Sport celebrities and cosmopolitan imaginaries

Blog post by Max Mauro, Bournemouth University, UK
 
Lamine Yamal, the 17-year-old wonderkid in the world of football, has three tiny flags printed on his boots: that of Equatorial Guinea, the country of origin of his mother; that of Morocco, the country of origin of his father; and that of Spain, the country where he was born and that he decided to represent in international competitions. His case is not original; over the last decades, many athletes with multiple national backgrounds have risen to fame.
 
They are often the offspring of migration journeys from the Global South to the Global North or members of ethnic minorities. In one case or the other, they have likely been racialized, and they often claim to have experienced racism and discrimination. Furthermore, their belonging to the ‘nation’ is frequently questioned in public and media discourse, as happened to the members of the France national teams who won the men’s FIFA World Cup in 1998 and 2018.
 
The global visibility of sports such as football magnifies the impact that these dynamics can have on popular culture. In a way, the sporting spectacle exposes the fragility of the 'imagined communities' that we call nations by showing that is perfectly normal to have multiple belongings. As noted by Stuart Hall, identities are never fully settled; they are made of continuous additions and diversions. However, this contradicts the way sports and media usually represent people and nations; as crystallized identities, often fixed in stereotypical traits.

The case of Yamal and others points to an interesting development. It is increasingly common for sport personalities to celebrate their diverse ethnic and national backgrounds; in other words, to embrace their diasporic backgrounds rather than downplaying them as it was, until quite recently, more common. By doing so, they consciously or unconsciously articulate new cosmopolitan imaginaries.
 
This is the topic of my Identities article, ‘Whose nation? The racialization of sporting heroes and the emergence of new cosmopolitan imaginaries’. Drawing on theories of race in sport, media and popular culture, and on the ongoing debate on the significance of cosmopolitanism and diaspora, I argue that sport celebrities have the power to counter nationalistic and xenophobic discourses, which are particularly active across Europe.
 
On the one hand, their global personas are enhanced by social media, where they count followers in the millions. Their followers cannot be interpreted as traditional ‘audiences’, but their large numbers testify to a wide outreach. Sports stars, like other celebrities, function as resources that individuals and collectives draw on to develop their own identities, using what Appadurai calls ‘social imagination’.
 
On the other hand, in the current media landscape, traditional media such as broadcasters and newspapers continue to lose grip on societies. Their historical publics increasingly shift toward different media and alternative sources of information. As it happens, traditional media have been instrumental in the popularization of sports, while sport competitions have expanded the publics of the mass media.
 
Sports and mass media have historically relied on culturally bounded communities; the same communities they have contributed to construct as ‘nations’. Over time, sports and media have strengthened the view that human societies are ‘naturally’ organized as nation-states.
 
Three combined factors may contribute to change this scenario: the evolution of the media landscape toward a less hierarchical structure; the persistent importance of sport events in popular culture; and, finally, the global visibility of racialized sport personalities who proudly reclaim their diasporic roots, articulating more cosmopolitan imaginaries.

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Image credit: Photo by Masarath Alkhaili on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
Mauro, M. (2025). Whose nation? The racialization of sporting heroes and the emergence of new cosmopolitan imaginaries. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2025.2505309   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

​Flying the Flag: Identities, the Nation, and Sport

The intersections of race and gendered stereotypes within the constructions of digital women footballers in video games   OPEN ACCESS

Whose ‘wee country’?: identity politics and sport in Northern Ireland