Football emotions

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 1, No. 4  30 April - 14 May 2007 ]

Talking about your footy team can be a most ­revealing moment ­according to University of Melbourne research. University of Melbourne Voice writer Shane Cahill reports.

Against expectations, Carlton had just beaten Essendon, but along with elation, John Cash found himself plunged into what he terms “football melancholia” – the recollecton of all the bitter losses against which the wonderful victories take on their poignant significance. An email on this seemingly inexplicable state of affairs to Joy Damousi – a Collingwood fanatic and so no stranger to football suffering – and Emotions at Play: Beyond the Football Boundary began its pre-season.

Both specialise in exploring emotions – Professor Damousi among war widows and Dr Cash on the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. But when their well-honed interview techniques were applied to football fans they experienced emotion like never before.

“In my case the most immediately emotional and immediately revealing interviews I’ve ever done are with people talking about their football teams,” says Cash.

“It just comes straight out at you whereas if you’re talking about the politics of Northern Ireland there’s a lot more cagey things happening and a lot more reservations about revealing what people think. But where it’s football and their team they tell you so much, not just about their relationship to the team but about themselves. It just spills out over you.”

Damousi concurs. “Somehow, when talking about football there’s a need and an openness. People might say it’s only about sport or whatever, but in fact it’s never just about the team and sport.”

Freudian theory and its application by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who explored the creative uses humans make of objects to which they closely attach themselves, enabled Cash and Damousi to break new ground by delving into the conflicts, psychological and social interactions and other processes that are really going on with football supporters.

Cash explains his own bittersweet reaction to his team’s victory as a process whereby the painful moments are endured and then treasured for future use.

“They’re remembered and entered into at the creation of the sense of pleasure, joy and delight when the team actually does well.”

The interviews have allowed Damousi to challenge the masculine “win at all costs” image of the game to include women who have played an integral role in fashioning the passionate attachment of supporters to their teams and players.

“We want to put the gender question really at the centre and make women very much a part of it and hear their stories out.” The study reveals that football plays a crucial role in the development of many women’s relations with their fathers, while team allegiance is a matter to be negotiated in marriage and the formation of families.

Families are central to the development of Australian Rules in Melbourne. “True allegiance is the reason people have a lot of emotional investment – because they have a history and it is a personal history,” says Damousi.

“It’s really striking when you interview people whose whole family and whole history has been centred on one club. There’s a difference between that family and another where everyone barracks for someone else, or two members barrack for the same and others don’t.

The suburban, tribal Saturday afternoon game that is the formative experience of most of the interviewees has now passed and its replacement is challenging old emotional attachments while creating new forms of bonding with clubs and players.

The most profound impact on ­supporters has been the dislocation caused by club relocation.

“Relocation really does challenge people’s sense of who they are as framed through their identification with the team,” says Cash. “It gets at a kind of depth of significance for them in the way they have over this long individual history made use of a whole array of feelings and affiliations and enmities within family and friendship.”

Damousi argues that people responded in a whole range of different ways. “There were some who went into denial and never followed the game again. Others went to the other extreme and completely embraced the new. And most probably fell in the middle, half heartedly took on the Swans or Brisbane and then maybe were convinced.”

Television too has radically transformed emotional attachments.

“Television has become the new medium through which people can attend and watch football, so they’re no longer in their heads connected with the team by the locality, that’s severed forever,” says Damousi. “Television has replaced it, you’re a national citizen, you can sit in your lounge room and be everywhere at once.”

Cash sees another impact of television as exposing supporters to a much broader view of the game where they see beyond their own club and are inclined to expand their loyalties. “We used to basically know our own players really well and occasionally see the others. I know of some kids in their 20s who follow players as much as they follow teams. If their player moves their affiliation moves to that other team. I can’t imagine that happening in the past.”

Emotions at Play: Beyond the Football Boundary will be published by UNSW Press in 2009.


Professor Joy Damousi is the founding Head of the University of Melbourne’s newly formed School of Historical Studies. Dr John Cash is Deputy Director of the Ashworth Centre in the School of Social and Environmental Enquiry.