serves as the platform for group creation. In order to capture the fluid reality of 21 Century group formation, this thesis rejects the label community, preferring to understand NYCFC fandom as an emerging social identity. Such an approach enables us to recognize the many layers of identification as part of peoples’ self-concepts. This thesis argues that NYCFC fandom, and perhaps social identities more broadly, are realized through ritual interaction in the form of normative group behavior. In this case, song is the meeting point of the converging worlds of soccer fandom and New York City, negotiating a shared musical culture that gives meaning to a new social identity. 4 Introduction For millions of people across the world, singing at soccer matches is the pinnacle of musical participation. Yet these songs have attracted little attention from music scholars as non-specialist singers are far down the list of priorities of traditional academic inquiry (cf. Kyto 2011 and Jack 2012). But given the frequent themes of place and belonging, their grassroots transmission and their being a rare occurrence of 21 Century people singing together in large numbers, there is plenty of scope for inquiry. This thesis explores the formation of singing culture at the newly established New York City Football Club (hereafter NYCFC). Its four chapters address the question of group formation from separate, yet importantly connected perspectives. Firstly, I discuss the idea of “place” as a foundation for building the group. Prior to the creation of NYCFC, none of the major sports teams representing New York City featured the word ‘city’ in its title despite New Yorkers casually referring to their hometown as ‘the city.’ This inclusion emphasizes the significance of the New York City concept for the cultural life of NYCFC and fans position this at the core of the singing repertoire. Yet, as Lefebvre reminds us, place extends beyond territory to the built environment and atmosphere (Lefebvre 1974/1991). At this point questions of “whose place?” and “what kind of place?” arise and soccer song is a key constructor of this. What appears is a New York soccer fan place that is a platform for belonging; it articulates both passion for the locale and global soccer fandom. This leads us to the second chapter, which considers the context of NYCFC fandom amidst the diminished group and cultural boundaries of late modernity. These exemplify the reality of the social group in the 21 century, which Bauman refers to as ‘liquid modernity’ (2001). For Bauman, the lack of stability in our networks and the 1 New York Mets, New York Yankees, New York Knicks, New York Giants, New York Jets, New York Islanders, New York Rangers, New York Lizards, New York Red Bulls, New York Cosmos. 5 constantly changing natures of our roles and groups challenge individuals to create a sense of belonging in the absence of guarantees. He characterises this as an impossible quest for community (ibid: 8). Supporters at NYCFC are aware that there are no guarantees of a long-lasting and meaningful fan-identity at this club, and require mechanisms to ensure its successful creation. Here, this lack of certainty drives people to create groups that we can strongly identify with, employing many of the territorial and enduring notions of the community concept and these are manifest in the singing culture. But these values of strong identification, solidarity, longevity of association, face-to-face interaction and place-belonging are ideals more than a description of daily social and economic reality. That is why I suggest that in this late modern context we move beyond community as a category of people towards a more dynamic system of understanding groups. This leads to the third chapter, which proposes the Social Identity Approach as a platform for analyzing groups in fluid times. This approach is centered on the intersection of multiple categorizations of the individual, known as social identities. Here, new social groups constantly emerge wherever people recognize some shared categorization as meaningful, and 21 Century life provides ample opportunity for these. Once such social identities exist, they can perpetuate certain behaviors for their members. NYCFC supporters are acutely aware of this, aware that norms emerge and that there is the opportunity to create an important fan culture for their club. Singing is the normative behavior par excellence in soccer culture, and NYCFC is no exception. As a new group, NYCFC fans do not have prescribed modes of behavior and so if displays of fandom are to be coordinated, supporters must create their own repertoire of songs. Within the Social Identity Approach, Self Categorization Theory discusses the mechanisms by which norms such as songs are generated and come to be 6 standardized. These give the group distinction, become accentuated as they gain subjective value for members and they enable individuals to recognize those who share a category through common participation. But participation does not only signal group membership, it also perpetuates social cohesion within (and identification with) the group. This is the purpose of the final chapter, in which I offer a Durkheimian interpretation of the singing culture, suggesting that bodies synchronised in song while observing the game is a fundamental building block of the social group. These key elements of repetition, synchrony, shared focus of attention and the presence of group symbols are precisely those that the Durkheimian tradition highlights as instrumental for euphoric ritual, which in turn produces the group by realizing the bonds that connect participants. In this light, we see ritual singing at NYCFC as both the target of fandom and an agent in the creation of the group; participants share the powerful experience of performance as well as the awareness of its being shared. Bridging social identity with ritual provides a new model in which we can understand normative group behavior as ritual. Here we can see that acting in accord with group values is an embodied mechanism that enables a group to flourish even with the many overlaps of 21 Century identification. Singing at NYCFC creates and displays unity of fans as the worlds of soccer and New York City meet. Song is active as a creator because it affords fans the opportunity to perform together, giving experiential meaning to the category of NYCFC supporter. This arises through negotiating expectations of thousands of actors with varied ideas about what kind of singing culture to be. An important subplot in this story is also disunity, where sufficiently differing conceptions about how to 7 experience New York City soccer fandom can give rise to conflicting singing cultures. Background Writing on soccer has found a niche in sociology, but has been remarkably absent from inquiry in musical and anthropological circles. Vidacs believes that sport is often overlooked in academic circles because it is seen as ‘trivial’ or as ‘just a game’ (2006: 336). But this clashes with the views of people who commit their social and professional lives to all kinds of sport. Further, it overlooks an important site in the performance of social roles. For example, as Markovits and Albertson state: ‘in many cases, for men in advanced industrial economies, being a sports fan is doing gender’ (2012: 124). There is an existing literature on soccer songs that this thesis consults throughout. In keeping with my focus on group formation, much of this literature emphasizes soccer song’s fundamentally social nature. For Armstrong and Young, there is ‘no other modern-day equivalent’ as ‘a public collective expression of social and cultural identity’ (1999: 180). Other writers have emphasized that this performance is not just the expression of an identity but part of a more complicated system of fostering belonging. Being-in-the-group as fundamental to analysis of football song is not just evident in performance, but also content. As Collinson says of his ethnography into songs at Sydney FC: ‘a simple taxonomy (...) would comprise only three types of song: those that include, those that exclude and those that do both’ (2009: 20). Soccer in the USA is growing in popularity but still falls behind American football, baseball and basketball (and depending on the region: ice hockey) in the popular imagination. Markovits and Hellerman trace this back to industrialization, 8 when leisure and work became meaningfully separated, creating the need for ‘organized and regularized recreation for the masses’ (2001: 13). Hence, they argue that in the US the sports popularized between 1870 and 1930 became culturally engrained, an explanation for soccer’s lingering alien status (ibid: 14). Collins extends this to larger shifts in social structure that has broadly accompanied modernity, arguing that sporting occasions were ‘designed to provide moments of ritual solidarity that previously would have been provided by religion, warfare, or political ceremony' (Collins 2004: 59).