ABSTRACT 
 
 
 

 
Title of Dissertation: After Bend It Like Beckham: Soccer in 21st-Century 

Theatre and Performance 
  
 Jared Strange, Doctor of Philosophy, 2023 
  
Dissertation directed by: Professor James Harding, School of Theatre, 

Dance, and Performance Studies 
 
 
After Bend It Like Beckham: Soccer in 21st-Century Theatre and Performance examines how the 

performativity of the world’s most popular sport is “played” by various actors for the purposes of 

social, cultural, and political transformation. In addition to being a type of performance, sports 

can be considered performative in that they can enact a consequential transformation, such that a 

win on the field becomes a win in life. Assumptions surrounding the transformative capacities of 

soccer, unabashedly described by fans and stakeholders as “The Beautiful Game,” are especially 

potent, particularly when invested with material powers that forms the sports-industrial complex. 

By examining case studies ranging from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play The Wolves to 

exhibition matches staged by authoritarian leaders, this dissertation demonstrates how soccer’s 

performativity can be reconfigured advantageously in conditions extracted from actual 

gameplay. Dramas that spotlight sportswomen using soccer to forge greater individual and 

collective selves show how athletes can play against the barriers that inhibit their access to the 

sport, and how nuanced representations of the plight of sportswomen can play against uncritical 

deployments of representation that only validate success. National and sporting governments, on 



  

the other hand, can leverage the sport to reify nationalistic myths and induce participants to 

reconfigure social memory through acts of play that elide historical accuracy and obscure the 

material powers invested in the game. This dissertation arrives at an ideal time to engage debates 

over the “true” nature of performativity, accounting for the efficacy of gestures amidst 

accusations of “performative activism” and redirecting attention to the conditions that make 

transformation possible but are more likely to sanction superficial changes that do not threaten 

the status quo. Soccer’s performative capacity can thus be understood as both a source of 

empowerment for players inhibited by racial, gendered, and nationalistic exclusion and a concept 

that is easily manipulated by powerbrokers whose embeddedness within the sports-industrial 

complex is protected by the very systems that perpetuate extraction and exclusion. 

 
 
 
 
 
  



  

AFTER BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM: SOCCER IN 21st-CENTURY THEATRE AND 
PERFORMANCE 

 
 
 

by 
 
 

Jared Strange 
 
 
 
 

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 

of the requirements for the degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy 

2023 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
Professor James Harding, Chair 
Professor David Andrews 
Associate Professor Melissa Blanco Borelli 
Assistant Professor Crystal Davis 
Dr. Caitlin Marshall 
Professor Orrin Wang 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

© Copyright by 
Jared Robert Strange 

2023 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

 

ii 
 

Acknowledgements 

The first thanks must go to the many faculty members at the University of Maryland 

who have guided this research, starting with my adviser, James Harding, whose support and 

encouragement has been a constant from day one. Thank you to my committee—David 

Andrews, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Crystal Davis, Caitlin Marshall, and Orrin Wang—who 

have all made pivotal contributions to my education. Credit also to Faedra Chatard 

Carpenter, Dan Conway, Laurie Frederik, Franklin Hildy, and Maura Keefe for their 

guidance and leadership. A special thank you to Crystal Gaston and the rest of Theatre, 

Dance, and Performance Studies staff for their inexhaustible patience. 

This research was supported by a grant from the International Program for Creative 

Collaboration and Research (IPCCR) and the Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Completion 

Fellowship. With the IPCCR grant, I was able to travel to the United Kingdom to conduct 

research for Chapter 2. My thanks to the leadership and staff of the International Centre for 

Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University and the British Society for Sports 

History, and the archival staffs of the National Football Museum, Shakespeare Birthplace 

Trust, National Army Museum, Imperial War Museum, and the British Library for their 

invaluable assistance. IPCCR also twice granted me funding to visit Buenos Aires and study 

Cirque du Soleil’s Messi10; unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic and other scheduling 

challenges have made taking that support impossible. 

My research into soccer performance began with “The World Cup’s Double-Headed 

Eagle: Gestures and Scenarios in the Football Arena,” which was published in Theatre 

Research International. Several further publications have been incorporated into this 



 

 

iii 
 

dissertation: “Playing On, Playing Along: Soccer’s Performative Activism in the Time of 

COVID-19,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism; “The President Makes a Play: Putin 

and Erdogan’s Sporting Statecraft,” co-authored with Sean Bartley for the anthology 

Performing Statecraft; and a review of Philadelphia Theatre Company’s online production of 

The Wolves in Theatre Journal. I am eternally grateful to the editors of these works, whose 

insight has helped me craft my research profile, and to Sean Bartley for being a great writing 

partner. 

This research has introduced me to many wonderful colleagues working at the 

intersections of performance and physical culture, some of whom are cited in this 

dissertation. Special thanks go to Shannon Walsh, who let me take up her working group 

with the American Society for Theatre Research; to the members of the Physical Cultural 

Studies program at the University of Maryland, who have given this theatre kid a second 

home in College Park; and to the MFA dance students for humoring me.    

My time at the University of Maryland will always be tied to my cohort of fellow 

PhD seekers: Lindsey Barr, Tara Demmy, and Alex Miller. To this day, they are the people I 

most want to share my academic successes and frustrations with. Special shoutout to Medha 

Marsten, our friend and colleague who left after her master’s. There are many other 

classmates in TDPS and beyond who shaped my thinking in one form or another—far too 

many to list here. 

Finally, a thousand thanks to Martha Fedorowicz, who graciously resisted the urge to 

run for the hills during our first in-person date after I meandered off yammering about this 

very dissertation while she stopped to smell the flowers. I love you, Toots. 

  



 

 

iv 
 

Table of Contents 
 

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. ii 
 

Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... iv 
 

Introduction—Playing to the Crowd: After Bend It Like Beckham ................................... 1 
Two Ways to Come After Bend It Like Beckham .................................................................... 9 
Joining the Match Already in Progress ................................................................................... 23 
Outlining the Field: Performance, Physical Culture, Dramaturgy .......................................... 29 
Chapter Outline ....................................................................................................................... 47 

 

Chapter 1—Playing Against Barriers: Caridad Svich’s Guapa and Sarah DeLappe’s 
The Wolves ............................................................................................................................. 53 
“And for Guapa, that’s enough”: Beauty and the Beautiful Game ......................................... 61 
“7 has always been striker”: Identity in Practice .................................................................... 79 
“being seen”: Reading Alongside the United States Women’s National Team ................... 100 

 

Chapter 2—Playing with History: Soccer in Dramatizations and Re-Enactments of the 
Christmas Truce .................................................................................................................. 107 
Cooperation and Commemoration: The Christmas Truce and Its Memory ......................... 113 
Phil Porter’s The Christmas Truce ........................................................................................ 127 
Football Remembers: Reenactments at Home and Abroad .................................................. 143 

 

Chapter 3—Playing for Power: Erdoğan’s Soccer Politics and the Age of Performative 
Activism ............................................................................................................................... 161 
Erdoğan on the Pitch and In Office ....................................................................................... 168 
“Is This Performative?” The Conditions of Taking a Knee .................................................. 193 
On the “True” Nature of Performativity ............................................................................... 206 

 

Conclusion: After Ted Lasso .............................................................................................. 215 
 

Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 234 
 



 

 

1 
 

Introduction—Playing to the Crowd: After Bend It Like Beckham 

In December of 2019, I took a long and wintry drive from College Park, Maryland to 

Toronto so I could attend Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical at St. Lawrence Centre. At that 

time, the research that forms this dissertation was still in its infancy, so this was quite a trek for a 

show I knew little about, save for its source material and the fact this was its second major 

production following a 2015 debut in London. Upon arriving at my sparsely furnished Airbnb, I 

settled in for a rewatch of Gurinder Chadha’s original 2002 film. The story centers on Jess 

(Parminder Nagra), a British Indian girl who idolizes then-Manchester United star David 

Beckham, famous for his uncommon ability to “bend” the ball when crossing or shooting,1 and 

fantasizes about playing for the English men’s national team. In real life, Jess is forced to put up 

with the extravagance of her sister Pinky’s (Archie Panjabi) impending marriage and her 

mother’s (Shaheen Khan) efforts to shape her into the ideal Indian wife and mother, a project 

that leaves no space for soccer. Enter new friend and fellow player Jules (Keira Knightley), who 

recruits Jess for a local club called the Harriers. Jess joins the team in secret and instantly 

impresses handsome coach Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). As the team goes from strength to 

strength, Jess and Jules struggle to manage the expectations of their families, who fear soccer—

football, in most of the world2—will compromise their passage into acceptable womanhood, as 

well as reconcile their shared romantic feelings for Joe. Jess’s participation is further shadowed 

by racism, a threat exacerbated by the specter of her father’s (Anupam Kher) exclusion from the 

cricket clubs of his native Kenya. While the girls try to keep their affairs under wraps, a series of 

 
1 Virtually all players can hit a pass or shot that arcs through the air due to the spin applied to it; Beckham could do 
so with exceptional “bend” and accuracy. 
2 Considering this dissertation is written for an American audience, I typically use “soccer” rather than “football,” 
with a few exceptions arising from the context of the case studies under examination. 



 

 

2 
 

arguments and comical misunderstandings threatens to ruin their relationships with their families 

and each other. Thankfully, their skillful performances eventually assuage their parents’ 

misgivings and affirms their right to be themselves. The victorious Jess goes on to play college 

soccer in the United States and pursue a relationship with Joe, albeit still in secret.  

As I watched the film, I noted two crucial ways in which the camera articulates Jess’s 

story arc. The first is that it constructs Jess as appropriately Beckhamesque on the ball through a 

series of cuts and close-ups. Considering that editorial facility would not be available onstage, I 

was curious as to how the musical would articulate similar mastery within the proscenium. The 

second was the film’s long series of misunderstandings, which include Jess’s aunts mistaking 

Jules for an amorous White boy and Jules’s mother mistaking the pair’s argument over Joe for a 

lesbian lovers’ quarrel, both of which set off a moral panic within their families. There seemed 

no limit to how the girls might be caught in the wrong frame at the wrong time. By the end, I 

recognized that repeating this device to the point of becoming rote drives home the two families’ 

concern for being framed in all the right ways: Jess as a domestically competent wife who 

honors her family’s culture; Jules as feminine and sexually available, specifically to men. In the 

end, being seen as skillful, happy, and straight soccer players whose exploits are validated by 

victory in a game framed as England’s national pastime assuages the parents’ anxiety and affirms 

the girls’ right to self-determination. Assuming the musical followed the same arc, the 

production would need to evoke the skill necessary to realize this conclusion. 

Chadha’s musical adaptation, created in collaboration with co-librettist and original 

screenwriter Paul Mayeda Berges, composer Howard Goodall, and lyricist Charles Hart, does 

follow that same arc. The story remains in the year 2001, the better to lionize the long-retired 

David Beckham during his Manchester United prime. Pinky’s extravagant wedding remains the 



 

 

3 
 

traditionalist counterpoint to Jess’s emerging hybrid identity, while Jess’s closeted friend Tony 

(played in the film by Ameet Chana) still provides sage encouragement to “bend” the truth rather 

than reveal one’s true, divergent self. Jess still ends up with Joe, although the musical denies her 

a speech from the film in which she asserts the need to prioritize her career, and Jules’s mother 

still panics about her daughter’s sexuality, only this time she comes to her senses on her own and 

emerges as a rainbow flag-waving ally. As an adaptation, the musical plays it safe—much like 

the Toronto production did when it came to staging soccer. The actors rarely worked with the 

ball and when they did, it was often through a series of drills conducted at half-speed. The 

choreography of the Harriers’ musical numbers trended toward calisthenics rather than evoking 

gameplay through, for example, the arc of a leg striking a ball in midair. Ashley Emerson, who 

played Joe, constantly (aggravatingly) handled the ball, a move incongruous to seasoned players 

and coaches. For Jess’s climactic, game-winning free-kick, the production went so far as to 

exchange a real ball for a spotlight zipping around the auditorium and over the wall of aunties 

who appear in Jess’s mind and transform a literal obstacle in her path to goal into a social 

obstacle in her path to fulfillment.3 

Ironically, one number that did center ball work ended up undermining the production 

and by extension one of the story’s central conceits. During the number “First Touch,” Joe 

counsels Jess to stop overthinking and play the game instinctually. As staged in Toronto, Jess 

(Laila Zaidi) demonstrated her hesitancy by running up to kick a ball and then stopping at the 

last moment. Three times she made this run-up. In the first two instances, she was positioned to 

boot the ball straight into the audience. In the third, she changed orientation entirely and kicked 

 
3 In soccer, a free kick is awarded when a player is fouled by the opposing team. A designated specialist then has an 
opportunity to kick the ball from a fixed position. When this presents an opportunity to shoot on goal, a wall of 
opposition players is set up to obstruct their path. Appropriately, free kicks were one of David Beckham’s signature 
skills. 



 

 

4 
 

the ball safely into the wings. While obviously considerate of the audience, I found this 

disruption of the rule of three dramaturgically problematic. Conventionally speaking, the rule of 

three suggests that Jess would successfully kick the ball at the third try, indicating that she had 

summoned the courage to overcome a barrier that had already stopped her twice. By changing 

Jess’s orientation at the final instance, the production unwittingly implied that the original 

parameters established for the run up could not facilitate success on their own terms. This is 

troublesome in a number in which the central character must prove that she can play her way 

through her own limitations and toward self-actualization. A failure to execute that moment with 

clarity and conviction does more than undermine an already fragile suspension of disbelief: it 

constitutes a challenge to carrying off Jess’s whole narrative. 

This instance was not a shortcoming of the actor, nor is my critique a blanket 

condemnation of the production’s efforts to confront the challenges of staging sport. Rather, this 

small but pivotal moment is indicative of an inability to sustain the production’s own conditions 

for excellence, which in turn is a failure to dramatize the conditions for excellence in the world 

of the musical. This failure to convincingly showcase and frame Jess’s athleticism undermines a 

central presumption that helped make the film a hit: that excellence on the pitch is a means of 

empowerment off it. The film advances this notion by composing a portrait of Jess that marks 

her out as a uniquely gifted player who only needs to be seen by the right people at the right 

time. Numbers like “First Touch,” a title that refers to a skill prized in attacking players,4 sustain 

this presumption on the stage. Apart from adapting the film’s narrative, the musical follows the 

path of many a screen-to-stage adaptation by trading on nostalgia for the original and the cultural 

 
4 “First touch” refers to the initial contact a player makes with the ball that allows them to bring it under control. The 
better the first touch, the better the player is at collecting a pass and setting themselves up for a run, a shot, or 
another pass. Having “a good first touch” is one of the hallmarks of a quality attacking player. 



 

 

5 
 

values that undergird it. Even as they come to terms with the rules of the stage, the creators of 

Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical play to an imagined audience that is attached to the film and 

what it represents. In a story that centers soccer as a vessel for Jess’s happiness, the success of 

that endeavor is dependent as much on making the soccer work as it is on adapting the film’s 

narrative beats.  

Rather than whine about verisimilitude in soccer staging, this dissertation takes a cue 

from the Toronto production of “First Touch” to examine how performances of soccer extracted 

from typical gameplay draw attention to the conditions that enable sport’s supposed 

performativity. Bearing in mind the many “infelicities” that haunt the term,5 I deploy 

performativity here not simply to describe the sport as a performance but to signal its capacity to 

enact transformation through performance. Crucially, such transformations “are all about the 

frame,”6 i.e., the conditions that allow for a performance to become performative. In Bend It Like 

Beckham, Jess’s skill with the ball is performative in that it enables her to change her 

circumstances and attain a measure of self-determination. However, it is not enough for Jess to 

be good at soccer: she must be good at soccer within the right frame, namely her penultimate 

match, during which her father watches secretly in the stands and is (eventually) moved enough 

to not only let her leave her sister’s wedding her family but resolve his own injuries suffered as a 

victim of racial discrimination. Furthermore, the conditions that enable Jess to succeed are rooted 

in the sport’s cultural status as a proving ground of English identity, not to mention the practice it 

takes for her to be so good in the first place. In short, an awful lot has to happen for Jess’s soccer 

skills to be performative, so much so that critiquing how Bend It Like Beckham deploys the sport 

 
5 See Aaron C. Thomas, “Infelicities,” in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 35.2 (2021): 13-25, for a 
concise overview of the “uses and abuses” of the term in performance studies literature. 
6 Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 118. 



 

 

6 
 

is to critique a broader cultural narrative in which players can change their external 

circumstances, themselves, and even the world if they play well. Therein lies the reason musical 

numbers such as “First Touch” are productive sites of inquiry: because they unintentionally 

reveal that the conditions required to enact sport’s performativity are deep, precise, and almost 

impossible to recreate elsewhere.  

This is not to say that sports, like any kind of performance, do not possess 

transformational capacities at all. Despite old and persistent claims to the contrary, sports are 

political in this sense because they really can stimulate players to organize and leverage power 

for the purposes of transforming social relationships between individuals and their institutions, as 

well as shape the cultural forces that give groups both a vision of themselves and a means of 

sustaining that vision.7 What is sometimes lost in representations of sport and in the 

representational frameworks applied to sport is the fact that these politics are inherent. Sports 

narratives frequently cast the playing field as merely a stage on which “real” politics are acted 

out, but the truth is that small playing fields are co-constitutive of larger political fields. Like the 

theatre, the soccer pitch does not merely reflect what happens on the outside but shapes and is 

shaped by it reciprocally. With that comes recognition that the conditions of sport’s 

performativity include the conditions that affect the players. In Bend It Like Beckham, Jess steps 

into the national sport as a person whose race and social status are tied inexorably to Britain’s 

(post-)colonial apparatus, steps away from her family as a young woman whose presumptive 

social role is tied to the birth country of her parents, and steps around the tropes that code 

women’s participation in sport as lesbian and therefore aberrant. These are all elements that 

 
7 The capsule definitions here, particularly of the social and cultural, are informed in part by Raymond Williams’s 
invaluable work elucidating their development in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, new edition 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 



 

 

7 
 

make her performative transformation inspirational—truly inspirational, as I will show—but they 

are also elements that in many circumstances limit how players enter their fields, what systems 

of power will allow them to accomplish, and how their accomplishments will be circulated 

discursively. To critique a sports narrative is not to decontextualize the sport but to recognize 

that its embeddedness within systems of power differentiates access and success along 

intersecting lines of privilege and oppression. To understand the politics of sporting 

performativity, then, is not just to grasp the conditions that shape the game but also the 

conditions that shape the player. 

While this dissertation invests in the politics of sport, it is not taken up solely by the 

representation of those politics. Instead, I investigate how performances of soccer actively 

engage the sport’s performativity. Crucial to that investigation is unpicking how performances 

estranged from usual game conditions reveal the representational mechanics, many of them 

distributed and reified by an immense media apparatus that includes pop culture touchstones like 

Bend It Like Beckham, that uphold so many sporting narratives. In starting with Bend It Like 

Beckham: The Musical, I have established that a failure to dramatize the sport convincingly due 

to the comparative constraints of the theatrical space is an avenue through which to explore how 

sport’s performativity can fail, yet I have also pointed to how the musical’s creators positioned 

their adaptation to tap into nostalgia for the original film. In this way, the creators of Bend It Like 

Beckham: The Musical endeavored to play to an affinity for the film and its cultural cache. By 

“play to,” I mean crafting the musical to satisfy the audience’s presumed demands for a show 

that not only reinvents the film but validates an essential premise rooted in the film’s reputation. 

“Play” is understood here as not only acts of portrayal but inclusive of the many ways one can 

act in accordance with certain prescribed rules to gain an advantage, reconfigure the terms of a 



 

 

8 
 

performance in a pleasing and sometimes subversive way, or undertake an activity that only 

seems to be what it portrays. To “play to” Bend It Like Beckham’s audience is to reconstruct a 

treasured cultural object, partly to make it seem new and partly to bank on what it already is. As 

I will demonstrate, many performers adopt a similarly playful disposition toward soccer, one that 

has much less to do with actually playing the sport than retooling it for purposes that make use of 

its political, social, and cultural cache. 

Over the course of this dissertation, I will examine case studies of soccer performance 

ranging from the stage to the pitch in the hopes of answering two questions. First, what does 

examining performances of soccer estranged from game conditions reveal about the sport’s 

performative potentials? Analyzing such performances with a dramaturgical eye reveals the 

degree to which they often trade on a limited conception of sporting politics that cast it as merely 

the avatar for “real-world” politics and ignore the various factors, such as race, gender, class, and 

nationality, that condition a player’s access to sport. Furthermore, each of the subsequent case 

studies demonstrates how presumptions of soccer’s performative capacities can be advanced, 

nuanced, or even challenged—often most effectively by actors with a significant stake in the 

sport’s enormous network of material powers. This brings me to the second question: how does 

play operate in these case studies to reconfigure the sport’s performative capacities? In other 

words, how do these performances play to, play against, play with, or play on soccer’s capacity 

to enact change? These questions point to a much larger consideration for scholars at the 

intersection of theatre, sports, and performance, which is what performance can really “do” and 

for whom. This is especially pertinent for soccer, whose most significant powerbrokers, 

including global governing body FIFA (Fédération International de Football Association), 

enthusiastically embrace its supposed role as a great unifier even as they partner with 



 

 

9 
 

governments who perpetuate human rights violations. The Beautiful Game, as fans and 

proponents unabashedly describe it,8 is saturated with pleasing fictions that mask all sorts of 

wrongdoings and belie even what players really can do through sport, yet there are ways in 

which performances of soccer can be critiqued with an eye to how they resist institutional powers 

that thrive on the mystification of the sport. This dissertation will settle no debates as to what 

performance broadly writ can “really” do, but it will excavate how power shapes the conditions 

that produce performative transformation through the biggest sport in the world—for good or for 

ill. 

 

Two Ways to Come After Bend It Like Beckham 
 
 This dissertation follows “after” Bend It Like Beckham in two senses. First, it designates a 

period of study beginning with the release of the film and continuing through 2022, a timeframe 

in which the global game’s social characteristics have shifted. In many cases, changes in the 

game have been progressive in much the way that Bend It Like Beckham gestures to. The elite 

women’s game in North America and Europe, for example, has grown in coverage and prestige, 

and many teams have made significant, if laborious gains in compensation. The biggest victory 

was won by the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT), which successfully litigated 

against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) to receive backpay comparable to that of the 

Men’s National Team (USMNT) and eventually signed a historic collective bargaining 

agreement alongside their male counterparts in front of a crowd at Audi Field in Washington, 

 
8 The origins of the moniker are disputed, though the late Brazilian star Pelé, arguably the greatest to ever play the 
game, popularized the term (jogo bonito, in Portuguese). “The beautiful game: Pelé, Didi and the origins of 
football’s most tiresome cliché,” When Saturday Comes, accessed January 19, 2023, originally in print August 2017, 
https://www.wsc.co.uk/stories/the-beautiful-game-pele-didi-and-the-origins-of-football-s-most-tiresome-cliche/. 



 

 

10 
 

DC.9 In England, the Women’s Super League (WSL) has emerged as a significant force in 

attracting global talent, while England’s national team went one better than their male 

counterparts by winning the European Championships on home soil in the summer of 2022. The 

significance of that achievement was encapsulated in several exhibits at the National Football 

Museum in England, including an extensive two-part special on the history of the women’s 

game, which for fifty years was banished from the official grounds under the purview of the 

Football Association.10 Perhaps if Bend It Like Beckham were made today, Jess would imagine 

herself playing alongside Lucy Bronze and Beth Mead rather than David Beckham.  

In short, the fact that the women’s game garners more investment now is evidence of how 

the sport has been shaped by larger social change. In addition to being a battleground in the fight 

for pay equity, the women’s game in North America has been an increasingly vocal space for 

queer acceptance, so much so that non-binary Canadian midfielder Quinn and trans-masc 

forward Kumi Yokoyama have been publicly praised for coming out and continue to play for 

their NWSL teams.11 While similar progress toward queer acceptance has been slower in the 

men’s game, many elite teams have adopted rainbow motifs in recognition of annual Pride 

celebrations. Gestures to progressive change in the form of Black Lives Matter activism has also 

been widespread, particularly after the 2020 uprising accelerated by the murders of George 

Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. While the efficacy of these gestures is debatable (a 

 
9 Fittingly, the signing was staged at the edge of the pitch, overseen by former USWNT star and pundit Julie Foudy, 
and accompanied by a congratulatory video by former tennis star Billie Jean King. For more on the agreement, see 
Brian Straus, “U.S. Soccer Announces History CBA Agreement, Equal Pay Between USMNT, USWNT,” Sports 
Illustrated, May 18, 2022, https://www.si.com/soccer/2022/05/18/us-soccer-cba-equal-pay-uswnt-usmnt-world-cup-
prize-money. 
10 Fittingly, the two parts of the exhibit were completed either side of the European Championships, making the 
Lionesses victory in the tournament a highlight of the second component. 
11 Yokoyama credited Quinn, the first openly trans athlete to win an Olympic gold medal, for inspiring them; 
Yokoyama was later praised in a tweet by President Joe Biden. See Alex Reimer, “Japanese trans pro soccer player 
Kumi Yokoyama just got engaged,” SB Nation: Outsports, November 3, 2021, 
https://www.outsports.com/2021/11/3/22761587/kumi-yokoyama-transgender-nwsl-washington-spirit-engaged 



 

 

11 
 

debate that I will return to in Chapter 3), the fact they are so visible demonstrates how the public 

character of soccer has changed in the Global North over the past twenty years.  

While there have been visible changes in how elite soccer stakeholders position 

themselves, it is imperative to recognize the simultaneous expansion of economic and political 

capital that has perpetuated harmful power structures and threatened sectarian backlashes even as 

the sport has ostensibly welcomed more participants. The compulsion of the game’s global 

leaders, particularly at FIFA, to seek out new markets under the guise of development is evident 

just in the locations of men’s World Cups. In 2002, the year Bend It Like Beckham debuted, the 

World Cup was hosted in South Korea and Japan, its first foray away from Europe and the 

Americas. Since then, it has made debuts in South Africa (2010), Russia (2018), and Qatar 

(2022), as well as repeat stops in historic power centers Germany (2006) and Brazil (2014); its 

next stop is the United States, Canada, and Mexico (2026), where the field of teams will expand 

from 32 to 48. The two latest World Cups in Russia and Qatar plus the 2026 edition in North 

America indicate the degree to which global power, fueled in part by a wealth of natural 

resources and, in the case of Russia and Qatar, autocratic governments using “sportswashing” to 

burnish their global legitimacy, has drawn the sport into places where it has not traditionally 

dominated. The Qatari regime exemplified this strategy by adopting a four-pronged approach 

that included constructing state-of-the-art venues to host major events, investing in global 

sporting broadcast rights, promoting Qatari success at the elite level, and engaging sport 

celebrities to speak favorably of the regime.12 Qatar’s biggest private gamble, conducted through 

Qatari Sports Investments, has been French club Paris St. Germain, which shattered the global 

 
12 Håvard Stamnes Søyland and Marcelo Moriconi, “Qatar’s Multi-Actors Sports Strategy: Diplomacy, Critics and 
Legitimisation,” International Area Studies Review, 2022. 



 

 

12 
 

transfer record when it paid the eyewatering sum of $270million to take Brazilian star Neymar 

from Barcelona.13 Elsewhere, the English Premier League, already among the most lucrative 

sports leagues in the world, saw an earlier influx of foreign money, beginning with the likes of 

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in 2003, continuing with American tycoons and 

conglomerates such as the Glazer family and Fenway Sports Group, and on to state-backed 

takeovers of Manchester City via the Abu Dhabi United Group and Newcastle United by the 

Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. These moves have garnered significant controversy, 

ranging from complaints that foreign investment and commercialization is eroding ties between 

clubs and their localities, to accusations of backroom maneuvers that allowed the World Cup into 

places like Russia and Qatar, both of which have poor human rights records.14  

 In short, the Beautiful Game has only gotten bigger over the past twenty years, yet with 

that increase in size has come increased exposure of its systemic shortcomings and resurgent 

currents of prejudice. For all the public deference to Pride, European governing body UEFA 

(Union of European Football Associations) still allowed Hungary to be a co-host of the pan-

continental 2020 European Championships (EURO 2020), prompting scrutiny of Prime Minister 

Viktor Orbán’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies.15 For all the widespread adoption of taking a knee, Black 

England players Bukayo Sako, Jadon Sancho, and Marcus Rashford were subject to openly racist 

 
13 Note that this figure only represents what PSG paid to Barcelona, as is customary when discussing transfer fees. 
The player negotiated a $54million-a-year salary with PSG separately. “How Does a Football Transfer Work?” 
BBC, accessed December 12, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170829-how-does-a-football-transfer-
work. 
14 Amnesty International has been a consistent critic of labor conditions in Qatar and has pressured the country’s 
leadership and FIFA to establish a compensation fund. For insight into how Russia won hosting rights to the 2018 
World Cup, see ‘The World Cup’s Mysterious Path to Russia’, The Daily from The New York Times, 22 June 2018, 
www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/podcasts/the-daily/russia-world-cup-fifa-corruption.html, accessed 17 October 2018. 
15 Orbán became embroiled in international controversy amidst criticisms of his policies, while UEFA was itself 
criticized for turning down Munich’s request to illuminate the Allianz Arena in rainbow colors in solidarity with 
LGBTQ+ citizens. See Kate Connolly, “Hungary’s Orbán cancels Euro 2020 trip to Munich after rainbow row,” The 
Guardian, June 23, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/23/hungary-viktor-orban-cancels-euro-
2020-trip-to-munich-after-rainbow-row-germany. 



 

 

13 
 

abuse on social media after they missed penalty kicks in the final of the same tournament, an 

event marred by fan violence and operational dysfunction that harkened back to the infamous 

heydays of (overwhelmingly White) English soccer hooliganism in the 1980s.16 For all the 

advances of the USWNT, it was less than a month after overseeing its historic collective 

bargaining agreement that the USSF released a damning report of systemic incompetence that 

allowed abusive coaches and administrators to act with impunity in the NWSL.17 This is to say 

nothing of the amateur and educational levels of the game, themselves shaped by power 

structures that often distribute access inequitably, protect abuse under the guise of establishing 

respect for authority, and are contiguous with larger systems of exploitation and extraction. The 

very recent, very public examples above demonstrate that this era of global expansion is as much 

a cause for social contestation as it is for progress. Contestation is important here because it 

demonstrates that sports are a worthy space for asserting, challenging, subverting, re-examining, 

and altogether engaging the powers entangled within them. This dissertation will adopt a critical 

approach to sport, yes, but that is anything but regurgitating well-trod arguments that sport is 

either a fundamentally anti-democratic obsession that stunts progress or a pastime that activates 

only the most stringent immoralities in everyone who participates.18  

A note on critique is an ideal segue into the second way this dissertation follows after 

Bend It Like Beckham. Like sport itself, Bend It Like Beckham is proof that sporting narratives 

 
16 Ben Morse, “Racist abuse directed at England players after Euro 2020 final defeat is described as ‘unforgivable’ 
by manager Gareth Southgate,” CNN, July 12, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/12/football/england-racist-
abuse-bukayo-saka-jadon-sancho-marcus-rashford-euro-2020-final-spt-intl. 
17 “U.S. Soccer Releases Full Findings and Recommendations of Sally Q. Yates’ Independent Investigation and 
Commits to Meaningful Changes and Immediate Actions,” US Soccer, October 3, 2022, 
https://www.ussoccer.com/stories/2022/10/sally-q-yates-investigation-findings. 
18 For a broader sense of these debates, see David Andrews and Ben Carrington’s introduction to A Companion to 
Sport, in which they critique Christopher Hitchens’ dismissal of sport as a useless activity that heightens political 
tension and sectarian feelings and Terry Eagleton’s argument that sport inhibits true working-class solidarity. David 
Andrews and Ben Carrington, Introduction to A Companion to Sport, eds. David Andrews and Ben Carrington 
(Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 1-16.   



 

 

14 
 

are complex sites that merit close critique and support diverse, sometimes contradictory 

assessments. In this regard, the body of Bend It Like Beckham literature that has emerged over 

the past twenty years is a useful template for approaching my case studies. For starters, it 

clarifies the acuity of this twenty-year time frame by highlighting some of the political 

assumptions of the original film. The film’s multicultural aspirations, part of a “Cool Britannia” 

optimism under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair, are rooted in the zeitgeist of 2001, 

the year prior to the film’s release. The advent of the wars in the Middle East, which Britain 

joined as an ally to the United States following the 9/11 attacks, effectively put an end to that 

optimism, leading to an uptick in xenophobia that resonates through post-Brexit Britain today. 

Granted, racism and xenophobia were hardly new phenomena in Britain. Roy Williams’ play 

Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads,19 set in a pub during a 2001 match between England and 

Germany, debuted at The National Theatre the very same year as Bend It Like Beckham was 

released and presented a far more critical perspective on interracial strife. Over the course of the 

play, two Black brothers, Mark and Barry, navigate their place in a White community whose 

disposition toward them ranges from surreptitiously prejudiced to openly antagonistic. The 

brothers adopt contradictory approaches to this problem: Mark, stung by his failed romance with 

bar owner Gina and troubled friendship with police constable Lee, plays things close to the chest; 

Barry, on the other hand, ingratiates himself by playing well for the pub’s amateur team. As the 

televised game unfolds, racist dispositions regarding the players are brought to the fore.20 

Meanwhile, the overt white supremacists in the group—studious Alan and hot-headed Lawrie, 

both inspired by the anti-immigrant ethos articulated in British MP Enoch Powell’s infamous 

 
19 Roy Williams, Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (London: Methuen Drama, 2002). 
20 One significant point of contention is the performance of Andy Cole, a Black striker who excelled at league level 
for Newcastle and Manchester United but, according to many of the White lads in the pub, cannot deliver for 
England. 



 

 

15 
 

“rivers of blood” speech21—turn up the pressure on the brothers. In the end, tragedy strikes when 

Gina’s young son Glen, a victim of bullying at the hands of some Black youths, takes out his 

anger on Mark, killing him. Unlike Bend It Like Beckham, which gestures to the utopian 

possibilities of a multicultural England, Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads forcefully interrogates 

the racism that was already bubbling in England at the time and forecloses the possibility for an 

easy resolution. 

Over ten years after the film’s debut, Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical traded both on 

love of the film and the dashed hopes that undergirded the period in which it was set. As Jerri 

Daboo notes in Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre, 

the musical must be set in that sunset period because its message of racial tolerance would 

simply not be as resonant today as it was then.22 The optimism that buoyed Bend It Like 

Beckham and other representative examples of what Michael Giardina calls “stylish hybridity”23 

was founded not on a genuine reckoning with the politics of difference and their materiality but 

on a superficial multiculturalism united under a fealty to Britishness. As Gamal Abdel-Shehid 

and Nathan Kalman-Lamb argue, the multiculturalism evinced in the film not only fails to 

eradicate racial inequity but perpetuates it by promoting a “national” culture that others must 

assimilate into, even as it touts multiculturalism as a cure for inequity.24 This dynamic is 

 
21 Allusions to the speech, which incorporates references to a river of blood via Virgil’s Aeneid, are used as a 
touchstone by Alan. The speech was delivered amidst a wave of immigration from the Caribbean and is seen as an 
example of pan-Atlantic white nationalist discourse that became especially mainstream in the United States amidst 
the rise of Donald Trump. Daniel Geary, “Most Americans don’t know who Enoch Powell was. But they should,” 
The Washington Post, April 20, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-
history/wp/2018/04/20/most-americans-dont-know-who-enoch-powell-was-but-they-should/. 
22 Jerri Daboo, Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre (Abingdon: 
Routledge, 2018), 2. 
23 Michael D. Giardina, “‘Bending It Like Beckham’ In The Global Popular: Stylish Hybridity, Performativity, and 
the Politics of Representation,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 27, no. 1 (2003): 67. 
24 Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Nathan Kalman-Lamb, “Multiculturalism, Gender and Bend It Like Beckham,” Social 
Inclusion 3, no. 3 (2015): 144. 



 

 

16 
 

especially pointed in Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, in which a shared affinity for the national 

team is no guarantee of equality. Once again, Mark and Barry illustrate this failed promise 

through contrasting approaches: Barry proudly paints his face with the white and red of the 

English flag, and Mark chastises him for looking ridiculous. As Abdel-Shehid and Kalman-Lamb 

further contend, Bend It Like Beckham, like many sports films, advances a faulty cure for such 

discrimination by operating through the “category of ‘transcendence’, framing sports as an arena 

of opportunity in which structural inequities like racism and patriarchy can be overcome through 

hard work and athletic experience.”25 By fulfilling its heroine’s romantic and familial desires, 

Bend It Like Beckham rewards this effort in a way that Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads does not. 

While troubling the “category of transcendence” is a useful entry point for critiquing 

sport’s supposed capacity to help players performatively rise above their circumstances, the 

degree to which Bend It Like Beckham has become a touchstone for various actors to pursue the 

inclusion it imagines must be accounted for. Not the least of the film’s long-term benefits is 

increased interest in the women’s game in Britain,26 which reached new heights with the 

Lioness’s march to victory in the European Championships just in time for the film’s twentieth 

anniversary. That anniversary was a cause for celebration of Bend It Like Beckham’s influence 

and reflection on the work still to be done, spawning a litany of commemorative articles and 

even a documentary produced by the BCC.27 The film is cited as a special source of inspiration 

for many women in sport, including Canadian sports journalist and critic Shireen Ahmed, cohost 

of the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down, whose interview with Chadha alerted me to the 

 
25 Abdel-Shehid and Kalman-Lamb, 142–43. 
26 Giardina, “‘Bending It Like Beckham’ In The Global Popular,” 78. 
27 Bend It Like Beckham: 20 Years On, directed by Miriam Walker-Kahn, aired April 15, 2022, BBC broadcast. 
Anniversary articles appeared in national presses such as The Telegraph, The Guardian, and CBC, sports magazines 
such as The Athletic, online publications dedicated to fans and people of color from marginalized identities such as 
Just Women’s Sports and gal-dem, and numerous other avenues.   



 

 

17 
 

musical’s Toronto bow.28 That it has inspired such investment speaks to its capacity to stimulate 

action, even if women’s sport remains contested territory, including internally vis-à-vis its 

privileging of whiteness.29 The film was also notable for the time in that it depicted Jess’s friend 

Tony, a fellow British South Asian, coming out to her, while the relationship between Jess and 

Jules has been a site of competing queer-feminist analyses. Jayne Caudwell critiques the film for 

reinforcing heterosexuality by suppressing the queer possibilities of Jess and Jules’ relationship, 

while also leaving room for the film to serve as a challenge to normative female 

heterosexuality.30 Katharina Lindner, on the other hand, argues that the text of Bend It Like 

Beckham enables lesbian spectatorship beyond the “binary understanding of sexual difference 

and . . . the subject-object distance implied by the gaze,” in part because of the communion 

found in team-based athletics, an arena often marked as lesbian.31   

Apart from the subjects it portrays, Bend It Like Beckham operates within a complex 

network characterized by diasporic and assimilationist tensions that artists like Gurinder Chadha 

have played to their advantage. As Mridula Nath Chakraborty observes, Chadha’s work grew out 

of a particular site of Black British feminism and womanist cinema, which allowed her to draw 

on the discursive category of “Black” to “[claim] a space for the Asians within and beyond black 

Britishness, thereby making her work bear witness to, and record the complex relationship 

 
28 Shireen Ahmed and Gurinder Chadha, “Special Episode: Gurinder Chadha Spills the Chai on ‘Bend It Like 
Beckham’—The Film & The Musical,” Burn It All Down, November 29, 2019, produced by Blue Wire Network, 
MP3 audio, 47:39, https://www.burnitalldownpod.com/episodes/special-episode-gurinder-chadha-spills-the-chai-on-
bend-it-like-beckham-the-film-amp-the-musical. 
29 Sheila Scraton, Jayne Caudwell, and Samantha Holland, “‘Bend It Like Patel’: Centring ‘Race’, Ethnicity and 
Gender in Feminist Analysis of Women’s Football in England,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 40, 
no. 1 (2005): 71–88. 
30 Jayne Caudwell, “Girlfight and Bend It Like Beckham: Screening Women, Sport, and Sexuality,” Journal of 
Lesbian Studies 13, no. 3 (2009): 255–71. 
31 Katharina Lindner, “‘There Is a Reason Why Sporty Spice Is the Only One of Them without a Fella …’: 
The ‘lesbian Potential’ of Bend It Like Beckham,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, no. 2 (2011): 210–
11. 



 

 

18 
 

between Britain and its colonized peoples from the Indian subcontinent.”32 Chakraborty argues 

that Chadha “embraces the very strong sense that diaspora is a place of enablement, a place from 

where fields may be played, advantageously, subversively, playfully, and always dialogically, 

from different positions, and where productively multiple negotiations of existing social 

identities may be effected.”33 Like other filmmakers in the Indian diaspora who found success in 

mainstream Western cinema during in the early 21st century, Chadha playfully operates within 

“an oppositional framework relative to the hegemonic narrative” both within the white-settler 

multicultural nation and the putative country of origin, challenging the dark sides of the former 

and the hierarchical social structure of the latter, even as the mainstream appeal of the film 

eschews overt feminist or anti-racist radicalism.34 As Daboo observes, the musical continues to 

play in this in-between space thanks in part to its Bhangra score. Created in the 1970s by second-

generation Punjabi youth who drew from both the traditions of their homelands and African-

Caribbean music to create a new form of expression, Bhangra suits Bend It Like Beckham’s 

multicultural fusion by living “in a third space as a transadaptation of a musical form, 

[embodying] both tradition and modernity in its performance, as well as a re-memory of the 

’homeland’ transformed through the musical filtering and culture of ‘home.’”35 In keeping with 

critiques of the film, Daboo further notes that sonically diverse score aids the various acts of 

“bending” within the story, “allowing for moments of subversion and intervention that never 

break the conventions and rules, but certainly challenge them.”36 

 
32 Mridula Nath Chakraborty “Crossing Race, Crossing Sex in Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2002): 
Managing Anxiety in Multicultural Britain,” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary 
Popular Cinema, eds. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 122-133. 
33 Chakraborty, 125. 
34 Chakraborty, 126. 
35 Daboo, 127. 
36 Daboo, 132. 



 

 

19 
 

While Chakraborty and Daboo point to the play between identities in Chadha’s work, 

Sara Ahmed dismisses the notion that Bend It Like Beckham offers the viewer a genuine “culture 

clash.” As she argues, the film “does not simply represent the two cultures as ‘cultures’ in quite 

the same way’”; rather, the “migrant culture appears as a culture, as something given or 

possessed, through being contrasted with the individualism of the West, where you are free to do 

and to be ‘whoever’ you want to be, understood as the freedom to be happy.”37 As Ahmed 

argues, the attainment of happiness that truly drives the film is wrapped up in “the promise of 

‘the one,’” seen in the shape of Joe, the ideal subject of the nation who not only allows Jess to 

share in the promise of nationhood through proximity to him and his whiteness but also enables 

her father to “let go of his injury about racism and to play cricket again,” thus bringing him back 

into the national fold.38 While Chakraborty sees the film and Chadha’s oeuvre as playing in the 

spaces of diasporic belonging, Ahmed sees Bend It Like Beckham as only playing into the notion 

that the promise of multicultural Western citizenship is a promise of happiness that diasporic 

subjects must demonstrate their worthiness of.39 Central to that demonstration is soccer, which 

acts as a vessel for Jess’s personal advancement: 

Football signifies not only the national game but also the opportunity for new 
identifications, where you can embody hope for the nation by filling up an empty place 
alongside its national hero. By implication, the world of football promises freedom, 
allowing you not only to be happy but to become a happy object, by bringing happiness 
to others, who cheer as you score. The inclusion of Jess in the national game might be 
framed as Jess’s fantasy, but it also functions as a national fantasy about football, as the 
‘playing field’ which offers signs of diversity, where ‘whoever’ scores will be cheered.40  

 

 
37 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 134. 
38 Ahmed, 145. 
39 Ahmed, 133. 
40 Ahmed, 135. 



 

 

20 
 

What Bend It Like Beckham trades on, therefore, is not merely the notion that someone like Jess 

can achieve self-actualization through soccer, but that the sport itself has an innate capacity to 

catalyze that self-actualization based on its inherent qualities.  

The fantasy that Ahmed identifies is difficult to sustain within the confines of the 

proscenium stage, where the unpredictability of ball movement, the functional differences 

between the pitch and the proscenium theatre, and the rigorous training required to embody the 

sport make representation on par with that of film, never mind the heavily mediatized elite sport 

itself, a significant technical challenge. As the disruption of the rule of three convention in the 

Toronto production’s rendition of “First Touch” demonstrates, the suspension of disbelief in 

such an endeavor is fragile to the point of necessitating visible, even sheepish compromises. 

Giving in to that fragility reveals that the conditions in which Jess can become the “happy 

object” that Ahmed identifies require her to be exceptional. For Jess to succeed and for soccer to 

be portrayed as the liberatory arena it is purported to be, the actor’s foibles must be excised, and 

the sport’s shortcomings must be minimized; the camera makes that possible in a way the 

proscenium does not. In short, where Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical truly fails its forebear 

is by revealing how easily its fantasies of sporting transcendence can be undone. 

The notion that sports are an inherently inclusive pathway to liberation, integration, and 

self-actualization is a fantasy. It is a fantasy because its presumptions can swiftly be expelled by 

pointing out how contingent its powers are, how quickly they can be utilized for purposes that 

are far from good, and how damaging it is when diversionary claims of upward mobility, 

security, equality, and intimacy are frayed by constant and fruitless use.41 It is also a fantasy 

 
41 “Fraying” borrows from Lauren Berlant, whose work on "cruel optimism" informs part of the first chapter. Lauren 
Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 



 

 

21 
 

because it nevertheless inspires so many to believe. In the case of Bend It Like Beckham, it has 

inspired players who were otherwise excluded from the Beautiful Game to forge entry on their 

own terms. While visiting the National Football Museum in England in August of 2022, I took in 

not only the special exhibit on the history of the women’s game but an additional exhibit, 

prominently placed on the museum’s first floor, on the contemporary state of the women’s game 

at the grassroots level. The references to Bend It Like Beckham, a touchstone so deeply 

embedded in the cultural fabric over the past twenty years as to be mnemonic, were evidence of 

its impact. That it should have such an organic presence in a space actively drawing the women’s 

game into the history of the national sport, at a time so perfectly attuned to the national team’s 

success, is evidence of how much this story has become a part of the sport itself. As many 

commentators will attest, that story is shadowed by frustration about what still needs to be done, 

even a sense that very little has changed at all. Perhaps it is appropriate that the celebration 

coincided with an acclaimed remounting of Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, a play that, as critic 

Anya Ryan noted, “has, miserably, taken on an even more distressing relevance,” especially as 

the country was, at the time, headed toward a World Cup amidst a resurgence of racist abuse 

toward players.42 Twenty years on, soccer is as complex and contested as ever, even if fantastical 

notions of what it can “do” persist on the stage, the screen, and the pitch.  

The past twenty years are significant for one final reason. Growing up in southern Africa, 

I was surrounded by schoolmates who were obsessed with soccer, yet I remained largely 

uninterested until the 2002 men’s World Cup. Perhaps it was the USMNT’s run to the 

quarterfinals or the sense that watching it along with my friends finally plugged me in to 

 
42 The production as originally staged in 2019 and remounted at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester. Anya Ryan, 
“Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads review—a burning portrait of racism in Britain,” The Guardian, July 27, 2022, 
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jul/28/sing-yer-heart-out-for-the-lads-review-minerva-theatre-chichester. 



 

 

22 
 

something vast; whatever the case, that tournament had me hooked. Later that year, I discovered 

that Zambia’s local channel, ZNBC, carried European Champions League games. One night, 

under cover of a blanket, I watched Manchester United—Jess’s favorite club, and mine—beat 

Greek club Olympiakos 4-0 at their home ground, Old Trafford. From that point on, I followed 

United from afar, caught up in the ebb and flow of their success, nurturing fantasies of appearing 

on their hallowed ground, playing until my legs were bloodied and caked with dirt every recess 

and after school. Over twenty years of fandom, I have seen United play in person only twice: 

once in Houston during a pre-season tour of the United States, and then again at Old Trafford in 

the summer of 2022. That trip to their home ground, known ever-so-poetically as “The Theatre 

of Dreams,” was made possible in part by research funding for this dissertation. It is fitting that 

my first trip to The Theatre of Dreams came when it did because it made me recognize how 

much this project is an opportunity to reflect not only on how the game has changed over the past 

twenty years, but how my relationship with it has changed, too. Over time, I have become more 

critical, more wary of being sucked in, yet even still, I am subject to the giddy rush that takes 

over when my team is winning or when a player executes something that truly credits the sport 

as “The Beautiful Game.” The game still moves me in mysterious ways, even to the point of 

making me aggressive and partisan in a manner I try not to be in my “real life.”43 This is why, for 

all the critical theory I apply here and all the structural harms that I identify, I leave space for the 

game’s unique pleasures—not decontextualized from their circumstances, but still available to 

those who play it. Only then can I attempt to understand what makes a game like this so 

fantastically powerful. 

 
43 The game I attended at Old Trafford was against Liverpool, United’s greatest rivals. United fans often chant “you 
Scouse bastards” at the visiting contingent; it’s a reference to “Scousers,” a nickname for residents of Liverpool. I 
found myself caught up in it, though why I cannot tell.  



 

 

23 
 

Joining the Match Already in Progress 
 
 “After Bend It Like Beckham” arrives at a significant point in the interdisciplinary study 

of theatre, performance, and sport. While sports-related writing has been a consistent presence in 

performance studies thanks to the efforts of founding figures such as Richard Schechner and 

Victor Turner, two recent anthologies curated by major stakeholders in this subfield demonstrate 

the degree to which its influence has grown. The first, Shannon L. Walsh’s Sporting 

Performances: Politics in Play, is a comprehensive collection of works accounting for 

everything from the fraught dynamics of sport mega-events to significant developments in Black 

athlete activism. In addition to noting the commonalities between student-athletes and student-

artists, subjects we touch on in our work together with the American Society for Theatre 

Research,44 Walsh’s introduction notes how athletes from marginalized backgrounds who rise to 

prominence in “rags-to-riches” stories can serve “as role models of difference in a celebrity 

culture awash in white privilege,” a system that disproportionately (and counterproductively) 

doles out the labor of training and games onto people who are still disenfranchised.45 This draws 

attention to the disconnect between narratives that celebrate individual triumphs over social 

barriers through sport and power structures that maintain such barriers through the inequitable 

distribution of resources. In keeping with attention to privilege, Walsh’s prior work draws from 

performance studies to illustrate how physical cultural regimes were deployed to “protect” the 

White race during the Progressive Era, often by using surrogation to appropriate the work of 

manual laborers and “perform those actions as effortless, therefore natural, aspects of an ideal 

white upper-class physical fitness practice, thus continually staging the actions of people 

 
44 Walsh generously allowed me to spearhead a working group on performance and physical culture based on her 
two prior installments. We co-convened the group at the 2022 gathering in New Orleans. 
45 Shannon L. Walsh, Sporting Performances: Politics in Play (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 6. 



 

 

24 
 

depicted as part of an evolutionary past.”46 In her archival and curatorial work, Walsh 

demonstrates the degree to which reading sport and physical culture through performance 

productively emphasizes the role sports play in the construction and presentation of self, 

especially when deployed in conjunction with the levers of power.  

The second significant anthology is Eero Laine and Broderick Chow’s Sports Plays, a 

collection of critiques on dramatizations of sport. Whereas much of the scholarship in our field 

treats sport as performance, the works in Laine and Chow’s anthology largely focus on plays that 

transfer sport to the stage. Working from Nicholas Ridout’s observations on embarrassment, 

Laine and Chow offer that the potential ineffectuality of dramatizing sport onstage “might be 

said to obstruct the smooth functioning of the circuits of representation through which we view 

athletic bodies, drawing our attention to those other key contexts overdetermining the moment of 

representation such as race, gender, and class.”47 Leticia Ridley, writing in one of the volume’s 

standout entries, further notes that the “framing of sport within the context of the theatre 

interrogates the often-presumed apolitical nature of sports by emphasizing how the convention 

and codes of sport (which are theatrical) are deeply embedded with ideology.”48 Building from 

these assertions and Walsh’s observations of the competing powers in sport and physical culture, 

I offer my critique of Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical as evidence that such obstructions can 

be interrogated with an eye to the historical paradox of sport: it’s capacity to simultaneously 

liberate and oppress in concert with the expansion and contestation of power.49 The estrangement 

 
46 Shannon L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era : Watch Whiteness 
Workout (Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 7. 
47 Laine and Chow, 6. 
48 Leticia Ridley, “‘Surviving Against the Sharp White [Tennis] Background’: Black Women’s Presence and 
Absence in Terrence McNally’s Deuce and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” in Sports Plays, eds. Eero Laine and 
Broderick Chow (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022): 17-31. 
49 Peter Alegi and Brenda Elsey, “Editors’ Introduction: Historicizing the Politics and Pleasure of Sport,” Radical 
History Review 125 (2016): 3. 



 

 

25 
 

that Laine and Chow describe is useful for this project in that it not only allows us to expand the 

critical examination of sports narratives by considering sports plays but also utilize the 

similarities and differences between theatre and sport to challenge the mystification of sports 

performance.  

While these recent anthologies are significant, the subject of how to read sport through 

theatre and performance extends much further back. I use “estrangement” not only to build on 

Laine and Chow’s description of sports plays but also to echo the distancing effects pursued by 

Bertolt Brecht, who aimed to generate opportunities for critical engagement by “making strange” 

that which is familiar. Brecht’s efforts to disrupt the representational model of bourgeois theatre 

by drawing attention to its illusory quality fits nicely into the tradition of counter-reification, 

which seeks to dismantle the “naturalized” mode of production under capitalism. Ironically, 

incorporating theatre into the counter-reification of sport twists Brecht’s own observations on the 

distinctions between sport and theatre. In “Emphasis on Sport,” Brecht praised sporting 

audiences as the “fairest and shrewdest” in the world partly because, unlike the theatre of 

interwar Germany, sports events consistently delivered “highly trained persons developing their 

peculiar powers in the way most suited to them, with the greatest sense of responsibility yet in 

such a way as to make one feel like they are doing it primarily for their own fun.”50 Brecht 

frequently returned to the lack of artifice in sport and its apparent clarity of performance, often 

with reference to how theatrical mise-en-scene could borrow similar techniques to create a 

relaxed but critical “smoker’s theatre” similar to what he perceived among boxing spectators.51 

 
50 Bertolt Brecht, “Emphasis on Sport,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John 
Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 6-8. 
51 See John Willett’s note on “Emphasis on Sport” for comment on the smoker’s theatre, 8. See also references to 
how Epic Theatre’s use of titles could foster a theatre “full of experts,” as apparently found in sport, in “The 
Literarization of the Theatre,” 43-7; and notes on adopting the exposed lighting instruments used for boxing 
matches, in “Short Description of a New Technique in Acting,” 136-147. 



 

 

26 
 

Brecht’s comparative impetus grew out of his dissatisfaction with the theatre of his day but it 

also bespeaks certain assumptions that can be productively troubled today. As Meg Mumford 

notes, Brecht’s interest in the critical distance is driven in part by “a macho assertion of 

masterful wit” that he expressed in himself through his “tough-boy posturing, complete with 

Caesar haircut, leather jacket and phallic cigar”; the boxer, meanwhile, was a potent symbol of 

the primitive heroic warrior fighting to reassert himself amid the erosion of rural life, the nature 

of mass living, and increased mechanization.52 Even accounting for his primary interest in 

contemporaneous German theatre and the masculinist undertones Mumford identifies, Brecht’s 

observations elide the complexities of sporting labor, which has, over the course of the century, 

became evermore exploitative in conjunction with the global expansion of elite sporting capital. 

Perhaps tipping his compulsion to contrast the arenas of sport and theatre into an embrace of 

“making sport strange” will generate the fair and shrewd critique he so desired. 

Though working from a different vantage point, Robert Rinehart also proposes a reading 

of sport that disrupts both its place within modes of capitalist production and its tendency to be 

uncritically dramatized. “Sports contests are not inherently dramaturgical,” he argues in Players 

All: Performances in Contemporary Sport, but “Sport discourse—the discourse of narrativity—

has, in this televisually literate society, become naturalized.”53 The mediatized narrativity of 

sport and the “reliance upon the sport-as-drama metaphor” not only limits the research on sport 

but “(re)creates unexamined assumptions of linearity and causality in sport, and perpetuates 

hierarchy, canonization, and privileging of scholarly over popular texts.”54 Rinehart offers 

rhetorics of avant-garde as a more appropriate heuristic, noting that while they are inclusive of 

 
52 Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (London: Routledge, 2009), 16-18. 
53 Robert E. Rinehart, Players All : Performances in Contemporary Sport (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 
1998), 23. 
54 Rinehart, 25. 



 

 

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“traditional” dramaturgy, their non-linearity makes them “multidimensional and multifaceted, 

much like contemporary sport.”55 In drawing from avant-garde performance to disentangle sport 

from linear narrativity, Rinehart anticipates Jan-Thies Lehmann’s work on the “postdramatic 

theatre” with its de-privileging of the text and points to ways of understanding the cultural 

significance of sport in a manner other than conventional narrative. Grant Farred, who writes 

prolifically on sport and philosophy, calls to mind both Rinehart and Brecht when opining that 

The lure/allure of sport is that it grounds our love for football or baseball precisely in how 
“strange” . . . it can be, how through it the miraculous unfolds before our very eyes, how 
poetic beauty manifests itself in the “strangest,” least-expected moments or encounters . . 
. how it can situate us as fans at once in an intense proximity to the event and yet leave us 
inexplicably removed.56  

 
Farred finds that the “strangeness” of sport makes legible the “burden of over-representation,” 

which “renders the political ‘visible’ and thinkable,” locating “the exceptional individual 

disjunctively within his (or her) community but also . . . dis-locates him (or her) from that 

community.”57 By examining key moments when racialized athletes undertook this burden, 

Farred shows that sport is a field in which to observe potent events that encapsulate the 

limitations of both representation and of a coherent, singular self that such linear representations 

would necessitate.  

These texts indicate not only the variety of frameworks operating at the intersections of 

theatre, performance, and sport but also the capacity such inquiries have to disrupt assumptions 

surrounding sport’s performativity. This extends to spectators, who are themselves 

conceptualized with varying degrees of agency. For example, former President Donald Trump’s 

appearances in professional wrestling prior to his ascension to the White House have summoned 

 
55 Rinehart, 34. 
56 Grant Farred, The Burden of Over-Representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University 
Press, 2018), 10. 
57 Farred, 3. 



 

 

28 
 

conflicting readings. Sharon Mazer argued that Trump’s forays proved his ability to leverage 

powerful affects while calling attention to the “rigged” game of politics, thus connecting with a 

fan base that overlapped significantly with his voter base—people who, as Mazer described, go 

to the arena “to feel the heat that comes from feeling one with the crowd, not necessarily to be 

winners themselves, but in cheering the winner and jeering the loser, to be on the side of 

righteousness.”58 In a critical response, Eero Laine, Broderick Chow, and Claire Warden 

question Mazer’s assumptions about wrestling fandom, arguing not only that her reading is 

“antitheatrical” and “antifan,” but offering  

(a) that if we watched politics more like wrestling fans then we wouldn’t have a Trump 
presidency; (b) if we approached work as wrestlers do (as collaborators rather than as 
antagonists) then we would have a stronger opposition in a political sense; and (c) if we 
celebrated the rise of women’s wrestling (and, to an extent, the broader diversification of 
professional wrestling) we could challenge the misogyny and bigotry that are all too 
prevalent in political discourse and everyday life.59 

 
The contrary readings offered by Mazer and her respondents, which include a counterpunch from 

the former in the pages of TDR,60 illustrate the degree to which discourses around sport’s cultural 

power has as much to do with articulating the ways larger forces make subjects of athletes and 

the diverse ways stakeholders such as fans can forge their own meanings. This can be seen in 

soccer-focused work such as Natalie Alvarez’s article on the cultural politics of diving, the 

much-maligned practice of pretending to suffer a foul in order to fool the referee and gain 

advantage,61 and in Philippa Wehle’s investigation of a documentary theatre piece created with 

fans of French club Lens.62 As in the diverse responses to Bend It Like Beckham, the question of 

 
58 Sharon Mazer, “Donald Trump Shoots the Match,” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 2 (2018): 186. 
59 Claire Warden, Broderick Chow, and Eero Laine, “Working Loose: A Response to ‘Donald Trump Shoots the 
Match’ by Sharon Mazer,” TDR: The Drama Review 62, no. 2 (2018): 202. 
60 “Sharon Mazer Responds to Warden, Chow, and Laine,” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 2 (2018): 216–19. 
61 Natalie Alvarez, “Foul Play: Soccer’s ‘Infamous Thespians’ and the Cultural Politics of Diving,” in TDR/The 
Drama Review 60, no. 1 (2016): 10-24. 
62 Philippa Wehle, “Soccer Fans on Stage,” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 41, no. 2 (2019): 93-100. 



 

 

29 
 

what sports can do for participants is subject both to the reification of power relations and 

identify factors and to the agency of participants. The literature on sports performance within the 

field, coupled by the vast corpus of physical cultural studies, is proof of that. 

 

Outlining the Field: Performance, Physical Culture, Dramaturgy 
 

Apart from tapping into veins of sports writing in theatre and performance, this 

dissertation draws from the literatures of performance and physical culture and on the flexible 

methodology of dramaturgy. While many of my case studies lean toward the theatrical—pre-

arranged events that are evidently staged, whether in a theatre or on the pitch, with a delimited 

purpose or narrative—my work is dependent on understanding sport and theatre as part of the 

larger continuum of performance; indeed, I find value in embracing the Anglo-American thrust 

of blurring the distinctions between theatre and other cultural performances, not to deny the 

utility of clear conceptual coordinates but to identify what elements and factors are salient across 

different events.63 The discourses of performance are furthermore integral to this project for how 

they have deployed and contested the myriad dispositions of play and the diverse orientations of 

performativity.  

At some level, all acts of play are constituted by familiar components put into “unreal” 

conditions. As Schechner writes, play “borrows” behaviors from their original contexts and then 

“redeploys them, makes a show of them, and uses them for no apparent purpose.”64 A playful 

punch, for example, is not an invitation to a real fight but instead to simulated combat. For 

 
63 See Janelle Reinelt’s account of the distinctions and overlaps in theatricality and performativity, charted mostly 
across Anglo-American and Continental European traditions. Janelle Reinelt, “The Politics of Discourse: 
Performativity Meets Theatricality,” SubStance 31, no. 2–3 (2002): 201–15. 
64 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2013), 102. 



 

 

30 
 

Gregory Bateson, play demands a degree of metacommunication, a paradoxical “this is play” 

statement implying that an action is not what it typically denotes.65 While acknowledging, as 

Schechner does, that play can extend to “deep” and “dark” levels wherein the 

metacommunicative lines are deliberately sabotaged, the tension in Bateson’s paradox remains 

acute. Oftentimes play gains in pleasure and potency by immersing players in what Mihaly 

Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” a state in which there is a merging of action and awareness such 

that a person has no dualistic perspective.66 This sense of playing to the point of becoming 

extends beyond games and into everyday life. In The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith 

identifies seven rhetorics of play, among which are play as progress, pointing to the way children 

develop; play as power, applied to the use of games as representations of conflict and a means of 

fortifying status; and play as identity, which maintains the character of a particular community.67  

Sutton-Smith notes that “play and games are played partly for their own sake and partly for the 

value attributed to them within the ideologies that are their context.”68 In this way, play is not 

just a separate realm pressing against the everyday, but a way to move through and remake the 

everyday. While the capacity for play to be truly formative and consequential is significant, I 

reiterate Sutton-Smith’s use of “rhetoric” to highlight the importance of assumptions about play. 

At issue in my case studies is not just what playing soccer can do for participants but the ways in 

which playing it evokes values that extend beyond the pitch, appearing to “make real” what is 

otherwise abstract.   

 
65 Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in The Game Designer Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, 
eds. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, 314-328 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 68-69. 
66 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “A Theoretical Model for Enjoyment,” in The Improvisation Studies Reader: 
Spontaneous Acts, edited by Rebecca Caines (London: Routledge, 2015), 152. 
67 Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9–11. 
68 Sutton-Smith, 78. 



 

 

31 
 

When seeking a foundation in performance, I gravitate to Schechner’s three capsule 

definitions: “twice-behaved behavior,” “restored behavior,” and “showing-doing.” These 

definitions constitute an understanding of performance as a recombination of behaviors that 

accrues meaning based on precedent and framing.69 This makes performance akin to play in that 

it often recontextualizes otherwise recognizable actions. The two can even be understood as 

intertwined, in that playing often incorporates the performing of roles according to pre-existing 

behaviors and scripts, while performance can occupy a similarly liminal space between the real 

and the pretend. What distinguishes many performances from play is that they exist for 

presumably “serious” purposes, particularly in ritual and ceremonial situations, and often in the 

various performances that constitute everyday life. Despite such serious purposes, performances 

are never fixed. As Schechner writes, “[performances] exist only as actions, interactions, and 

relations.”70 In other words, performances are done and redone, their meaning contingent upon a 

variety of fluid factors, some of which, like the identities of the performer and the object being 

performed, are held together simultaneously through the enactment itself.71  

Performance’s interactivity can be conceptualized in several ways, including as a form of 

knowledge production. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor argues that despite their 

ephemerality, performances “replicate themselves through their own structures and codes,” 

always mediated by the processes “of selection, memorization or internalization, and 

transmission [that take] place within (and in turn helps constitute) specific systems of re-

presentation.”72 Performance validates the body’s ability to “know” in a way that documents 

cannot, leading some to call it an archive of its own, “a repository imbued with polysemiotic 

 
69 Schechner, Performance Studies, 35. 
70 Schechner, Performance Studies, 30. 
71 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 6. 
72 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20-21 



 

 

32 
 

possibilities.”73 This is not to say that the repertoire generates exact copies. As Joseph Roach 

notes, “the paradox of the restoration of behavior resides in the phenomenon of repetition itself: 

no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; they must be 

reinvented or recreated at each appearance.”74 Schechner describes each theatre, sport, or ritual 

“show” as “a palimpsest collecting, or stacking, and displaying whatever is, as Brecht says, ‘the 

least rejected of all things tried.’”75 Schechner’s invocation of the performance as palimpsest is 

useful here in that both sport and theatre arrive in their contemporary states through iterative 

processes that exchange components based on historical factors. In European soccer, class and 

economics have had a significant influence on the evolution of the game, beginning with late-

19th century disputes between gentlemen amateurs and working-class professionals and 

continuing well into the advent of “post-fandom,” where even the historically proletariat and 

communal fanbase of major clubs have shifted into dispersed, heavily mediated spaces.76 

Throughout this evolution, the shape of stadiums, quality of materials, levels of fitness, and even 

tactical approaches to the game have shifted to accommodate the spectacularization of sporting 

events, even if the basic components of the game have remained largely the same. Understanding 

this process as driven in part by the interplay of bodies and recontextualizing of codes helps 

illuminate why the game has a potent historical heft as well as a capacity to accommodate vast 

social and cultural change. 

For Taylor, the interactivity that drives performance often unfolds most potently through 

scenarios, which have the capacity to “reactivate the past, rehearse the future, and produce a new 

 
73 Awam Amkpa, “A State of Perpetual Becoming: African Bodies as Texts, Methods, and Archives,” in Dance 
Research Journal 42, no.1 (2010): 83-88. 
74 Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 
1996), 29. 
75 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 120. 
76 Mark Turner, “Football Fandom in Late Modernity: Alternative Spaces and Places of Consumption,” 43-44 



 

 

33 
 

‘real.’”77 Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, Taylor defines a scenario as “a paradigmatic setup that 

relies on supposedly live participants, structured around a schematic plot, with an intended 

(though adaptable) end,” which exists as a “culturally specific imaginary,” a set of “possibilities, 

ways of conceiving conflict, crisis, or resolution—activated with more or less theatricality.”78 In 

this sense, scenarios are akin to open-ended “scripts” in that they seem to provide a loose 

narrative outline, yet it is important to point out that they are not just passed down orally or in 

text, but are meant to be actively embodied through simulation, generating a “once-againness” 

rather than a duplication.79 A scenario must be understood not simply as an isolated phenomenon 

but as that which emerges out of a society in order to understand itself. As Taylor asserts,  

Because scenarios say more about the ‘us’ envisioning them than about the ‘other’ they 
try to model, they are fundamental to the ways societies understand themselves . . . And 
because scenarios are about ‘us,’ we need to factor ourselves in the picture—as 
participants, spectators, or witnesses we need to ‘be there,’ part of the act of transfer.  
Thus the scenario precludes a certain kind of distancing, and places spectators within its 
frame, implicating “us” in its ethics and politics.80 

 
Following Taylor, I understand participation in a scenario, or any performance that appears to 

affirm those who invest in it, as extending beyond just the “players.” To be involved in a 

scenario is also to validate it as a witness, to share in its reactivation and its circulation as a kind 

of framework that “explains us to ourselves.” Soccer matches, particularly at the international 

level, can be understood as scenarios in that they can seem to reactivate historical and 

nationalistic contents, offering stakeholders an opportunity to re-present themselves in a more 

flattering light on one of the most consequential stages in the world.81 

 
77 Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 134 
78 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 13 
79 Taylor, Performance, 139-140. 
80 Taylor, Performance, 141 
81 I developed this notion of an international match as a scenario in a prior publication: Jared Strange, “The World 
Cup’s Double-Headed Eagle: Gestures and Scenarios in the Football Arena,” Theatre Research International 45, no. 
1 (2020): 55–71. 



 

 

34 
 

In positioning my work in the field of performance, I bear in mind the rich, complex 

powers of performativity, which I understand as retaining transformative potential. Apart from 

the emphasis on framing identified by Taylor, itself built on the notion of the “performative 

utterance” offered by J.L. Austin,82 I follow Judith Butler in acknowledging performativity as a 

durational process of iteration and reiteration, “repetition and ritual,” wherein an identity 

becomes naturalized through performance.83 Like Schechner’s notion of make-belief, 

performativity can be understood as actualizing a social role or identity, not only in the realm of 

gender, as Butler famously writes, but also in race, religious practice, and activism. What 

“counts” as performative is fluid and highly contentious; as Laurie Frederik observes, especially 

provocative and self-reflexive performances that “show off” or “show up” may not be 

performative in the ”status-transforming sense,” but they can gain in transformative potential 

through the interplay between performer and audience.84 Reference to status checks Victor 

Turner, whose anthropological work identified the performative powers of rituals to catalyze a 

change in one’s social character, particularly in agrarian societies. Significantly, Turner 

identified a difference between liminal and liminoid events: the former produces a consequential 

transformation in status; the latter are examples of the “leisure genres,” “symbolic forms and 

actions in complex, industrial societies” that offer only temporary release from typical social 

relations.85 As I will indicate in Chapter 3, Turner’s distinction between liminal and liminoid can 

 
82 The genesis of this line of performativity is typically identified as Austin’s 1955 lecture series How to Do Things 
with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). 
83 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999): xv. 
84 Laurie A. Frederik, Introduction to Showing off, Showing up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and 
Cultural Power, eds. Laurie A Frederik, Kim Marra, and Catherin Schuler (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 
Press, 2017), 11–12. 
85 Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal 
Publications, 1982), 41. 



 

 

35 
 

be useful, though it is worth reiterating that what constitutes “true” performativity is heavily 

dependent on the social expectations regarding what that performance is expected to accomplish.  

Retaining transformative power in performativity is not an effort to solve the semantic 

debates around the term itself, which has come to mean “of or pertaining to performance” or 

even, in popular parlance, “disingenuous,” e.g., in “performative activism.” Indeed, it is the 

slippages in the term and the tendency to associate performativity with results (or lack thereof) 

that is central to my inquiry. In that vein, the second major notion to which I subscribe is that 

performativity’s entanglement with transformative efficacy can illuminate the way performance 

operates as an index of achievement, justified or otherwise. In Jon McKenzie’s conception, 

“performativity is the postmodern condition: it demands that all knowledge be evaluated in terms 

of operational efficiency” in realms such as performance management, performance studies, and 

techno-performance, and even extends across “the entire realm of social bonds.”86 In this sense, 

performativity has a compulsory tenor, hence the title of McKenzie’s book: Perform or Else. 

Interestingly, the “postmodern condition” has often been associated with a certain playfulness in 

culture, accounting for the recombinations and inversions of irony and pastiche, not to mention 

the constant “play” in semiotics identified by deconstructionism. I would offer that both can be 

seen operating at the heart of cultural production encapsulated in neoliberalism in that a sense of 

playfulness is manifested throughout yet conditioned by the imperative to play well. While I 

share Dorrine Kondo’s suspicion of a totally reified and inescapable conception of neoliberalism, 

as well as the conviction that performance “can constitute an imaginative, unpredictable excess 

that cannot be fully contained” by neoliberal forces,87 I am mindful of how the economics of 

 
86 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001), 14. 
87 Dorinne K. Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham: Duke University 
Press, 2018), 90. 



 

 

36 
 

cultural production compel even pleasurable pursuits to be assessed on their capacity to generate 

economic, social, and cultural capital.88 As critic and soccer romanticist Eduardo Galeano 

lamented at the turn of the millennium, “The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to 

duty . . . professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable.”89 

Thinking through neoliberalism’s structuring of culture requires not only a reckoning with the 

fusion of public services to private interests and erosion of social safety nets but also the way art, 

sport, and even fun are judged by their utility, forcing cultural and scholarly workers to 

conceptualize their work in service of the “creative economy” and the accrual of data.90 To 

understand performativity, then, is not just to leave room for the transformational effects of a 

given performance or act of play, but to understand that even play can be compelled to operate at 

a level of economic achievement over and above whatever social benefits it may offer.  

Like performance studies, physical cultural studies (PCS) cultivates a broad range of 

interests while resisting disciplinary boundaries. According to Michael Silk, David Andrews, and 

Holly Thorpe, PCS is best understood as “an intellectual assemblage perpetually in a state of 

becoming” and “a dialogic learning community.”91 Its emergence in the latter decades of the 20th 

century was in part the result of a growing scientization in kinesiology and sports studies, a 

development that often reduced the regard for humanistic inquiry and dovetails with the same 

forces that compel the marketization of the arts and culture industries. One of my chief 

 
88 The notion of the symbolic power and cache available to actors who evince aptitude for cultural codes is drawn 
from Bourdieu, who identifies how various modes of seemingly non-economic capital can be accumulated (though 
often for the purposes of economic gain). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. 
Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 
89 Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow (London: Verso, 1999), 2. 
90 For more on how neoliberalism’s macro characteristics affect cultural production, consult Lara D. Nielsen, 
Introduction to Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance: Performance Permutations, eds. Lara D. Nielsen 
and Patricia Ybarra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1-21. 
91 Michael L. Silk, David L. Andrews, and Holly Thorpe, Introduction to Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural 
Studies, eds. Michael L. Silk, David L. Andrews, and Holly Thorpe (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2. 



 

 

37 
 

attractions to PCS is the way it complicates this process of hyper-rationalization, itself motivated 

by a neoliberal impetus for higher performance at all costs. PCS has countered that development 

by critically engaging the social divisions and hierarchies that are enacted, experienced, and 

contested in physical activities. Partially in response to the rigidity of the sociology of sport, 

which has sought to gain currency within mainstream sociology,92 PCS undertakes that project 

on a broad scale, including everything from sport, exercise, and fitness, to dance, health, and 

leisure. One of the core tenants of PCS is that none of the activities within or beyond the 

categories listed above are isolated phenomena but instead reside within the interrelationships of 

body, power, and culture.93 Susan Brownell articulates it nicely when describing her 

ethnographic work in Chinese physical culture programs as not about “the small world of the 

athlete’s body” but rather the “the place of the small world of the Chinese athlete’s body within 

the larger universe of ideas.”94  

The uniquely potent sociopolitical position occupied by sport has been articulated in 

numerous ways. Varda Burstyn, writing primarily about sport’s masculinist tendencies, defined 

the “sports nexus” as “an entity consisting of sport in its associations with the mass media, 

corporate sponsors, governments, medicine, and biotechnology.”95 Joseph Maguire offers the 

“sports-industrial complex,” which contains structural, institutional, ideological, and cultural 

dimensions. For Maguire, the sports-industrial complex’s “mechanism of production, experience, 

and consumption [involves] several elements: the identification and development of talent; its 

 
92 Dominic Malcolm, “The Social Construction of the Sociology of Sport,” in International Review for the Sociology 
of Sport 49, no. 1 (2012): 3-21. 
93 Silk et al., 4. 
94 Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. 
95 Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press, 2000), 17. 



 

 

38 
 

production on a global stage, in a single or multi-sport event; and its consumption by direct 

spectators or, through the media complex, by a global mass audience.”96 Finally, David Andrews 

articulates “uber-sport,” which “[both] materially and expressively . . . advances, and 

simultaneously normalizes, the capitalist-neoliberal-nationalist institutions, interests, and 

ideologies governing all facets of contemporary life.”97 For Andrews, uber-sport is supported by 

the late-capitalist forces of replicative corporatization, expansive commercialization, creative 

spectacularization, and intensive celebritization, which, taken together, “[describe] a highly 

rationalized, diversified, yet integrated popular sport phenomenon designed to generate mass 

audiences/markets, and thereby popularity/profits, across an array of culturally and economically 

multiplying streams.”98 As Andrews argues, sport in these terms is not political per se, though 

uber-sport can have a political purpose in that it can act as a “surreptitious proxy, unobtrusively 

articulating the ideological and affective orientations bolstering” a political agenda,99 such as that 

of former President Donald Trump. For my part, I lean on my prior usages of the sports-

industrial complex—partly for the recognizability of the “X-industrial-complex” formulation, I 

admit—but bear in mind Andrews’ point on the diversification of sport’s cultural sway, which 

will be evident in the case studies under consideration here. 

Whatever the nomenclature, I understand sport as enjoying a privileged position within 

neoliberal culture and society, partly by dint of the enormous state monies which fund, among 

other things, the construction of elite stadiums and sporting mega-events such as the World Cup 

 
96 Joseph Maguire, “The Sports-Industrial Complex: Sports Sciences, Social Developments, and Images of 
Humankind,” in Power and Global Sport: Zones of Prestige, Emulation, and Resistance, ed. Joseph Maguire 
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 159-176.  
97 David L. Andrews, Making Sport Great Again: The Uber-Sport Assemblage, Neoliberalism, and the Trump 
Conjuncture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 4 
98 Andrews, Making Sport Great Again, 8-9 
99 Andrews, Making Sport Great Again, 12 



 

 

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and the Olympics. This shapes sport at levels far beyond the elite; indeed, some of the most 

compelling research on sport’s enormous power has been conducted at the local, collegiate, and 

even youth level. For example, university programs vastly overshadow many of their academic 

counterparts in terms of funding and exposure, yet often underdeliver on promises to generate 

capital for the institution as a whole.100 Nevertheless, the re-production of these structures and 

the events they