Hybridisation of Football and Politics in Italy

This paper explores the relation between the rhetorics of politics and football in Italy. As a four-time World Champion, Italy is perhaps the most prominent example of a country, in which politicians have adopted football language and use it to analyze politics and to make it intelligible for their audiences. This paper intends to shed light on the symbolic hybridization of football and politics and its origins in Italy, focusing on the rhetorical uses of football language by Italian politicians. Italian political rhetoric has been greatly influenced by football due to the great popularity of the game at least from the 1980s. Although the use of football language is often associated with the rise of Silvio Berlusconi and with the birth of the so-called “second Italian republic”, Berlusconi is by no means the only or the first politician to employ football jargon in his speeches. Berlusconi, however, used football symbolism more systematically and successfully than any politician before him. Currently, Italian politicians such as Matteo Salvini and Matteo Renzi, use football language for political analysis. Matteo Renzi has, for instance, used the football term false nine to analyse the defeat of the Democratic Party in the 2018 elections. The use of this kind of relatively new football term illustrates, how football language offers new possibilities for political analysis. In other words, the ‘theory’ of football is used to analyze political struggles, its tactics, strategies and procedural aspects. The example shows, that mastering football language requires sophisticated knowledge regarding the game and surrounding issues. Moreover, the development of the game ensures that new terms and concepts are continuously introduced in the jargon and adopted by politicians who are interested in the game. Football can also be considered as one of the most universal special languages, in the same sense as, for instance, parliamentary language, which has its own rhetorical conventions, and which allows the parliamentarians from different countries to understand each other. This is illustrated by Renzi’s statement on Britain’s EU referendum. Renzi claimed, that if Britain decides to leave the EU, it is forever and continued: “it’s not that there is first a home match and then an away game”. This paper identifies different manifestations of hybridization of football and politics and maintains that football and politics are not so much separate as they are usually depicted.