From 'pats on the back to 'dummy sucking': a critique of the changing social, cultural and political significance of football goal celebrations

The essay offers a critique of the changing social, cultural and political significance of goal celebrations by considering how, during the transition from football as a local, proletarian, masculine industry and product of Fordist modernity to a global, mediated, paradoxical entertainment spectacle, a postmodern culture of goal celebration has emerged, which acts as a comment on or reaction to modernity. In many cases, individual postmodern goal scorers have shifted their interest from a concern with the ultimate end of scoring a goal and restarting the game as soon as possible, to a pragmatic concern relating to the optimal performance of celebration. Through a series of genres, the essay discusses how the postmodern goal celebration in creative modernity has several styles, all of which demonstrate the way in which football culture ‘has become increasingly self-reflexive, juxtapositional and parodic through the growing irrelevance of a stable conception of reality’.