ARW250NAA: Research Essay Assignment
Length: Minimum of 1750-2000 words, not including quotations
(At Least 7-8 typed double-spaced pages)
Font Size: no larger than this one: Times New Roman 12
Format: Must have an MLA title page with pertinent information such as:
Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course Name and Section (ARW250NAA)
Date Submitted
Essay Title (Centred above first paragraph)
Student’s last name and page number as right-sided running head
The essay must make substantial references to academic research materials and must treat the
topic in a scholarly manner. (Academic research texts are usually written by professors, or
specialists in the discipline, and most are published by university presses.) The essay must use
quotations from the texts to support critical arguments, and proper citation and
bibliographic form must be maintained. Do not fill up your paper with quotes that are too
long – this will be considered padding. You must edit long quotes without eliminating their
essence – substantively -- and whether they are fewer than four lines and incorporated into the
body of your text, or four lines or longer, and set off, they must read grammatically.
You must do substantial research in order to support your paper. Sources must be quoted and
cited properly, following MLA Style rules. Your essay requires the use of at least five scholarly
sources, preferably published by academic presses. The sources are the ones that you used in
your proposal, even though you can use additional ones if they have been approved. Do not use
book reviews! However, you must cite everything correctly, both in your text and on your
Works Cited page,
When you are doing research, you must think in an analogical or parallel manner. This means
that if you cannot find a specific text on a subject, you should try to find a text that deals more
broadly with contingent ideas. The names of writers that I provided with each question are the
best places to start your research. It is possible that the source might incorporate direct or
comparative information. Critical thinking requires that you extrapolate conclusions from a
range of arguments and critically justify the reasons for your claims.
Write analytically and try not to spend too much time summarizing or merely reciting
information from other texts. Avoid thinking of these as personal essays or emotional reflections.
ARW250NAA: Research Essay Assignment
You must use your resource material to support your thesis. You must be less an advocate,
and more a dispassionate scholar.
Watch making grand and unsupported generalizations! Your research must be used to
support your assertions. If you fill your paper with long quotes from sources, I will regard this
as padding, and as evidence of inadequate effort. However, if you show too little evidence of
thoughtful and proper use of research materials, I will regard this as evidence of inadequate
effort. It is vital that you have a clear and cogent thesis that works as both a foundation and
a frame for your essay. This means that you will have a compass point to guide all manner
of argument.
In-text citations and Works Cited page(s) must be pristine. Marks will be taken away for
incorrect incorporation of quoted passages, and incorrect textual citations. Improper layout,
form, typographical errors and spelling mistakes in your Works Cited page will also be
penalized. This means that editing and proofreading should be thorough.
ARW250NAA: Research Essay Assignment
Ventura Filho 1
Jair Ventura Filho
Professor Winston Smith
ARW250XY
27 April 2014 1
“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am
very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much,
much more important than that.” (Bill Shankly, legendary
Liverpool FC Manager)
Football and the Politics of Identity2
The game of football (soccer) has long attracted arbiters of culture, such as creative
writers, visual artists, musicians, philosophers, and a host of academicians who have set their
minds to the task of representing, and trying to figure out, what this most popular of obsessions
is all about. A major feature of the sport and one that many have explored is related to identity.
This is not so much about the basic identity of the game, such as its birth, its rules, and the kinds
of people who play it, but more about the deeper feelings of allegiance and alliance that the game
confers upon those who champion and identify with it. Indeed, it could be argued that football
gives a strong sense of belonging and pride to its devotees, because the athletic arena allows
1
The first page includes required student and professor names, course name and section, and essay date in this style
on the upper left of page. At the top right of the page, in a running header the student’s last name and page number
appears as shown.
2
The title of the essay is centred above the first paragraph of the essay. The essay is double spaced and written in
Times New Roman 12 font.
Ventura Filho 2
those who follow the game to celebrate closely held notions of personal and national pride, by
providing them, if only briefly, with the opportunity to act out a variety of desires allied to their
dreams of heroism.3
Of course, many will ask whether other sports do not illustrate and convey the same
things that football does. The quick answer would be, yes, other sports share aspects of audience
relationship and participation with football, but none have the international reach and appeal of
the beautiful game. According to the “2010 World Cup South Africa Television Audience
Report,” “The in-home television coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa reached
over 3.2 billion people around the world; 46.4% of the global population and an 8% rise on that
achieved at the 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany” (8).4 While the Olympic Games can always be
counted on to draw comparable numbers of viewers, this event is composed of many different
sports, including football. No other team or individual athletic event has been able to attract the
same loyalty. It has long been beyond debate that football sits in a unique position as the sport
that attracts the greatest number of participants and viewers. Even though it is too soon for The
Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) report on the 2014 Brazilian
tournament, speculation suggests that the viewing results will surpass all previous records.
There have long been books and articles on tactics and training, many written by coaches
and players, but increasingly the notion of sport as reflective of historical, social, political, and
cultural practices has taken hold. As such, a variety of writers who are able to draw on a number
of disciplinary foundations have become engaged with the sport’s relationship to human
3
4
The first paragraph introduces and sets up the idea of the essay. It should also end with the thesis of the essay.
Note that a quote of fewer than four lines should be incorporated into the body of the paragraph. If it is introduced
with information that lists the name of the publication and/or the author, the page number is all that is required in the
parenthetical citation.
Ventura Filho 3
perseverance and struggle. No doubt, the work of Johan Huizinga, and his Homo Ludens, has
been a forerunner to many of these ideas, but contemporary writers have opened the way for
deeper discussions of football’s relationship to the notion of man at play in society.
In a recent volume of the journal, Soccer and Society,5 I read a fascinating article on the
island of Corsica, which has long had a troubled and complex relationship with its legal and
political French identity, and its Italian and Mediterranean heritage. What struck me in this piece
was the idea that Corsicans saw their football as inseparable from questions of their identity:6
While the inhabitants of Corsica have fought to obtain recognition for their identity,
they share with the French the opinion that there is a marked difference between
Corsican and French football. The Corsicans are convinced that their football is just
as markedly theirs as their language and culture. They consider football to be part
of their identity and the teams to uniformly represent the island….
The French sports reporters more or less agree that the Corsican style of football
differs from the French one and consider it more like the type of football played by
teams from less urban Mediterranean islands, such as Cagliari in Sardinia or Real
Mallorca in Spain. French writers commonly identify teams by region when
discussing playing style – quick but disorganized Mediterranean teams, strong
northern style, tough, robust Bretons, etc. (Győri Szabó 47-48)7
5
Names of journals are italicized, but the names of articles from those journals are kept in regular font and are
placed between quotation marks.
6
Block quotes, those that are longer than four lines, are indented away from the left margin. They are double
spaced, just like the rest of the essay. And they must be introduced, and not just dropped into the essay.
The block quote ends with a parenthetical citation of the author’s last name and the page number(s) from where the
quote was taken. In a block quote, there are no quotation marks placed around the text, and the period comes at the
end of the quote, not after the citation.
7
Ventura Filho 4
The article expands on the double sense of otherness that players for the two major clubs
from the island, SC Bastia and AC Ajaccio, inherit and have foisted on them, both by local fans,
and by French journalists. Irrespective of his individual nationality, a player must come to accept
that to locals he is first a Corsican, a representative of the island; and he must accept that, “The
French media at times refer to SC Bastia as the ‘Corsican club’ and the members of the club as
‘Corsicans’ or ‘Corsican players’” (47).8 The same holds for AC Ajaccio. Győri Szabó is
appropriately wary of the controversies inherent in trying to ascribe racial and ethnic
characteristics to style and performance, but he is aware that no amount of academic opposition
can completely erase certain deeply embedded stereotypes.
“Ethnicity and nationhood” is a section found in African Soccerscapes,9 a pioneering
book by the Italian American historian Peter Alegi. Alegi discerns an interesting pattern in the
recent development of the game by reversing the North/South approach to global relations.
Where earlier scholarship had focused on the effect that the European game had on the African
continent, Alegi sees the impact of migrations from the developing to the developed world as one
that has reframed and restructured the European game and our understanding of it. In this
approach he anticipated the scholarly work of Laurent Dubois, who has written on the remaking
of France’s national football identity by those players of African and African diasporic origins.
Like Győri Szabó, Alegi is careful about notions of ethnic essentialism, but he understands that
the game tends to mimic, perhaps in a chicken and egg form, broader political conceits of
xenophobia as a subcomponent of nationhood. Where Corsica is a part of France, most African
8
Note that in a quote that is included in the body of the paragraph, the period follows the citation. The quotation is
enclosed in quotation marks, which precede the citation.
9
Titles of books are italicized or underlined.
Ventura Filho 5
countries are former European colonies with brutal and tumultuous pasts. Ethnic and linguistic
divides are everywhere present, often based on the leftovers of the colonizers’ ideas of
organization and control. Against this backdrop, the liberation of many of these countries during
the 1950s and ‘60s left a legacy on their football:
While much was achieved in the first decade of independence, African football struggled
to produce a lasting sense of nationhood. This was partly due to the game’s paradoxical
ability to unite participants while simultaneously dividing them. The inherent quality of
team sport complicated nationalist agendas in postcolonial nations that had been
artificially created by European powers and continued to be marked by cultural pluralism,
class and ethnic divisions, and other social cleavages. Much to the chagrin of African
governments, football fostered multiple identities. The national championships allowed
citizens to choose to belong to the “imagined community” of the nation, without
neglecting individual, local, ethnic, religious, and other identities. (Alegi 63)
Similar to but different from the Corsican situation, African realities presented greater
contradictions and implied contradictions.10 The football field presented the opportunity for
countries to “tribalize” into smaller units, which threatened to subvert larger governmental
intentions of newfound unity. “In ethnically and culturally diverse Cameroon, parochial affinities
continue to shape the game to this day. For example, PWD Bamenda, from the Anglophone
west, ‘carries the hopes and aspirations of most Anglophones,’ while Canon Yaoundé is linked to
people of Beti background, Union Douala with Bamileke migrants, and so on” (Alegi 63).
Indeed, while many national teams from the African continent have developed significant
10
New paragraphs are always indented. Do not add additional spaces between lines, whether they start after block
quotations, or after the end of another paragraph. And make sure that transitional statements, which link to the
previous paragraph, are used. An essay is a unity of ideas, not a series of random thoughts.
Ventura Filho 6
profiles, there are still questions about squad selection when a team is led by a local coach. For
example, the Super Eagles of Nigeria might have their composition questioned by those who
think that there are too many Igbos or Yorubas on the team. In this scenario, the coach’s ethnic
affiliations are subjected to deep scrutiny.
To conceive of the playing field as an arena where certain inequalities can be balanced
out has some value. The Nobel laureate, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, reflected on this in
an essay awhile back. He had listened to a lecture on football by the Brazilian anthropologist,
Roberto da Matta, which he termed “brilliant.” According to Vargas Llosa, da Matta had said
that “football expresses people’s innate desire for legality, equality and freedom” (239). Here the
game could be seen as one that allowed its players to transmit the energy of their democratic
desires to the fans in the seats who would receive and return this almost-sacred energy. da Matta,
as Vargas Llosa further reports, asserted that “the public sees football as a representation of a
model society, governed by clear and simple laws which everyone understands and observes and
which, if violated, brings immediate punishment to the guilty party.” All of this egalitarianism
seems to confer on the game a utopic aura, where it can be used as a model for progressive
politics. The argument for the necessity of football in our lives must then be regarded as an
unequivocal one. Varga Llosa neatly summarizes the gist of da Matta’s theory:
This is what, in the end, stirs the passions of the crowds that, the world over, pour into the
grounds, follow games on television with rapt attention and fight over their football idols:
the secret envy, the unconscious nostalgia for a world that, unlike the one they live in
Ventura Filho 7
which is full of injustice, inequality and corruption, gripped by lawlessness and violence,
offers instead a world of harmony, law and equality. (Vargas Llosa 240)11
But the Peruvian master is also deeply skeptical that football is generative of all of that,
because he sees the ultimate reason behind our interest in the game as something “less
complicated than sociologists and psychologists would have us suppose.” What we must never
lose sight of is that thing that accompanies play, the notion of fun. And as Vargas Llosa will have
it, “football offers people something that they can scarcely ever have: an opportunity to have fun,
to enjoy themselves, to get excited, worked up, to feel certain intense emotions that daily routine
rarely offers them” (241). It is not so much that he is at odds with da Matta, but that he feels that
where scholars try to rationalize and theorize, the football-loving public wittingly allows the
irrational and the unstructured into their moments of being.
Of course, fun in sports comes with its sister emotion: agony. The football fan knows
that the release that victory brings to both participant and observer can rapidly change with the
dejection of defeat. In these moments both players and fans seek out others to share their
emotions, making alliances of sorts. Identity is founded on the idea of similarities, meaning that
those who experience joy in the face of triumph experience it in similar registers. When the
agony brought on by defeat manifests itself it must be shared and felt on the same registers,
equally. The football fan who is alone at the point of his team’s defeat must suffer in silence, but
when he can share that experience with others a liturgy, or pattern of remonstration, can be set
and observed. Tim Parks, a British football fan, translator and writer, who has long lived in Italy,
gives us a passage of great poignancy in his book, A Season with Verona:
Because the quoted passages in the paragraph above the block quote came from the same page of Llosa’s text, one
does not need to insert individual citations for each quote. The final parenthetical citation is enough if all
observations were from a single page.
11
Ventura Filho 8
When your team lose on television, you are left in a state of extreme anxiety and
disappointment. There is no sense of occasion to offer catharsis. You are on your own
with no idea how to move back from these crushed hopes into a normal state of mind. I
can imagine people doing serious damage to themselves and the furniture in such
situations. I myself have been known to kick things, though never people or animals. At
the stadium, on the other hand, there is the comfort of being part of the crowd, and after
the away game there is the long forced wait in the alien stadium while the local thugs are
dispersed to allow for your safe departure. This occasion was the perfect example of how
disappointment can be turned into self-mockery and finally fun; how you can lose the
game but still go home emotionally uplifted. (97)
The reader can see a consonance with Vargas Llosa’s observations about “fun” and the
power of the game. There is a communal feeling that pervades any gathering of football
devotees. They come together to ensure that their passion is shared by others, and to pledge and
initiate those who are on the outside into the liberating rituals of release. The rational mind might
be able to see the hidden connections between joy and suffering, but the football fan must
journey through the depths of purgatory before they can be cleansed and brought back to the
light. There is an unmistakable Dantean feeling in Tim Parks’ description.12
The paragraph provided some analysis of Tim Parks’ observations, and tried to connect his viewpoint to
observations made by Vargas Llosa. As the essay continues, transitional phrases will connect each new paragraph,
helping to unify the essay.
12
Ventura Filho 9
Works Cited13
Alegi, Peter. African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World’s Game. London: C.
Hurst & Co., 2010. Print
“Bill Shankly in quotes.” Official Club Website Liverpool FC. 12 Feb. 2010. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.
Győri Szabó, Róbert. "Identity And Soccer In Corsica." Soccer & Society 13.1 (2012): 36-55.
Academic Search Premier. Web. 29 July 2014.
Parks, Tim. A Season with Verona. New York: Arcade, 2002. Print.
“2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Television Audience Report.” FIFA.com. KantarSport.
2010. Web. 17 June 2014.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. “The Empty Pleasure.” The Global Game. Eds. John Turnbull, Thom
Satterlee, and Alon Raab. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. 239-242. Print.
13
Note the accuracy and layout of the Works Cited page. It begins on a separate page, and all items are alphabetical.
Do not underline the title Works Cited, and do not number items on the page. All run over lines in entries are
indented, otherwise known as hanging indents. Because the essay used various texts, including books, websites, and
articles from databases, it must employ the correct forms of citation in each instance. Remember that everything on
a Works Cited page must be cited in the essay.
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