Thesis
Understanding Goal Nets as a Symbolic Representation of Changing Football Culture
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Master of Creative Arts, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25907/00050
Abstract
As the on-field architect of Total Football, a revolutionary style of play based on the idea of manipulating space, footballer Johan Cruyff was nicknamed ‘Pythagoras in Boots’ (Goldblatt 2006, 465). Cruyff focused his innate sense of geometry within the game and his understanding of space solely on the game’s central objective, ie. a goal being scored; the ball crossing the goal line. He did not concern himself with the spatial meaning of what happened after; when the ball crossed the goal line and impacted with the goal net. This practice-led research project seeks to address ‘what happened after that,’ when a goal is scored and the ball and net react in the Thirdspace (Soja1996, 2008); how a goal scored is visually affected by the ball’s interaction with the goal net,and how the goal net, as an object, is imbued with meaning.
In order to explore this phenomenon, the research project investigatesthe field of creative non-fictionrelated to football and identifies and examines two exemplar texts, Fever Pitch(1992) by Nick Hornby and Brilliant Orange (2012) by David Winner. From the analysis of these two works, five characteristics and conventions common to the genre are extrapolated and deployed to inform the production of a new work of creative non-fictionrelated to football.
This practice-led research project consists of two parts. Part A is the exegetical component. It is sited at the nexus between object biography, which interrogates object agency (Kopytoff 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999) and critical research in football, the academic enquiry of the social (Rookwood and Hughson 2017), cultural (Hughson 2019; Guilianotti and Robertson 2004), political (Penny and Redhead 2009) and economic (Millward 2017) aspects of the game. The theoretical lens underpinning object biography is informed by aesthetics (Best 1978; Mumford 2009, 2016; Borge 2019) spatial theory (Soja 1996, 2008) and nostalgia (Boym 2002; May 2017) and is applied to illuminate the absence of the goal net in critical research in football. Part B is the creative element, a novel-length object biography guided by the human history of Johan Cruyff, to trace and investigate the goal net’s material history.
The goal net’s history as a recognizably differentiated stadium fixture effectively ended at the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain when a standardised goal net replaced the differentiated styles local to the Spanish venues. The standardised goal net has since been established in the top tier professional game. This research argues it has had a significant visual and cultural impact in the stadia in which they are sited and constituted a dramatic change in the visual narrative of goals scored.
Details
- Title
- Understanding Goal Nets as a Symbolic Representation of Changing Football Culture
- Authors
- David Forrest
- Contributors
- Lee McGowan (Supervisor) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Business and Creative Industries
- Awarding institution
- University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
- Degree awarded
- Master of Creative Arts
- Publisher
- University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
- DOI
- 10.25907/00050
- Organisation Unit
- School of Business and Creative Industries; Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; Student Services and Engagement
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99523208902621
- Output Type
- Thesis
Metrics
42 File views/ downloads
245 Record Views