Talking about ‘Fairness’ in Football and Politics: The Case of Navad

ABSTRACT

We argue that sport in general, and association football in particular, are activities that invite spectators and players alike to talk about them. Using a Wittgensteinian approach, we argued more precisely that football, like any sport, may be understood as a form of life, and as such that it enables speakers to talk about it in quite specific ways, not least in the manner in which normative terms, such as fairness and bias, are used. Football thereby creates a metaphorical space, we suggest, in which there is a freedom to explore and play with language, and in particular normative language, even if that language-use is repressed in the wider political society. Using the example of the Iranian television programme Navad as a case study, we explore the ways in which talk about fairness in the context of football can develop and sustain a competence in the use of political and moral language-use even when that competence is under-threat elsewhere.