College football kicked off this weekend, and it should come as no surprise that one of the biggest stories surrounded Johnny Manziel. The Texas A&M quarterback rose to national prominence last year with a terrific season, winning the Heisman trophy, and garnering the nickname “Johnny Football.” Returning after a Heisman-season is enough to put one squarely in the media’s lens, but Manziel’s off-the-field summer activities made him a much bigger target.

At the beginning of August, ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported the NCAA was investigating whether Manziel was paid for signing hundreds of autographs, citing two witnesses and multiple other sources. NCAA bylaw 12.5.2.1 states student-athletes cannot use their names or likenesses for commercial gain. More and more sources came forward, including an autograph broker claiming he paid Manziel $7,500. Finally, in late August just days before the season began, the NCAA revealed the results of their investigation: they found no evidence of Manziel receiving payment. However, Manziel would be suspend for the first half of Texas A&M’s opener against Rice this past Saturday for violating the ‘spirit’ of the rule. Many questioned the odd decision and the message it sent, some wondering if he got off too easy.

ESPN played up the controversy as they hyped the opening weekend. This promo video from ESPN writer Wright Thompson shows how the network presented Manziel as a superstar celebrity, emphasizing his off-field personality more than his athletic achievements:

After the game, ESPN got exactly what they wanted: not just a great athletic performance but fuel for the fire of Manziel’s cult of personality. Although Manziel had a great game, this was almost entirely overshadowed by his antics on the field, including autograph and money-based taunting and a personal foul for unsportsmanlike conduct. To be clear, this post is not interested in Manziel’s sportsmanship, eligibility, guilt, or otherwise. What is fascinating about this story is how it was reported and discussed on ESPN immediately afterward, and what that reveals about the nature of celebrity, sports, and media representation.

A quick game recap featured on both ESPN’s website and SportsCenter broadcasts introduced Manziel as the “biggest villain in college football.” When the recap reached the unsportsmanlike conduct call, the reporter said, “I suppose when you win the Heisman trophy, you can do things like that,” although he was quick to add, in a somewhat parodic manner, “but it’s just not becoming of a champion.” In other words the quick-style reporting of the incident did not question Manziel’s actions, and even went so far as to play up the antagonistic behavior.

This reporting is in contrast to several analysts’ takes on the situation, including one from Jesse Palmer calling Manziel’s antics “inexcusable.” After reiterating the ways in which Manziel is viewed as a villain (referencing Heisman jealousy and fraternizing with LeBron James), Palmer shifts focus to Manziel’s performance saying, “Now on the field, I love what Johnny Manziel did today.” Here we see the ways in which ESPN (and several fans) are attempting to both celebrate Manziel’s athletic accomplishments while acknowledging and criticizing his personal presentation.

Davis, Holtz, and May

However, a segment featuring two of the networks stalwart college football analysts, Mark May and Lou Holtz, alongside host Rece Davis pulled back the curtain on how ESPN decides to deal with Manziel as both athlete and celebrity. When discussing Manziel’s taunting, Davis claims, “One of the reasons we love Johnny on the field is because he’s flamboyant, he’s reckless, he takes chances… but there’s a line and he’s got to find that boundary and stay behind it.” When Davis says “we,” he might as well be saying “We here at ESPN,” as he is acknowledging the antics of Manziel are what makes him the celebrity figure he is; loved or hated, it gets a reaction from viewers and gives people a reason to watch ESPN.

After Davis continues to play Manziel’s advocate, claiming Manziel made these gestures last year, May and Holtz immediately argue that Manziel has indeed gone too far with Holtz saying, “I don’t think it’s good for the game… It think it’s good for ESPN, but I don’t think it’s good for the game.” Davis immediately responds by saying, “Well what’s good for ESPN is good for the game,” though he barely gets the last word out as he appears to realize what he is saying. In that brief, unfiltered moment, Rece Davis reveals exactly the position ESPN is in; they are a business who’s role is not to support ‘the game’ as an abstract concept, but to profit alongside the NCAA through stars like Johnny Manziel. (Student-athletes’ inability to make money off their own names/likenesses, of course, makes this problematic).

Rece Davis is absolutely right, from ESPN’s perspective, as Manziel’s antics will only drive more viewers to the screen. By creating the persona of Manziel as the villain or heel, ESPN can engage viewers on a more emotional level, giving people another reason to tune it. This is ESPN creating a narrative to further engage their audience. Just like Breaking Bad or professional wrestling, the desire to see justice prevail and villains punished pulls us in deeper and keeps us watching. They are stuck in the middle between glamorizing and promoting the natural celebrity of Manziel while at the same time criticizing the very actions which make him a celebrity in the first place. ESPN wants it both ways. When it comes to showmanship vs. sportsmanship, ESPN are enablers, wagging their finger with one hand and patting the back with the other. It becomes easy to forget that at the center of all of this is a 20 year-old kid from Tyler, Texas named Johnny.

Much of Jean Baudrillard’s (1993: 79-80) analysis of football as a space for increasing spectacle that at some stage is so enlarged in its representation that the actual event may well not need take place at all, has been proven right over the past decade, but not even he will have imagined the spectacular triumph of superficiality and ephemerality that is Cristiano Ronaldo’s hair–and indeed ego. Those searching for further evidence for the preponderance of the postmodern in European Championship don’t have to look far: once again, the mediated tournament appears in radical isolation from the context of the social, cultural, and physical landscapes in which the matches take place, with the exception of the dramatic thunderstorm that led to an hour-long delay in host nation Ukraine’s group match with France. German public broadcaster ZDF–previously rarely know as a beacon of postmodernism–has inadvertently crossed into the realms of the surreal by deciding to build a stage for its pre- and post-match analysis on a pontoon in the Baltic Sea on the island of Usedom, leaving millions of bewildered viewers–and newspaper columnists–to wonder “why?”, as the floating stage seems to have as little to do with football as host Katrin Müller-Hohenstein and former Germany keeper Oliver Kahn’s wooden attempts at conversation and banter have with entertainment.

Yet, just when there are appears plenty of convincing proof of football’s dissolution into postmodern spectacle, fate presents us with a match-up that forcefully reminds us that base and superstructure are rather less divorced than the non-reductive methodologies of postmodern theories would have us believe. When Greece meets Germany in the second quarterfinal match tonight, it’s, literally, about the Euro(s), stupid!

One of the most persistent myths about the nature of modern sport is that it has lots its innocence and authenticity over time through professionalization and commercialisation. In fact sports, and none more than football–or what Europeans tend to call football and Americans, in reference to Association, call “soccer“–have from their very origin in the second half of the 19^th century been driven by forces of capitalism and industrialisation, resulting in the regulation of time and space and crucially the distinction of participants and spectators, the latter becoming paying customers as early as 1871 when English side Aston Villa was the first to charge at its gates. All that followed from the game’s symbiosis, first with newspapers, then radio, and eventually television to turn it into a the multi-billion dollar industry it is today, adhered to the very principles that had given rise to modern football in the first instance (Sandvoss 2003). And with the popular appeal and reach that football achieved in its mediated form, it inevitably became part of the public sphere in which, as much important work in media and cultural studies has illustrated over the past three decades, the political may not always be popular, but the popular is always politics.

Rarely will this nexus of sports, politics, and money be more evident than when on Friday night the German team meets Greece in Gdansk. In the rhetoric of many Greek politicians, the current economic plight is a result of austerity enforced on the Greek state by the EU and driven by its largest member state Germany. Many Germans in turn are dazzled by such hostility as Germany’s contributions account for nearly half of the €240 billion bailout Greece has received since 2010.

In the same manner, Germany, who have won all three of their first-round matches in what the ever restrained sporting press named “Group of Death”, are perceived as strong favourites, the Goliath threatening to roll over Greece’s brave eleven that somehow sneaked its way through the quarterfinals with efficiency, ingenuity, and self-belief.

But beyond all the hostile rhetoric and regardless of tonight’s result, over time the game will simply confirm the realities of a globalising world–a world in which through pressures of global capitalism as much as, I believe, related yet partially autonomous social, cultural, and political forces, create transnational structures and trajectories that erode the cultural frame of the nation station. The reality of the two teams that will play tonight is that almost half of the Greek squad either currently live, grew up in, or previously played in Germany, much as the German team includes many players of migratory backgrounds, primarily from the Mediterranean. In the same way, the only resolution to the Euro crisis, over time, will be an ever closer political and fiscal union between today’s still seemingly autonomous member states of the Euro Zone. Because, in the end, the Germans, the Greeks, and all of us share something more fundamental than the Euro and the Euros in a clash that the prophetic Monty Python predicted four decades ago. There, finally, is some hair to make Cristiano Ronaldo blush with envy!

I’ve always been a passionate sports fan, and my dad instilled in me the principle of picking one team per sport to root for and sticking with them for life. I grew up in the Chicago area, so that’s had its upsides (the Bulls) and downsides (the Cubs). Rooting for anyone other than the Chicago Bears in pro football has never been an option I’ve entertained. But by participating in fantasy football, I’d have to mostly root for anyone but the Bears, or more precisely, its individual players.

Our group opted for a computer-generated draft, and when I saw the team assigned to me, I had some pleasant surprises – I got the Bears defense! – and some dismaying ones – I got Michael Vick. I’ve thought back on who is the most detestable athlete I ever rooted for simply because he was on “my team,” and I come up short of Michael Vick with every name. Sammy Sosa went sour, but public awareness of that came largely after he left the Cubs. Dennis Rodman is a creep, but he was more charmingly wacky in his Bulls days. Bears quarterback Jay Cutler frowns excessively, but that’s no crime. So having dog killer Michael Vick on the Mathletes probably put me in my most awkward sports-rooting situation ever.

It was also my oddest experience of fandom ever, because it meshed fandom and anti-fandom. Fantasy league players are matched up against another group member each week to earn the highest point total, which means you end up rooting not just for your players but against the ones yours are matched against. It would be as if you’re invested in Sons of Anarchy but need for Breaking Bad to stink that week for it to truly pay off for you. Or more accurately, you need Charlie Hunnam to fake anger more expertly than Aaron Paul. And, because friends of yours are running those other teams, it’s as if Kurt Sutter is rooting for Vince Gilligan to fail (perhaps a bad example; Sutter might do so). You’re even rooting for players you didn’t start to flop so you don’t regret passing on them, akin to hoping for Julianna Margulies to perform poorly in a Good Wife episode because you didn’t have time to watch it. Of course, this is less like fandom and more like gambling, with the expected stress and alcoholism attached.

So I rooted for the dice to come up Vick, and they mostly did…until he got hurt. I can only assume that the karma of violating my long-held anti-dog killing principles started to reverberate at that point. Halfway through the season, to make the fantasy experience less miserable and more like traditional fandom of rooting for lovable things, I traded for the Chicago Bears’ stellar running back Matt Forte. He promptly forgot how to run fast and then went down with a season-ending injury. He wasn’t alone; across four weeks, I lost five starters to major injuries, including Vick. I started to think I should drop all of my players out of concern for their future ability to frolic with their children after retirement. The final indignity came when I lost a late-season matchup to someone not paying attention and starting a player who wasn’t even suited up. Watching the usually glorious NFL RedZone channel that day was like being poked repeatedly with a sharp stick, every cut to a new sequence of plays reminding me where I went wrong, the ticker a loop of regret.

When all was said and calculated, I actually finished the season among the top points-earners in the Acafantasy group but was relegated to fifth place thanks to matchup losses, so had no trophy to show for it. I felt like Community, ranked high in most critics’ Best lists but unmentioned at the Emmys. (Though I was quite happy that The Perd Hapleys won the group. Ya’ heard?) In the end, I decided that I didn’t like the fan that fantasy football created in me. I rooted against the Bears. I rooted for a dog killer. I rooted against friends. I listened to radio shows that spent hours debating if Beanie Wells should start over BenJarvus Green-Ellis. Next year I’ll just go back to rooting for my Chicago Bears, no fantasy fandom involved. There will still be regrets, and Jay Cutler will frown excessively, but at least I can watch RedZone with contentment again.

Let’s back up a bit first, though, to discuss why a room full of Malawians cared so very much that Ghana, a country that is almost 2800 miles away, would win against the seemingly innocuous “villains” of Uruguay.

I want to start by backing up to my frustrations of watching several first round games in the US. Not only is ABC and ESPN’s announcing shockingly bad, but I found that it often walked straight into nasty racist tropes of treating “Africa” as a singular entity. The stats bothered me in particular – I was often told by the screen that “no African team had ever won a game it was losing at the first half,” or so forth. The stats seemed as eager as the announcers to consign “Africa” to being a single unit, either a blameworthy one (as if to say, “damn Africa, why can’t you win a game after the first half? What’s wrong with you?”) or a pitiable one. ABC and ESPN’s treatment of “Africa,” therefore, fit too easily into a centuries-old hackneyed and sloppy racism that can’t see differences within Africa, that frequently treats Africa as a single nation, and that either scorns that nation’s dysfunctionality or pities it and hopes for its small victories as a parent might laugh and clap at an infant saying a funny word for the first time.

And yet I’d seen at Euro 2008, staged during my previous visit to Malawi, how much Africanness matters. Many Malawians I spoke to then had supported France, due to the large number of players from African countries; when France spluttered out of the tournament early on, most shifted allegiances quickly to Spain, and many explained that this was because Spain had several Arsenal players, and Arsenal had several Africans. Eto’o jerseys abounded.

Here in 2010, again Africanness mattered. Earlier, I’d watched The Netherlands play Brazil, and the room had a decidedly lighter feel to it than when Ghana took the stage. Tension gripped the room, and “Ghana moto!” (“Ghana fire!” or “go Ghana!”) yells interchanged with “Africa moto!” The South African channel’s announcers, led by Nelson Mandela’s example earlier in the week, had embraced Ghana whole-heartedly as “our” team. And the celebration following the Ghanaian goal was like no goal celebration I’d seen; earlier in the day, The Netherlands was the room’s clear favorite, but cheers at their goals were tepid by comparison.

From all of this, I want to draw two conclusions.

One is to reiterate the perhaps banal point that when a subjugated group is discursively constructed, members of that group are bound to make what was a semantic and semiotic trick (making all of Africa a single unit) something of a reality through identifying with their fellows in subjugation. Malawians could and perhaps should vigorously assert their individuality – and at other times, of course they do – but if on one hand nobody bothers to listen when they do, and on the other hand there are pleasures in the strategic essentialism of “being African,” one can understand why it happens.

Two is to encourage readers not to fall headlong into the generalizations themselves by seeing this as “Africa’s heartbreak.” Sure, it would have been nice if Ghana won. But the ills that have been delivered across Africa by centuries of Euro-American aggression and exploitation were hardly going to be redressed by Ghana winning a football match or three, nor has the continent felt this as a shattering blow to the heart. Today, business is back to usual, and I saw way more day-after depression when Canada crashed out of Olympic hockey in Gretzky’s last year than I see here today. If “Africa” exists, it is only in brief moments anyways, so to pity Africa and feel sorry for “its” loss is to fall into the discursive trap of giving the term “Africa” – complete with its significant colonial baggage – more mileage than it deserves.