Passing to India: a critique of American football's expansion

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Passing to India: a critique of American football's expansion

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Passing to India: a critique of American football’s expansion

Erika PolsonUniversity of Denver, USA

Erin WhitesideUniversity of Tennessee, USA

AbstractAlthough India has long held a passion for cricket, an organization called the Elite Football League of India (EFLI) is looking to disrupt that sporting nerve center, and introduce the foreign sport of American football to the country’s growing middle class. While it is too soon to assess how Indian audiences will respond to, negotiate and perhaps create new cultural practices around American football, we focus this article on an analysis of efforts made by promoters of the new league to create a cultural context in which this very foreign game might make sense. Drawing from press releases, promotional videos and news coverage, we demonstrate how language of social, economic and individual (male) development is deployed to create American football as a platform for delivering global brands to a vast Indian market. In deconstructing these efforts, we critically explicate how creative practices are implemented to produce an atmosphere within which globalization may occur.

Keywordsemerging middle class, globalization and sport, India, labor exploitation, neoliberalism, sports and gender

In August 2012, eight teams made up of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan athletes gath-ered in a stadium in Sri Lanka to play the first season of the Elite Football League of India (EFLI), a new venture by US investors to bring the virtually unknown sport of

Corresponding author:Erika Polson, University of Denver, 2490 S. Gaylord St., Denver, CO 80208, USA. Email: [email protected]

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American football to televisions across the Indian subcontinent. Founders tout the league’s financial potential, as India is the site of an emerging leisure economy and, due to recent changes to regulations on foreign direct investment, has become more open to foreign brands. Globalizing commercial enterprises increasingly leverage ‘sport’s cul-tural capital to raise the global profile and appeal of corporate brands and to expand the global market for their products’(Smart, 2007: 6); indeed, Rupert Murdoch sees the ‘uni-versal appeal’of sport as a ‘battering ram’ to open new television markets (Miller et al., 2001: 64). However, as Thussu points out, ‘US-led Western media conglomerates have regionalized and localized their content’ (2010: 222, emphasis added) in a process of glocalization that sees media tailored for specific audiences, not necessarily out of respect for national cultures but rather for commercial necessity (2010: 229). In this process, Thussu says that television audiences are reimagined as consumers, rather than citizens. Such practices have been most marked in the emergent economies of globaliza-tion, where nascent middle classes present a new throng of consumers for whose loyal-ties global brands may now compete.

In this article, we analyze promotional and media discourse around the expansion of American football into India, demonstrating how a new site of cultural production is marked out through a paternalistic development rhetoric which, we argue, masks a highly exploitative and potentially dangerous venture (particularly considering that the sport is introduced to India at a time when its safety is an increasing topic of concern within the US football establishment). Season one’s debut was less than spectacular, and while it is too soon to assess whether the sport will take hold, and how Indian audiences will respond to, negotiate, and perhaps create new cultural practices around American foot-ball, we focus this article on an analysis of efforts made by promoters of the new league to create a cultural context in which this very foreign game might make sense. Scholars have long discussed the need to understand the actual practices that make up economic globalization (e.g. Sassen, 2001), noting that it is no longer adequate to simply invoke globalization as a master trope (e.g. Chakravartty and Zhao, 2007). Drawing from press releases, promotional videos and news coverage, we demonstrate how language of social, economic and individual (male) development is deployed in an effort to create American football as a platform for delivering global brands to a vast Indian market. In deconstructing these efforts, we critically explicate how creative practices are imple-mented to produce an atmosphere within which globalization can occur.

Sport, globalization and culture

The global spread of ‘modern sport’ can be traced via 18th-century colonial trajecto-ries, with the British leading the regulation and diffusion of sport until the mid 1900s (Guttman, 1994). With established standards around rules, roles, playing fields and equipment, British sports such as cricket and soccer became ‘cultural forms’ that were exported throughout the expanding empire (Bairner, 2001). Through these cultural forms, the bodies of colonized men were disciplined to support the needs of colonial administration, and organized sport is now understood as having been ‘utilized in order to “civilize” and control populations’ (Miller et al., 2001: 99). Miller et al. (2001: 10) stress that this instrumental use of sport developed and expanded along with empires,



Polson and Whiteside 663

pointing out that the modern Olympics, as well as global governing bodies for soccer, cricket and tennis, all emerged during the height of European colonization during the late 1800s to early 1900s. However, homegrown games such as baseball and American football (in the case of the United States) were invented as a part of creating new national traditions distinct from those of the former colonizers (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007).

The later rise of the US and its supplanting of Great Britain as the world’s most promi-nent empire may be understood partly through the lens of national sport. Guttman (1994: 2) argues that after the Second World War, Americans took over as ‘primary agents in the diffusion of modern sports’, and sees National Football League (NFL) expansion efforts as an attempt to ‘displace firmly rooted British sports’ (1994: 112) in Europe. This new mode of imperial contest comes about in a neoliberal context in which nation-states have increasingly dropped barriers to flows of foreign products and media; such shifts have opened the door for the creation of what some have lamented is an Americanized global popular culture, including sport (Crothers, 2007). Although the way sports are produced and packaged as commodities to be sold through television and merchandising reflects this process of the Americanization of sport, Bairner (2001) claims these trends point more generally to the encroachment of global capitalism. Goldman and Johns (2009) refer to such productions as ‘sportainment’, in that they focus as much on creating an entertaining package as on broadcasting the actual athletic contest.

Over the past several decades, scholars have increasingly turned their attention toward relationships between sports and society, pointing out the powerful ways that sport functions as a space for the display and celebration of normative behavior and ways of knowing (e.g. Coakley, 2000; Messner, 2002). Sports are lauded in US public discourse, for instance, because of their presumed ability to transcend race, class and gender lines, as well as for their ability to teach such cornerstone capitalistic values as hard work, teamwork and obeying authority. Assumptions about sports as a pro-social force are often used as justification for funneling resources to sports-based programs; the United Nations, for example, touts sports’ positive values as justification for the inclusion of sports programs in its mission (Hartmann and Kwauk, 2011). Similarly, American universities often point to such benefits to justify dedicating an overwhelm-ing amount of resources to an increasingly commercialized version of amateur sports (Clotfelter, 2011).

In the United States, sport is often described as a hegemonic institution because of the ways its discursive frameworks justify male authority and naturalize normative gender roles (Duncan, 2006). Sports featuring visible displays of power, such as football or baseball, enjoy cultural primacy in the US because they showcase an ideal, or hegemonic form of masculinity. American football features bodily contact, vicious but sanctioned brutality, and is only formally sponsored as a male sport at US academic institutions. Players are praised for playing through pain and sacrificing their bodies for the team – in doing so, showing no fear or weakness (Anderson and Kian, 2012). Emblematic of these standards is the abundance of war metaphors used in sporting discourse, where sport becomes analogous to military and battle, with action described by terms such as ‘kill … weapons … taking aim, fighting, shot in his arsenal, reloading’, etc. (Messner et al., 2004: 239). Such terminology invites spectators to view sports as a space in which




masculinity is celebrated and revered, and one in which boys and men embody a natural aptitude.

Despite the privilege awarded to the display of hegemonic masculinity, its celebration masks how embodying this ‘ideal’ subjectivity poses a threat to the body (Jhally and Katz, 1999). For instance, new medical research has illuminated concerns about how playing football – and sustaining the brutal hits that are emblematic of routine play – may affect the brain. In a study commissioned by the NFL, researchers found that former football players were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or other memory-related diseases at higher rates than the general population (Weir et al., 2009). And a recent study examining donated brains of 35 deceased ex-football players found that all but one included evi-dence of a serious degenerative brain condition (McKee et al., 2012). The NFL has strongly campaigned to discredit such research and the league’s tactics in this regard have elicited criticism from various circles. One US politician, for example, compared the NFL to ‘big tobacco’, arguing that it is knowingly leading individuals down a path to imminent health risks (Dwyre, 2013). The research and dissident voices directly chal-lenge the cultural juggernaut that is American football; at a time when the future of football in the United States is increasingly in question, expansion into international markets is strategic for investors looking to use football as a platform for reaching brand-conscious consumers.

The areas that make up this overall context (e.g. sportainment and globalization; sports and masculinity) intersect with the launch of the Elite Football League of India. The league, a well-orchestrated and expensive effort to introduce American football to an Indian audience and potential investors, provides a useful context through which to inter-rogate the persistent march of globalization with a particular focus on a key player in that process – India’s growing middle class.

India’s new middle class

With the second fastest growing economy in the world, India has become one of the most sought-after markets to emerge from the policies of deregulation and liberalization that characterize the era of globalization. Attention is largely fixated on the country’s expanding middle class, which makes up over 45% of the country’s 1.2 billion people and is expected to grow tenfold by 20251 (US Department of State, 2012). Although India’s middle class has developed steadily since the mid 1970s, it burgeoned when major economic reforms of 1991 opened the economy to foreign investment and reduced trade tariffs (Mathur, 2010). According to Mathur, the shift from a socialist to a liberal-ized economy ushered in new middle-class subjectivities by facilitating ‘a rise in con-spicuous consumption and the concomitant emergence of a consumer culture coupled with increasing affluence and individualism’ (2010: 217). Business analysts home in on this new consumer class as a target for global brands; as one report from Deloitte (2010: 5) noted, ‘Growing disposable income has led to increasing consumer aspiration, with easy access to consumer finance lending a source to achieve these aspirations and desires.’ The potential windfall has been compounded by the 2013 decision by the Indian government to allow 100% foreign direct investment by single-brand retailers




(Syed, 2012), and 51% ownership by multi-brand retailers, such as Wal-Mart, is on the horizon (Venkatesan, 2012).

Global brands entering the Indian market find an overall receptive social environment that sees upward mobility and modernization tied to the consumption of foreign goods (Oza, 2006). As Fernandes (2000: 614) notes, the ‘abroad’ is a signifier of privilege in middle-class discourse, and the ‘notion that “abroad is now in India” … signifies the potential realization of middle-class aspirations of consumption, one that can now take place within India’s borders’. The cultural capital attached to foreign consumption is further elaborated by the fact that the growth of many middle-class jobs in India is con-nected to global business practices, where knowledge of ‘the abroad’ becomes a profes-sional qualification. For example, call-center employment requires ‘de-Indianization’ training, which includes studying US television to learn American lifestyles, attitudes and accents (Pal, 2004).

According to Oza (2006: 12), India’s consumption lifestyle was ‘bolstered by adver-tisements, newspapers, magazines and television programs that filled the popular imagi-nation with attitudes reflecting the new modern middle classes’. The liberalization of the media sector has enabled the rise of this consumer culture; since 1991, India has gone from five television channels to 825 (Thussu, 2012). While ‘the main aim of the national broadcasters … was to educate, inform and create a feeling of national identity and help maintain national unity’ (Thussu, 1999: 126), a privatized media system acts as a vehicle for connecting Indian consumers to businesses. For example, citing untapped potential in media and entertainment, Ernst & Young advises clients that Indian television ‘provides attractive growth opportunities for global corporations’ (2011: 48), and notes the $2 bil-lion televised cricket market ‘has demonstrated the huge commercial potential of sports in India’ (2011: 51).

Sports and India

In general, India is not considered a prominent center of sporting excellence, which may be a function of a lack of resources directed toward the country’s athletic programs (Chelladurai et al., 2002). Yet India excels in certain sports, most notably cricket, which enjoys a passionate following among Indians at home and abroad (Chelladurai et al.; Kaufman and Patterson, 2005). Cricket’s high visibility and fervent following reflect what Markovits and Hellerman (2001: 12) call a hegemonic sports culture, in that the sport has become a ‘social force’ beyond the field of play. It is this locus of power that EFLI sees as one of its biggest challenges, as American football has no prior presence in the country.

During the early period of British colonization, cricket was a sport of cultural elites and its fields a space to display upper-strata values (Kaufman and Patterson, 2005). Eventually, talented non-elites were encouraged to play, and cricket’s wide diffusion has been attributed to its lack of class-based barriers (Appadurai, 1996; Kaufman and Patterson, 2005; Mills, 2010). As the game developed, matches between Indian and British sides generated enthusiasm among the public, as it became ‘a vehicle for express-ing anti-colonial and nationalist emotions’ (Mills, 2010: 211). However, it is overly sim-plistic to assert that India adopted cricket as a direct result of British colonization; a




non-contact sport, cricket was in many ways consistent with Indian values toward the body, which included highly regulated social mores around human contact and directives prohibiting the mixing of social classes (Mills, 2010).

In the postcolonial period, cricket has become what Appadurai (1996: 111) calls ‘pro-foundly Indianized’. The country has enjoyed consistent success in international matches, a point of pride given the symbolic dimensions of international sporting competition (Rowe et al., 1998). Rumford (2007) asserts that cricket is in a period of post-westernization, which he attributes to (1) the physical relocation of cricket’s international body from Britain to India; and (2) the process by which Indians re-appropriated traditional English cricket into a new, made-for-TV version. In particular, India took what was once a more complicated and lengthy game (extending up to five days, with no clear winner) and transformed it into a mediated spectacle that caters to India’s new leisure and entertain-ment economy (Rowe and Gilmour, 2009). The Indian Premier League (IPL) follows the logic of the US sports model: games are played at times that maximize television viewer-ship, teams are based in major urban centers, and contests even feature cheerleaders – imported from the United States (Rowe and Gilmour, 2009).

Background and methodology

The EFLI is the brainchild of American marketing consultant Sunday Zeller, who co-founded the league with Richard Whelan and currently serves as CEO (Stone, 2012). Although EFLI has no formal connection with the NFL, well-known NFL personalities such as Super Bowl MVP (‘Most Valuable Player’) Kurt Warner and legendary coach Mike Ditka, as well as former executives, are investors. The league contracted Ten Sports, South Asia’s largest sports content provider, to broadcast all games through 2016, giving investors hope for a vast television audience (Monday night football …, 2012). Indeed, the venture initially focused on television over stadium play. The entire first season was played in August 2012, in a single stadium, after first teaching players the rules of the game; EFLI producers then created packaged programming for its debut autumn ‘season’. To maximize viewer engagement, Emmy Award winning broadcaster Sandy Grossman, who has directed 10 Superbowls, was hired to train the Indian crew on production techniques, creating ‘a mix that’s part Sports Center highlight reel and part reality TV’ (Hannon, 2012: para. 3).

Given the resources dedicated to this venture in conjunction with the priority status global brands are bestowing on India’s emerging middle class, efforts to launch the EFLI present an instructive case study to assess cultural practices structuring economic glo-balization. With that in mind, we sought to examine how EFLI promotional discourses and related news coverage negotiated concepts of identity and modernity through narra-tives positing the universal benefits of professional sport. We conducted a theoretical thematic analysis to examine EFLI marketing materials, including press releases and promotional videos, as well as worldwide news coverage of the league, which turned up articles in mainly US and (very few) Indian outlets. Using the LexisNexis news database and Google, we conducted searches of the terms ‘EFLI’ and ‘Elite Football League of India’, which generated 64 articles from 18 July 2011 to 1 April 2013. Additionally, we




collected all available promotional material, including press releases and promotional videos, from the EFLI website. All material was in English.2

We began the analysis with each researcher reviewing the material independently. Because we viewed both print and video, we took into account Meyrowitz’s (1998) model for media literacy, which calls for analyses to focus on both content and form. In applying these techniques, we followed Baptiste’s (2001) approach for interpretive anal-yses, which suggests first coding or ‘tagging’ content in such a way that it stays close to the text’s manifest meaning. Following this initial process, we came together to analyze the codes with a focus on similarities and differences and grouped them into categories that we labeled ‘economics’, ‘development’ and ‘gender’. Baptiste (2001) argues that final themes go beyond a simple ‘glossary’ and instead draw from the researcher’s inter-pretive lens to provide explanatory statements. As one author’s research focuses on eco-nomic globalization and cultural change, and the other focuses critically on sports, media, gender and society, we worked through theoretical lenses to create four themes – pointed at potential investors as well as prospective Indian television audiences – that demonstrate how discourses of neoliberalism and gender converge in a push to develop an exploitative labor market in support of US investors and global brands.

Theme 1: A new frontier for American corporate expansion

Although the success of the IPL is touted as evidence for EFLI’s potential to create a successful media spectacle, marketing literature presents India as a sports-starved coun-try, whose citizens only have cricket to watch, suggesting the entry of a new sport as a strategic move by investors. Co-CEO Richard Whalen explains, ‘We felt that India didn’t have enough games or sport to watch on television, and thus, see a huge potential there’ (Xavier, 2011: para. 8); this perceived lack is framed as an opportunity for the league to, as one writer puts it, ‘diversify India’s sporting pallet’ (RSB, 2012: para. 3). India is presented to potential investors as an audience-in-waiting, as former NFL player and current investor Ron Chillar explains: ‘I know it’s all about cricket here, but I believe that if you give people an alternative, and give them an aggressive fun sport to watch, they’ll take to it’(The guy bringing U.S. football …, 2012: para. 13).

Much of the argument for investors to join EFLI’s venture rests on India’s booming population, citing its ranking as the world’s second most populous nation to suggest the country, as co-founder Zeller explains, is ‘ripe for new opportunities’(Stone, 2012). The growing population is understood economically, often in comparison to an American standard. One writer explains, ‘If American football catches on, viewership could sur-pass the US viewership four times over’ (Ghosh, 2012: para. 5). At the same time, how-ever, reporters and EFLI executives acknowledge that American football is a foreign concept to Indians; one writer calls the idea ‘ambitious’, and investor and ESPN person-ality Ron Jaworski is quoted saying: ‘In India, I don’t think they know if the football was stuffed or pumped’(RSB, 2012). This raised questions about the league’s ability to put a strong product on the field, and critiques of season one compared the level of play to a US high school game (e.g. Bajaj and Belson, 2012). Again, however, the country’s large




populace is often cited as evidence for India’s potential to eventually produce elite-level players, describing India as offering ‘an immense pool of talent’ and as ‘a country that loves sports’. Zeller explains it as such: ‘In a country with 1.3 billion people, of course there are athletes’(Stone, 2012: para. 9).

Theme 2: Social progress measured by the ascendance of American sports

Promotional discourses around the nascent EFLI exploit the connection between India’s escalating consumer culture and American brands by linking a rising India to the ‘American dream’, naturalizing assumptions of the universalism of American values. In this vein, EFLI promotions aimed at both US investors and Indian audiences portray pro-gressive societal development as following a trajectory that can be traced through the availability and popularity of particular sports. An EFLI video called ‘Traditional sports in India’ begins with text asserting that ‘traditional sports in India are comprised of ancient games, most are declining in popularity’, which overlays a black-and-white photo of a man playing cricket. The video then builds its argument through a disparaging sequence targeting specific sports that are supposedly ‘ancient’ and ‘in decline’, including rugby, soccer, field hockey (all colonial-legacy sports) and finally, kabbadi, a native Indian sport that the video explains patronizingly by equating it to the children’s game, Red Rover. The video goes on to assert that ‘now India is embracing modern sports’, and presents imagery and statistics on the growing popularity of Formula One, hockey, golf, basketball, vol-leyball, and … American football (EFLI, 2012b). Compared to the ‘modern’ American football, cricket and other popular sports are constructed as boring, slow and lacking in excitement. One story describes cricket as ‘genteel’ (Associated Press, 2011: para. 1); and a promotional video, entitled ‘Not your daddy’s game’, features a young Indian man play-ing with a soccer ball, only to be brutally tackled by a football player, juxtaposing the ‘boring’ game of soccer against exciting American football (EFLI, 2012a). League inves-tor Kevin Dieball echoed those sentiments when quoted as saying that football is ‘more of a thrilling game’ in comparison to the less physical and exciting cricket. The superiority of American football over other sports is highlighted again in a video called ‘Gladiators’, which calls football the ‘most advanced game on the planet’, describes it as ‘similar to the game of chess’ and claims it is ‘the only game which showcases the ultimate gladiators, the fastest, the strongest, the quickest’(EFLI, 2012h).

To address doubts about whether American football can thrive in a new culture, another video, which highlights the achievements of the Canadian Football League, pos-its the expansion of American football as natural and universal. The video situates the popularity of American football as a cultural and societal milestone, connected to univer-sal values and essential human traits: ‘Football’s rise in popularity is [a] natural mile-stone that is universal and will cross all cultures. Simply put, the human eye is drawn to televised football’ (EFLI, 2012c). This image of a universal sport portrays a game so inherent to the progressive rise of India that soon it will be considered a timeless classic. A video called ‘The EFLI spirit’ uses a glocalization strategy combining Bollywood music with black-and-white footage of scrimmages between EFLI teams to position the sport as already absorbed into Indian culture (EFLI, 2012d). Another, ‘Kids can dream’,




proclaims: ‘In the near future children will not believe football didn’t always exist in India.’ That clip uses inspirational music, visions of camaraderie and playful scenes of boys and men throwing the football, supported by the headline ‘Dreams Begin Here’, to suggest the American dream is being instilled in India and that football is the beginning of that dream (EFLI, 2012e). EFLI is constructed not only as a ‘new era of sports in India’, as many videos and press releases claim, but as part of a new era of Indian moder-nity, achieved through its growing connection to American culture. Zeller directly asserts her belief that American football is destined for India. In an interview she proclaims:

There is no way two people – or even 100 – could have achieved what we have without some sort of universal blessing. It’s almost as though this is destined to become what it is. I feel … that there is some sort of divine intervention, if you will … I feel like I am just some sort of tool used for something far greater and far bigger. (Stone, 2012: para. 14)

Theme 3: Football is virtuous, a field for solving societal problems

EFLI promoters exuberantly portray a new venture with almost limitless market poten-tial, yet carefully balance this discourse with a parallel sentiment highlighting the benev-olent implications of the new league. Zeller explains: ‘The financial implication of where this could go is not what drives it, although our investors clearly see the potential’ (Stone, 2012: para. 11). ‘What drives it’ is recounted across multiple press releases and inter-views where Zeller speaks of a multitude of societal problems she believes the sport will solve. According to this message, the true purpose of the EFLI is to raise boys out of poverty, develop new sporting opportunities in an emerging economy, promote values of equality among classes and religions, and create peace between India and Pakistan. In the ‘EFLI pledge’, which forms the boilerplate on email updates about the new league, Zeller declares:

The EFLI was founded on the concepts of love and unity. By bringing together the East and the West in alliance to eliminate poverty … the EFLI will make the impossible a reality through peaceful, healthy competitive play. Regardless of faith or political view, we can all embrace the game and come together in celebration of the mission.

Promotions portray American football as a route to economic and social development, claiming EFLI will rescue children from the slums of South Asia. This humanitarian mis-sion is presented as a key motivator for investors: Hollywood actor and EFLI investor Mark Wahlberg said that once he heard of Zeller’s undertaking, he felt compelled to ‘commit to the cause’ (Gaines, 2012: para. 2), a sentiment echoed by Kurt Warner, who hopes to ‘use the great game of football to truly impact the people of India, both on and off the field, and help many to improve on their quality of life’ (Gaines, 2012).

Promotional ads also portray the football field as a proxy battlefield where societal tensions ranging from class inequalities to feuds between neighboring nations can be solved through amicable competition. A video entitled ‘Helmets’ poses Indian and Pakistani football players as warriors, depicting players solemnly readying for battle




through the ritual of putting on their helmets (EFLI, 2012i). Another spot mimics the pomp and circumstance of a military parade, finally declaring, ‘the ultimate rivalry, India versus Pakistan, will now be settled on the field: The football field.’ Despite the serious-ness and legitimacy of the football field as battlefield proxy, the video goes on to say, ‘Win or lose, the competition always ends with a handshake’ (EFLI, 2012f).

In a press release, EFLI touts its role in ‘bringing a little bit of peace to a world that is so wrought with hate’ (Stone, 2012). An announcement regarding the league’s broadcast-ing deal with Ten Sports asserts, ‘the focus on peaceful play on field between countries at war politically and religiously will offer a new message to the children and the world’ (Monday night …, 2012). Despite altruistic messages, EFLI promotional material leaves room for investors to understand the potential of the league by reminding them that 1 billion people watched India play Pakistan in the 2011 cricket World Cup semi-final. Founders insist, though, that the larger goal is one of peace, even though the road to peace (through football) yields great profit: ‘Respect and unity brought by our EFLI games of India vs Pakistan rather than division of warfare is very valuable’ (The EFLI lands Gibran Hamdan …, 2012: para. 12) and thus has ‘telecast commercial appeal’ (para. 14). Media have picked up the message; for example, an article running with an EFLI press release about the Ten Sports deal begins, ‘With a stated goal to improve the economic conditions of underprivileged youth, the EFLI is moving forward with a humanitarian mission backed by unprecedented revenue potential’ (Elite Football, 2013: para. 1).

Theme 4: American football represents the new Indian man in a stronger India

To introduce American football to a country with no prior knowledge of the sport, the EFLI attempts to manufacture interest in what, up to this point, has been mainly a US cultural product. League promotions strategically introduce American football through a gendered lens, tapping into normative gender assumptions, and offering the sport as a pathway to a ‘modern’ (read: American) and civilized embodiment of manhood. Several of the videos, for instance, juxtapose Indian boys to men, suggesting American football provides a pathway to successful embodiment of the latter. This message pervades the promo ‘The spirit of football’, which explains through textual overlays that boys have a ‘natural aggression’, are ‘born’ with the call to engage in competitive sports, and are incapable of ‘sitting in stillness’. These ideas manifest in the video by depicting adoles-cent Indian boys playing a haphazard game that features constant movement and bodily contact. Suddenly, a man arrives to the game, draws a line in the dirt and hands the boys a football; the game morphs into an EFLI contest, featuring players in full gear. Textual overlays summarize what is already obvious: ‘The culmination of all that is masculine of this spirit that is inherent in the hearts of both boy and man is celebrated on the playing field of football’ (EFLI, 2012g).

Media coverage of the league often describes American football by drawing from shared assumptions that point to the value of the game in the United States. One article notes that India ‘is about to get a taste of the rough and tumble sport of American foot-ball’ (Associated Press, 2011: para. 1). Promotional material, however, offers a more




nuanced understanding of football that does not overly highlight the physicality of the game. Even in the ‘Gladiator’ video (EFLI, 2012h), in which football players are com-pared to Roman gladiators, viewers are not invited to revel in the brutality of either; notably absent in the narrative is a glorification of violence. Although military discourse makes its way into material, most obviously in the spot about the Indian/Pakistan rivalry (EFLI, 2012f), where players are described as ‘warriors’ (and many team mascots, such as Warhawks, Gladiators and Marathas – Hindi for ‘warriors’ – reflect this sentiment), EFLI material presents football as largely refined and civil. Videos often use slow-motion shots featuring players dousing themselves in water or staring intently on the field, point-ing to stoicism and determination, and offering a vision of a dominant, assertive leader. Much of the footage features low shots, which emphasize player size and presumed cultural power. At the same time, many videos allude to concepts of teamwork and unity; for example, ‘Kids can dream’ includes many shots of players sitting together, tying their shoes together, congratulating each other and generally engaging in constructive group activities (EFLI, 2012e). Ultimately, football is framed as a space where the refined ten-ets of masculinity will manifest themselves. A letter from sportscaster Paul Crane pub-lished as part of the EFLI marketing plan sums up this sentiment; to illustrate the virtue of players he observed during an exhibition game, Crane writes:

They all stood respectfully as the national anthems from each country were played, with players from the anthems’ country singing along. Once all three anthems were done … the teams came together, started jumping up and down, high-fiving and embracing. (An Absolute, 2012:para 5)

Discussion

Despite immense publicity and strategic marketing, the EFLI had a lackluster debut (Ten Sports aired the pre-recorded opening game at 8:30 on a Saturday morning) and elicited very little buzz outside of its own PR-generated media campaign. The second season was pushed back eight months to develop a new strategy: moving to a traditional format of live broadcasts of games played in home stadiums, including a New Year’s Eve opening game spectacle in the massive Salt Lake Stadium in Pune, which, if promoters are able to fill all 120,000 seats, will be the highest-attended football game ever (Ratnam, 2013). Although EFLI owners claim a lack of understanding of football’s rules and strategies are behind the unsuccessful season, and suggest the solution is further training players and educating audiences, American football’s acceptance and subsequent diffusion will ultimately depend on how it is understood culturally.

Although EFLI founders seek to capitalize on India’s developing consumer land-scape, their methods reveal the balancing act required for the league to exploit business opportunities embedded in a social environment undergoing massive transformation through neoliberalism. The liberalizing reforms that opened India to global investment also resulted in a dramatically widening gap between classes. Although a middle class has emerged, with the state retreating from ‘social responsibility toward its poor’ a for-gotten class has become increasingly desperate (Oza, 2006: 16). Considering that, in the neoliberal context, social concerns shift to private enterprise, and considering that it is this same reform context that allows for the very existence of the EFLI, the onus is on the owners to position their venture as acting in the public good.




In introducing the game to a prospective market in India, EFLI promotions use narra-tives touting the sport’s pro-social benefits. By alluding to football’s ability to raise boys out of the slums, foster teamwork and dedication, and play a (presumed) role in facilitat-ing peace between nations by uniting players on a civilized battlefield, the league pre-sents the ‘foreign’ concept of American football as a positive social force, consistent with contemporary Indian values and needs. Such an approach has long provided a powerful logic for the cultural adoption – and sustained financial support – of sporting programs across various contexts (Clotfelter, 2011; Hartmann and Kwauk, 2011). The pro-social narrative of sport also functions ideologically by masking how its adoption and diffusion of cultural values simultaneously produces social hierarchies (Coakley, 2000). This pro-cess is manifest in two key areas, discussed below: (1) the value of a global outlook in relation to Indian middle class upward mobility, and (2) the emergence of new gendered subjectivities.

Selling an ‘Indian dream’

Through promotions conferring the ideals of modernity, progress and an exceptional ‘American dream’ on the game of American football, the EFLI reaches out to Indian middle-class consumers, welcoming them into ‘modern’ global culture. EFLI videos of Indians playing American football create a site where India’s relationship to global cul-ture can be visualized, negotiated and assimilated. Fernandes explains that, by producing a ‘vision of the Indian nation’ that idealizes the new middle classes and their consump-tion habits, media representations become ‘a crucial site in which the politics of eco-nomic liberalization are negotiated through the articulation of a new relationship between the national and the global’ (2000: 612). Across multiple national milieus, researchers find that liberalization has accompanied the emergence of ‘globalizing’ or ‘denational-ized’ middle classes in conjunction with global economic opportunities (e.g. Koning, 2009; Rutz and Balkan, 2009). In this context, key to upward mobility as a member of a globally focused, new Indian middle class is the ability to navigate external cultural ref-erences. Watching and learning about American football, indeed, having an elite league devoted to American football, puts the ‘abroad in India’ (Fernandes, 2000) and signifies a connection between India and global. In this way, EFLI promotes a new ‘Indian dream’, promising dividends by way of valuable global cultural capital in exchange for viewership.

Because this dream has left some Indians behind, the development rhetoric of EFLI founders becomes an important accompaniment to the orchestration of their overall mes-sage. A consistent message focused on the philanthropic mission of the league functions as reassurance to Indians worried about those who may be left behind in their globalizing nation. This dual message targets both a prospective audience and potential investors.

Gender and football: privileging masculinity

EFLI promotions invite Indians to engage with American football in a very different context compared to how that same process is manifest in the United States, where view-ers are besieged with symbolism dedicated to glorifying the condoned violence on the




field (Anderson and Kian, 2012; Messner, 2002). Although journalists covering EFLI – likely drawing from shared understandings of football in the United States – situate foot-ball in this context, glorified violence is largely missing from league-produced materials. Although one noted exception is the use of war metaphors and references to such imagery through team mascots, this rhetoric functions less to glorify the violence of the game than to demonstrate its importance by suggesting the stakes are enormously high. Instead, most content touts collectivity, friendship, peace and other pro-social values. Although EFLI founders did not modify the game itself for India, they notably tailor the promo-tional campaign to maximize cultural acceptance and, by extension, commercial appeal.

In the US, football players’ power is connoted through the pageantry of violence and the celebration of physically overpowering an opponent; EFLI promotions, however, present this power through a more subtle process that underscores their stoicism and thoughtfulness. Marketing materials de-emphasize football as a cultural space for sanc-tioned violence and instead offer the sport as a way of corralling the unruly or unpredict-able masculine boy into a productive and civilized member of society. While American football is framed as superior to existing popular sports like soccer and cricket, it is still portrayed as reflective of an ideal type of civilized manhood, specific to Indian culture. Masculinity is privileged, and traits such as leadership, power and determination are transformed as masculine. This is underscored by the overwhelming lack of women as part of the overall message, as well as the portrayal of cricket as feminine and ‘genteel’. Sport creates a space through which dominant values are communicated and EFLI pro-motions suggest that more than a game is being exported here. Although the lens through which male authority is communicated differs from EFLI promotions to those in the US, an overall message privileging masculine authority endures.

Conclusion

Just as under British colonialism, when sport was deployed in attempts to ‘civilize’ and control populations (Miller et al., 2001), the EFLI may be seen as an analogous endeavor – by corporate empire – in an era of deregulation and trade liberalization. American foot-ball in India hopes to produce a population of consumers who will be receptive to global brands precisely at a time when India has opened the door for global retailers to do busi-ness. The EFLI mobilizes strategies such as interpellation of the ‘new Indian man’ and the globally integrated Indian middle-class subject in a mission to create a televised platform that can deliver global brands to Indian audiences.

We have critiqued how discourses of progress, class mobility and idealized versions of masculinity are deployed in efforts to bring American football to India. However, in addition, we are especially disconcerted by the gap between the celebratory discourse of what the sport can supposedly do for India and the growing awareness among the US football establishment of potentially dangerous effects on the body. In the United States, American football is a multi-billion dollar enterprise with myriad stakeholders, but the sport is in the midst of a publicity crisis stemming from frightening research that contin-ues to emerge about football’s effect on the brain and overall health; for example, EFLI investor Kurt Warner has recently said he would prefer his own sons not play the sport (Kurt Warner prefers …, 2012). Yet, despite new information on serious health risks,




EFLI’s dedication to creating a demand for the sport among Indians continues unabated. Just as ‘big tobacco’ did when its US market became threatened, American football seeks to maintain its formula for economic success through expansion to new markets. The EFLI presents American football as beneficial to Indian society, and particularly to Indian men, at a time where such messages may resonate in particularly strong ways. Exploitation of laboring bodies lay at the heart of colonialism, and the EFLI’s efforts present a disturbing contemporary version of this endeavor for a neoliberal era.

In conclusion, however, we must note that cultural rituals, including those in the realm of sport, are dynamic, subject to an ongoing meaning-making process with socio-political implications (as evidenced by cricket’s historical trajectory). The EFLI has several measures in place to guard against re-appropriation of this American cul-tural export and protect against the post-westernization that occurred with cricket (Rumford, 2007); for example, by bringing in seasoned Monday Night Football pro-ducers to train local teams, the EFLI is essentially protecting its definition of football and, importantly, the values that underpin its current structures. However, as Saavala points out (in Mathur, 2010: 214), the ‘mutual influence [of modernity and tradition] within a new global market … creates new forms of particularism’. Thus despite US-based efforts to push this very American game into a new foreign market, as the league struggles to gain a place in India’s sport culture, the EFLI enters a new negotia-tion phase. This will ultimately determine not only what American-style football looks like in India, but how consumers of its mediated form respond to the ideological mes-sages communicated through it.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Matt McAllister of Penn State University for his detailed reading and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. According to a US State Department report, ‘middle class’ in India refers to those with dis-posable income ranging from 200,000 to 1 million rupees per year ($4166–$20,833).

2. Promotional materials taken from the EFLI website included 14 written press releases and 12 videos – eight ranging from 30 to 90 seconds each, and four 12-minute ‘documentaries’ featuring interviews with EFLI players and coaches, as well as game and behind-the-scenes footage. News coverage was found in outlets ranging from notable wire servers like the Associated Press to top American newspapers such as the USA Today, to major Indian outlets, such as the Times of India, to sports blogs in the US and India.

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