A discursive construction of teasing in football fandom: The context of the South-Western Nigerian viewing center

Abstract

Previous research on the linguistics of football fandom has said little on the value of teasing in this popular public space. This qualitative study, however, highlights the discourse of teasing as realized by Nigerian fans of the English Premier League (EPL), from a pragmatic perspective. In all, 12 teases or teasing expressions, ascribed three judgmental values – positive, neutral, and negative – as assigned by both the teaser and the teased are identified and analyzed. It is discovered that when other-directed, the tease is usually either neutral or negative, but when self-directed, the tease is either neutral or positive. First, I observe that fans often use a tease when their team is in a position of advantage. Second, the teaser–target relationship is ever-fluid: the teasers could become the targets at any time during the course of a match, depending on the in situ performance of the teams playing the game. I argue that despite the face threats expressed by most of the teases, the performance of teasing in this fandom is essentially face-supportive, since the fans, on the whole, enjoyed the teases, and forgot about or discountenanced them almost as soon as the game was over. I also submit that the context of football fandom in the viewing center is mainly a macro-level instantiation of ‘jocular mockery’, more of relational connectedness than separateness, since the fans usually remain friends/acquaintances after each game and would return, sooner or later, to watch and tease one another during another game.

Keywords

Context English Premier League face fandom teasing viewing center Yoruba

Introduction

Because football (or soccer) has, for some time now, been a popular, global, socio-cultural phenomenon, especially in the United Kingdom and former British colonies (like Nigeria), it has become the domain of various forms of academic research. Although studies abound on the discursive architecture of football fandom, to the best of my knowledge none has been specifically directed at its teasing content; nor has there been much said on its linguistics. This study, then, is a discourse-analytic study of teasing as humorously contextualized among Nigerian fans of the English Premier League (henceforth EPL). Being an extension of an earlier study (Adetunji, 2010), it furthers the boundaries of fans’ behavior in a virtual context of fandom. This study is focused on a spoken context, conceptualized, according to Cutting’s (2008: 5–13) three types of (a) situational (speakers’ knowledge about what the see around them), (b) background knowledge (speakers’ knowledge about each other/one another and the world, and (c) co-textual (speakers’ knowledge about what they have been saying). And teasing has been seen as a context-bound activity, especially as it is fundamentally predicated on speakers’ familiarity (Boxer and Cortes-Conde, 1997; Dynel, 2008).

About 500 languages are spoken as First Languages (L1s) in Nigeria (Ginsburgh and Weber, 2011, put the number at 527), although the major regional languages are Hausa (North), Igbo (South-East), and Yoruba (South-West). However, English remains Nigeria’s first language. Additionally, Nigerian Pidgin (NP) (originally a contact language created from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and the various Nigerian local languages for communication between the earliest European traders and their Nigerian customers) is acquired informally, and is probably the most-widely used Nigerian language. Yet most Nigerians remain passionately attached to their L1s and would prefer them (the languages) for communication, regardless of their interlocutors’ level of education. As will be shown presently, Yoruba, the major language of South-Western Nigeria, is the major language of interaction in the fandom being studied, despite the fact that most of its members are educated and although the commentaries of the EPL matches are run, mainly, in British English.

The Nigerian viewing center is often a shack or abandoned and reclaimed hall, where international sports, especially football, are transmitted via satellite television on one or more large screens, for token fees. It is usually run by a manager who reserves the right to tune the TV, as and when due, and to determine the game(s) to be shown. In its comfortable version, found in the major Nigerian cities (like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt), the viewing center is located in choice areas, equipped with state-of-the-art infrastructure (e.g. air-conditioners, comfortable seats), and intended to accommodate wealthy Nigerians, who simply prefer the experience of watching (essentially) football with others of their social class. The other type, by far the most ubiquitous, usually has rickety or uncomfortable furniture and a few ceiling fans (whose effect is hardly felt by the large number of bodies they usually have to cool). Although food and drink are permitted in these venues, non-alcoholic drinks, especially those in plastic containers, are the most preferred: many of these centers display notices indicating the prohibition of alcohol and bottled drinks, or the managers simply correct a non-compliant fan. As one of the managers claimed, the behavior of fans had sometimes been uncontrollable, aided by alcoholic intoxication, and resulting in feisty physical encounters, in which bottles had been used as weapons.

Football fandom, regarding the collective followership of foreign football (played off Nigerian shores), became popular in Nigeria in the mid-1990s, primarily because of the exploits of Finidi George and Kanu Nwankwo at Ajax Amsterdam. Seeking to identify with these Nigerian players, the fans usually gathered anywhere they could to watch football – particularly the European Champions League matches involving Ajax, until the team won the tournament in 1995. Subsequently, the fans began to passionately support other Nigerian players in foreign leagues. This prompted investors and sports fans to invent the idea of viewing centers, where fans could, via affordable satellite television, converge on a regular basis and share the experience of watching football and supporting teams. Being a former British colony, and with the exodus of Nigerian players into the EPL in the 1990s, Nigeria soon caught the bug of EPL fandom, although at the expense of the Nigerian football leagues, whose followership has since reduced drastically.

Teasing

Teasing, though an everyday communicative tool used by all humans to interact and socialize (Keltner et al., 2001), has always been difficult to define, essentially because it has been conceptualized from various research perspectives. From the broad perspective, Keltner et al. (2001) have conceptualized the term as ‘an intentional provocation accompanied by playful off-record markers directed by one person toward another that comments on something of relevance to the target’ (Keltner et al., 2001: 236). This definition denotes teasing as a discursive act connecting a teaser and a target, wherein the former performs a verbal/non-verbal act in a direct/indirect manner, related to an object of interest to the latter, and intended to have an effect on the latter. And specifically in ‘off-record markers’, the said act should be framed in such a way as to be seen by both teaser and target as non-serious, non-truthful (not to be taken literally), ‘less face-threatening’ (less injurious to public image) and, therefore, humorous.

Most linguistic definitions of teasing are foisted on this humorous contextualization. Right from Drew’s (1987: 219) narrow definition of teasing as ‘mocking but playful jibes against someone’ to Haugh’s (2010) broad conceptualization of the concept as face-constitutive relational practice, linguists have seen teasing from standpoints in between these wide extremes. While some definitions focus on the non-seriousness of the message of teasing (Dynel, 2008) and some emphasize its humorous cues (Eder, 1993), others emphasize the presence of the target (Boxer and Cortes-Conde, 1997), and yet others locate teasing in the public domain (Kotthoff, 2007).

The grounding of teasing in pragmatics has blossomed in its function as a politeness strategy, with special focus on its applicability to face (‘the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact … an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes …’ (Goffman, 1967: 5). Following Goffman, Brown and Levinson (1987) posit the Model Person (or ‘speaker’) who has to devise the appropriate strategies to achieve a face-maintaining communicative goal which will maximally support and minimally threaten the addressee’s face. Brown and Levinson (1987: 62) posit that every individual has two faces: a positive face (‘the want of every member that his wants be desirable at least to some others’) and a negative face (the right to freedom of thought and action). The Goffman/Brown and Levinson view of face, then, is individualistic or person-centered, albeit socially constructed.

Recently, there has been the conceptualization of face as relational practice, in Arundale’s (2010) Face Constituting Theory (FCT), as: ‘participants’ understandings of relational connectedness and separateness conjointly co-constituted in talk/conduct-in-interaction’ (p. 2078), which could be face-threatening, face-supportive, or face-static (i.e. neither threatening nor supportive). This makes face a plural, interactive concept, which makes evident that achieving connection [unity, solidarity, association, etc.] among individuals in interaction integrates them into a social system, while achieving separation [differentiation, divergence, autonomy, etc.] in interaction within a social system differentiates among the individuals who are its components (Arundale, 2010: 2087). And relational work links face in teasing, because it concerns the group-centered co-constituted perceptions of participants as regards their relationships with each/one another (Arundale, 2010; Haugh, 2010). Haugh (2010) broadly identifies teasing as ‘jocular mockery’, as ‘(non)verbal acts whereby the speaker somehow diminishes something of relevance to self, other, or a third-party who is not co-present but does so in a non-serious or jocular frame’ (Haugh, 2010: 2108). He also foists jocular mockery on three interlocking factors – its speaker’s projection or framing, its audience’s interpreting/interpretation, and its occasion/local sequential context – and concludes that it is both co-constituted in interaction and co-constitutive of interaction, so that face is ‘our face’, rather than ‘self face’ or ‘other face’.

Mostly, scholars have researched teasing as face work from the perspective of a speaker’s (non)-verbal enactment of either face-support (friendliness or solidarity) (Dynel, 2008; Haugh, 2010) or face-threat (unfriendliness or aggression) (Drew, 1987; Geyer, 2010) or both (Arundale, 2010; Norrick, 2003) to a co-present interlocutor or target. Yet Boxer and Cortes-Conde (1997: 279) locate teasing in a continuum from bonding to nipping to biting, valuing ‘bonding’ as positive and the other two as negative. And for some scholars it is a matter of degree, such that teasing is regarded as more positive than negative (Blythe, 2012).

Teasing has been fused with jocular mockery (Haugh, 2010), banter (Dynel, 2008), and mock politeness (Dynel, 2008), but has been divorced from putdown humor (Dynel, 2008) or mocking (Haugh, 2010) because ‘mocking does not have connotations of repeated provocation in the same way as teasing, nor does it encompass instances where an object of desire is purposefully withheld from someone’ (emphasis in original) (Haugh, 2010: 2107), and because the teaser’s ultimate intention is to amuse but not to denigrate the target.

From the review above, teasing is then often, though not exclusively, orally enacted and is predicated on the presence of and communication between at least two persons. Thus, a tease is discursive and pointedly dialogic, not just because it has been conceptualized minimally as ‘a verbal witty turn’ (emphasis mine) (Dynel, 2008: 242), but also because it presupposes an interaction between a speaker (teaser) and a hearer (target).

This study subscribes greatly to that of Haugh (2010). So, I operationalize teasing as an act which football fans conjointly deploy, for both evolving relationships and achieving face wants. Additionally, I ground teasing in Bakhtin’s (1986) notion of ‘dialogicality’, that language is always dialogic, since every utterance (a) is essentially addressed by a responsive speaker to an active listener, who, with the speaker, is the utterance’s co-creator, and (b) is co-created by the speaker and the hearer, because the former formulates his/her utterances in anticipation of the listener’s response, while the listener responds by displaying a responsive understanding of what he/she hears.

(Football) fandom

A characterization of fandom, that has enjoyed a wide currency, defines it ‘as a product of a hierarchical social system in which privilege and value are accorded to only [a] few’ (Lewis, 1992: 3). Accordingly, Fiske (1992: 30) identifies fandom as a feature of popular culture that could be similar to, or different from, the culture of more conventional audiences. He outlines the three major features of fandom, generally, as (a) discrimination and distinction, (b) productivity and participation, and (c) capital accumulation. Under (a) a fandom is an ‘Us’ (inclusion) versus ‘Them’ (exclusion) relationship, used to differentiate one fan group from another. Regarding (b), fandom is a site for active participation, revealed in three interrelated productivities, where fans make meaning of (semiotic productivity), share (enunciative productivity), and invest monetarily in (textual productivity) their object of fandom. For (c), fandom elicits the knowledge and appreciation of the cultural capital of the object of fandom. Fiske concludes that fandom is a site for both the reception and the production of popular culture and the appropriation of official culture.

Specifically, a football fan is ‘one whose devotion to a particular club dominates his entire way of life’ (Ben Porat, 2010: 280). Giulianotti (2002) has classified football spectators into four types – supporters, followers, fans, and flaneurs. The traditional/hot supporter feels obligated to express a strong, localist solidarity with the team as part of her personal identity, especially the cultural symbolism of its ground (or stadium), while the traditional/cool follower identifies, additionally, with the team’s players, managers, and other teams with which their team shares any affinity. The hot/consumer fan experiences a distant, non-reciprocal form of intimacy with a team and its players:

Fans refer to stars by first name, discuss their private lives and traits, collect biographical snippets, surround the family home or workplace with their images, and perhaps even fantasize about a loving, sexual relationship with their objects of affection. Star footballers … are rarely in a position to reciprocate. (Giulianotti, 2002: 37)

The flaneur is the cool/consumer post-modern spectator who relies mostly on audio-visual technology (television, Internet) to identify with a team which wins and/or remains aesthetically appealing, and who is ready to switch allegiance whenever the status of his favored team disagrees with his cosmopolitan identity.

Ben Porat (2010) positions football fandom as a life-long, emotional community in which the traditional fan identifies with a team regardless of the team’s immediate achievements. He posits three domains of fandom experience – emotional, cognitive, and symbolic: emotionally, fandom is affective, therapeutic, and cathartic, a projection of self and collective image; cognitively, fans experience the costs and benefits of supporting their team, segregating themselves from others who support other teams or others who are less passionate about football via a we/they pronominal distinction; symbolically, fandom helps to culturally identify, by relating a fan to a team for regional, ethnic, or nationalistic identity.

Researchers on football fandom have applied the taxonomies discussed above in different ways. Jones (2000) interprets football fandom as a serious leisure activity compensated for by four behaviors, any, some, or all of which a fan would seek consolation in: in-group favoritism (solidarity with fellow fans), out-group derogation (disapproval of and hostility towards opposing fans), unrealistic optimism (prediction of the unrealistic success of one’s team), and voice (emphasizing the positives of the poor performance of one’s team). In Gastaldo’s (2005) study of the fandom in Brazilian bars, he identifies three modalities which coalesce in unpacking football joking relationships as indices of the practice of masculinity: ‘presence as performance’ (being there means supporting a team), ‘verbal provocations’ (mocking as speech), and ‘joking theatricalization’ (mocking as non-verbal humorous performance). For Weed (2007), the pub (public house) is a site for live football spectation, necessarily because of spectators’ financial incapacity to access live televised games at home and because of the congeniality of the pub (when compared with the high probability of hooliganism at stadia). He concludes that pub spectation still falls short of live spectation in football fandom because of the former’s inferior value in capturing the event for re-telling purposes.

Broadly speaking, studies on African fandom have focused on Nigeria (Adetunji, 2010), South Africa (Fletcher, 2010), Ghana (Fumanti, 2012), Zambia (Komakoma, 2005), and Zimbabwe (Manase, 2011). Studies specific to African fandom of the EPL (via satellite television) have generally submitted that these fans identify mainly with consistently successful teams (Adetunji, 2010; Komakoma, 2005). Yet to the best of my knowledge, none of these studies has been devoted to teasing, a task which the present study seeks to accomplish.

The virtuality of the football fandom, reported here, is enacted by the mediation of the action (football), offered both by the technology of television and the teasing targets. Regarding the former, fans, unlike those who watch the games live, see the action only from the viewpoints of the broadcast station, have access to replays of especially controversial actions, and can form opinions from the comments of studio or live commentators. They thus tease, based on the amount and nature of the technologized information at their disposal. Moreover, the teasing targets are only implied, such that when a teaser addresses an implied second-person ‘you’, often the player, they expect a reaction not from the players themselves, but from the players’ fans, who then become both the direct and implied targets of the tease, all at once.

On method

The research presented here is based upon a combination of participant observation and semi-structured oral interviews. Data were collected during the 2009–2010 EPL season (of August to May), between December 2009 and March 2010, from six randomly selected viewing centers at Ibadan (the capital city) and Oyo (a major city) in Oyo State, South-Western Nigeria. This period, spanning the middle months of the EPL season, was chosen because it usually revealed intense fan relations – these were usually the most crucial weeks in the EPL, when the teams’ end-of-season positions were, quite often, pre-determined.¹ I underwent a four-month period of participant observation, when I watched selected matches, listened with rapt attention, and jotted down the teasing expressions. The hypothesis, which was eventually confirmed, was that any tease which was missed in a particular game was likely to be repeated in another. An initial attempt to record the fans on tape was shelved because the venues were usually too noisy for the interactions to be meaningfully recorded. Moreover, most fans rejected being recorded, claiming it might hamper their freedom of expression. Also, any form of non-verbal performance which could be interpreted as teasing was noted.

Yet I had to interview the fans after the games in chosen quiet places, not too far from the viewing centers. Because of the difficulty in convincing fans of teams that had just lost their games to give interviews, I restricted my choice of interviewees to fans of the winning teams. In all, 10 fans were randomly interviewed by use of a mini tape recorder. The interviews were conducted in English, since the typical Nigerian (viewing center) fans of EPL were youth and students (Adetunji, 2010: 9) who had some proficiency in English (as a Second Language). More than 90 percent of the fans were male, thus nine males and one female were sampled.² First, I sought to know the contextual meanings of the teasing expressions. Also, I asked why the fans teased and what their responses to teasing were, with the intention of finding out if there were differences between the fan as a teaser and the fan as a target.

Sixteen games (eight watched at viewing centers in each of the two cities) and their fan situations were purposively sampled. Six games involved teams known as the ‘Big Four’³ playing against each other, while the others involved any of the Big Four playing against any other team. I do not report the teasing situation of any of the games excluding the Big Four since very few fans watched those games, and those who did, did so more out of idleness and adventure than any passion for the dueling teams, and so hardly teased one another. I demarcated single teases (which were in the majority) from teasing turns. I then represented fans’ interactive teases with initialisms of their teams (e.g., ‘L’ represents a Liverpool fan).

Findings

Nigerian football fandom is clearly demarcated into in-group and out-group, a delineation made obvious when the teasing encounters begin. While some of the fans are easily identified because they don their team’s paraphernalia (jerseys, sweatbands, mufflers), others may not be recognized until they tease or react to a tease or teases. And even when a fan of a team comes to watch a game between two other teams, such a fan’s ‘emergency’ (that is, ‘for that particular game’) identity is revealed when they take part in the teasing game or react to major moments in the game.

The findings revealed three teasing values of positive, negative, and neutral, as assigned by the fans, and two major types of teasing – single teases and teasing turns. While the single tease was uttered independently, not necessarily needing a reply to be meaningful, the teasing turn came either as an adjacency pair (a sequence of utterances made by different speakers in which the first utterance somehow requires the second) or a three-part exchange of the Initiation–Response–Feedback⁴ form.

Single teases

In all, 12 single teases/teasing expressions were found: nine of them are pure Yoruba expressions, two are code-mixed, and one is a noun phrase (NP) expression. These are characterized in Table 1, with their English translations, contextual meanings, and interactional values (from the fans’ points of view and my observations of their contextual uses).

Table 1.

Single teases and their meanings.

Value	Tease in Yoruba	Gloss in English	Contextual meaning
Positive	1. A ti fit	We are (now) fit	We are playing well
	2. Èmi mo wà n’lé	I’m at home	I have the home advantage
	3. Won gbá wa	They played us	They matched us
	4. Wón ti je. wá	They have eaten us	They have scored against us
Neutral	5. Lo. gbé bike	Go pick a bicycle	Assist your speed
	6. You go gree?	Would you allow?	Won’t you prevent him from outwitting you?
Negative	7. Ṣe kiní ye.n fun	Do that thing for him	Humiliate him
	8. Fi lọ̀ ọ́	Try it with him	Try to outsmart him
	9. Gbára le	Press your body on him	Cheat him with your body/size
	10. Ta ló wà nílé?	Who is at home?	Which team is really playing at home?
	11. Wón ti wo. bàtà sùn	They have slept with their shoes on	They have been defeated
	12. A/Wọ́n ti la’ná	We/They have caught fire	We/They have had a bad run

Positive teases

These teases are so named because they verbalize the positively valued instances of team play. Not only do the presence and location of the first-person pronouns (Èmi/I, my, a/we, wa/us) in the teases give them away as in-group directed, their explicit and implicit meanings also indicate that they are used to articulate, generally, fan identity (Adetunji, 2010; Ben Porat, 2010), and specifically, ‘in-group favoritism’ (Jones, 2000). Specifically, I observed that (1) was uttered by fans when their team was in the lead, while (2) was expressed when their team was playing at home (in their own stadium) and playing well. In the words of a Liverpool fan, (3) and (4) are in-group directed and connotatively positive, even if they may not seem explicitly so:

We say Wọ́n gbá wa after a difficult game in which we either won or drew … when the draw is good for us … as in we didn’t expect the other side to play so well, like when we play against those small teams … not the Big Four. We use Wọ́n ti jẹ wá when they score [sic]⁵ us … it’s like saying we are down and must get up. We say it when we still have hope [of not losing] because when the game is beyond repair … like if they have scored the second or third goal and we have none … God forbid, we just keep quiet.

Neutral teases

The neutral teases, (5) and (6), could be either in-group directed or out-group directed. According to the fans, while example (5) is cast in the form of an admonishment, example (6) is a rhetorical question, and both are usually addressed to the players, based on the unrealistic assumption that the addressees can hear and respond. In the words of a Chelsea fan:

Lọ gbé bike can be said to any player, whether mine or not. It is for when … a player has to chase the ball, like when the pass is too far and they try to chase it and you know they can’t catch it. As for You go gree, we use it for defenders mainly. Like now if a striker like [Fernando] Torres wants to dribble [sic] my [John] Terry, I may ask my player the question. Also, I can say it if my player wants to dribble [sic] another. It is [said] when we are excited.

Negative teases

The teases are so valued because they are either sarcastic or derogatory. Apart from (12) which is in-group directed, all the other expressions are out-group directed. Teases in this category are interesting, pragmatically, because with the exception of (12), there is a wide demarcation between their semantics and pragmatics – that is, between their semantic glosses and contextual meanings – such that only a fan or someone who is conversant with fan lingo can recover the relevant interpretations of the teases.

Examples (12) and (7) occupy the farthest end of negativity. While (12), two expressions minimally paired, is understandably so, because the ‘fire’ metaphor captures an intensity of (self/other) destruction which the fans map onto a poor run of form, (7) is no less deep, though less explicitly. This situation was confirmed by two Manchester United (MU) fans, when I asked them about the senses conveyed by each of the teases. The transcripts are provided below, and MU (B)’s explanation shows that (12), an instance of teasing via lexical exaggeration (Drew, 1987; Keltner et al., 2001), has a local (Nigerian), anecdotal origin:

MU (A):

Ṣe kiní yẹn fun is meant to tease fans of the other team, especially when my team is leading. It’s like an order [that] I give to my player to punish their player in any way possible. Kiní yẹn [that thing] doesn’t really mean anything … but their eyes usually turn red when you say something like that. Nobody like [sic] to hear that, that another player should do something to his player. That is why we only say it when we are leading them [sic].

MU (B):

As per A/Wọ́n ti la’ná, it could be for us or against us. A ti la’ná is an acceptance that we are not doing well … you know it happens sometimes. Wọ́n ti la’ná is to tease the other team, that they are finished [beaten]. The term la’ná is a reference to the ‘wonder-banks’ [financial houses promising super-high yield on investments] that c ame last year and told people to bring their money, that they will double and triple it for them. They were doing so until, one day, people went to their offices and they were gone. So people started saying Wọ́n ti la’ná, saying the banks and people’s money have gone up in flames. And so we also started using [sic] when a team has no more chance to win a game or a trophy.

From my observations, (8) and (9) are only milder forms of (7), since they both make fun of a player’s ability to outwit another, a metaphor for the teaser’s intention to underline the notion that they are superior to their target. While (8) is not based on the addressee’s superiority of any form and (9) is predicated on the addressee’s superior physical size, both connote the teaser’s claim of his player’s and, by extension, his superior intelligence. The context of (10) alludes to that of (2), only that the former is out-group directed. The only female interviewee – an Arsenal fan – explains things more clearly, and even adds some cultural information:

We say Ta ló wà nílé? when a home team isn’t playing well. You see, we assume that you should play well and win when you play at home … because that is your backyard. In Yorubaland, no man should lose any contest in his own house. So when you play at home and you are not playing well, and maybe they have scored [sic] you, fans of the other team or rival teams will ask the question … and you cannot talk until you have scored more [goals] than the visiting team.

Fans use (11) to tease out-groups when the latter are defeated, especially in major games. For example, if the game is a cup tie, the tease resonates louder than if the game is just a league game (especially if the losing team can still make up for lost ground in subsequent games). So, it presupposes, as confirmed by a Liverpool fan in the transcript below, that the teaser must be either a fan or a well-wisher of the winning team:

It’s assumed that you should remove your shoes before sleeping … and so we attach this to defeat. And because we use the pronoun ‘Wọ́n’ (i.e. ‘they’), it means the tease must come from a fan, or friend of the fan, of the winning team.

Teasing turns

There were also instances of fans’ verbal and non-verbal actions which took the form of adjacency pairs, in which a fan teased another who replied either immediately or later in the course of the game, a reciprocity that underlines the target’s recognition of the teaser’s jocular intention (Drew, 1987; Haugh, 2010). In example (I), Liverpool scored a controversial goal against Manchester United in a game which, up to that point, had been scoreless. After a slower replay showed that the goal was scored from an offside position, many Manchester United (MU) fans chorused their displeasure and a Liverpool (L) fan, having waited for the noise to subside, responded with an iconic, gestural teasing expression:

(I) MU:

Ha! Offside ni! (It’s offside!)

(brings out a whistle from his pocket) Oyá take, blow … OK, a à ní kàá, zero-zero ṣὶ ni. (OK, we won’t count it, it’s still zero-zero.)

Similarly, example (III) depicts a verbal–gestural dialogue between two fans, one Arsenal (A), the other Chelsea (C). An Arsenal player was infringed on by a Chelsea player, and A believed that the offense should earn the offender a dismissal and said so, aloud. Fan C responded immediately by teasing both verbally and via emblematic gesturing, and A’s feedback indicated an uptake (acceptance of the tease).

(III) A1:

Red Card!

(Dipping his hand into his pocket and bringing out his identity card, and offering it to A)

Oyá(Now) take, give him

A2:

You dey craze. (You are crazy)

The situation of fandom depicted by example (II) is slightly different. Here, a Manchester United fan teased a Chelsea fan C, on behalf of Tottenham Hotspur fans. While watching a game between Chelsea (the home team) and Tottenham, in which the home team was finding it difficult to outplay the away team, MU made a statement which was intended to provoke the reply of Chelsea fans:

(II) MU:

Ta ló wà nilÉÉ! (Who is at home?)

There was no immediate response. But the response which would confirm MU’s tease as anticipatory of and therefore co-created by C would come later, after Chelsea had scored a goal:

Èmi ni mo wà nilÉÉ! (I am the one at home).

The jocular frame of the teasing turns is revealed both by the participants’ prosodic cues (Keltner et al., 2001) (here, emphatic stress and vowel elongation) and the target’s countering of the tease (Drew, 1987).

Reasons for teasing

From the interviews conducted, fans gave varied responses to the question, ‘Why do you tease?’. I quote below replies which capture the major reasons as to why fans tease.

We tease for the fun of it. It makes everybody laugh although the person supporting a losing team may not laugh very well. But you see we say if you can’t take a joke, don’t come to the viewing center.

It is to let people know we are leading. When my team is winning I want people to know. Because when another team is winning at another time their fans also want everybody to know.

Some of the fans of other teams are also very noisy when they are winning and even after the game. I’m Arsenal tọkàntọkàn [wholeheartedly] and you see … especially those Chelsea people, they are very noisy. When they win or are winning they won’t allow you to rest. So we Arsenal have also learned to make jest of those we are beating.

Teasing helps ease tension. Though we generally tease other people, you sometimes tease yourself to relieve tension, especially when your team is not playing well. For example, when we say A ti la’ná we are easing the tension of [a] poor performance.

We tease to congratulate ourselves and make the other people jealous … like A ti fit and Èmi mo wà n’lé.

In effect, these fans tease for the purposes of jocular mockery, attitudinal expression (of superiority), and salubrity. In other words, these football fans tease for the major purpose of face maintenance (balancing one’s face in relation to another).

Reactions to teasing

I also sought to know how the fans usually felt and the ways in which they reacted when they were the targets of teasing. According to Haugh (2010: 2108), responses to mockery come in three major forms: rejection, ‘going along with or making the pretence of accepting’, and ignoring. But Nigerian fans expressed five major responses to teasing, which are extensions of Haugh’s categories: anger, laughing it off, discountenance, marking the teaser out for a later attack, and taking up the challenge. Examples of these reactions are listed haphazardly below, and, as evidenced by responses (e), (f), and (g), ‘taking up the challenge’ can be diversely enacted.

It is usually not easy. Sometimes I will be burning inside and I may be sweating. I won’t want anybody to annoy me at that time because I can [sic] kill.

Oh, that [teasing], it’s one of those things. Is it not a game? Somebody must win and somebody must lose. You can’t win always. If they tease you today because your team is not playing well, you just laugh it off, although I know it’s not easy [to do so] because your team will beat them some day.

What I do is to pretend that I can’t hear anybody. I then focus on the game praying that my team wins at the end of the day. This is why sometimes I go to the viewing center with my phone … So when things are getting bad I switch it on to music and use my ear phones. So, I won’t hear anybody.

I make sure I know the noisiest out of them all. So I will wait to make fun of him anytime his team is beaten, even if not by my team but by another.

I always reply almost immediately. When they say Ta ló wà nílé? I say Èmi mo wà n’lé. When they say You go gree? I say I no go gree (I won’t allow), even if my team is not playing well. I give them the correct reply. If you don’t do that they won’t shut up. But when they see that you are ready for them they won’t trouble you or at least, it will reduce [sic].

I reply [sic] the person talking by reminding him of the last time we beat them. I may even talk about the number of times we have won the Premiership. As a Man U fan I have won the title more than anyone else, the same [number of] times as Liverpool. And they won it in the olden days. So I shut them up with history.

I sometimes reply by saying something about the person talking … that is if I know something about him that can keep him quiet … like saying he uses a cheap phone or that he can’t toast (woo) a lady, or even that his shirt is dirty. I know it could lead to a fight but I know he won’t [fight] … he will just keep quiet.

When asked if a fight had ever broken out after a game, two of the interviewees answered in the affirmative. But they, like the rest of the interviewees, said physical combat, as a reaction to a tease, was an exception rather than the norm.

Discussion of findings

It has been proved here that teasing is either in-group or out-group directed. When in-group directed, indicated by the use of first-person pronouns, the tease is usually positive or neutrally valued. But when it is out-group directed, as shown by the use of (implied) second-person or (stated) third-person pronouns, the tease is either of a neutral or negative value. A fan teases most often when their team is in an advantageous position in a game and the teaser–target situation remains ever-fluid: a teaser may become a target and vice versa, depending on who has the upper hand in the course of the game.

Half of the single teases (6 out of 12) are negatively valued, a statistic which shows the tilt towards biting or face-threatening teasing behavior. The out-group direction of the negative teases is predictable since conventionally people tend to criticize other people and not themselves. Although some fans claimed that teasing was intended for humor, and some even said they teased to release tension, basically the preponderance of sarcastic remarks and face-threatening expressions in the data suggest that the hostility theory of humor (‘that laughter arises from a sense of superiority of the laugher towards some object’; Attardo, 1994: 49) would hold sway in the context of Nigerian football fandom.

The findings revealed some peculiarities about the dialogue of (Nigerian) football fandom. While two single teases, (6) and (10), were cast in the mode of questions which should invite replies from their implied targets, such replies were usually not forthcoming, since such targets were on the games’ receiving ends and were usually too absorbed in the games to utter any replies. This attunes with one of the findings of Gastaldo (2005) on the use of adjacency pairs for teasing in football fandom: that targets sometimes decide to delay their replies until more auspicious moments in the game, most often once their team has the upper hand. Also, the discovery that any member of the Nigerian viewing center audience would be regarded as a fan and expected to tease or be teased, whether or not an identifiable fan of any of the two dueling teams, concurred with Gastaldo’s (2005) notion of ‘presence as performance’.

This study has revealed Nigerian fans’ appropriation of Fiske’s (1992) three characteristics of fandom in varying degrees. While fans rated highly in ‘discrimination and distinction’ and ‘capital accumulation’, they rated only averagely in ‘productivity and participation’; the fans made much use of enunciative productivity by loudly teasing, but scored considerably low in semiotic and textual productivities, because less than half of the fans wore, and therefore teased with, their teams’ paraphernalia. And most of these fans would belong to Giulianotti’s (2002) ‘hot-consumer’ category, which dwells mainly in Ben Porat’s (2010) emotional and cognitive domains of fandom experience.

All in all, the meaning-making is contextual in the viewing center, and the teases which come across as formulaic or standardized expressions are mutually intelligible to the fans, regardless of the teams they support. The teases are mostly metaphorically coded, so that their meanings are not easily decipherable by a non-fan. In effect, these football fans are, in their teasing practices at least, in the process of developing a lingo or register, which a non-fan would have to learn if he or she is to ‘belong’.

Conclusion

This study was intended to contextualize teasing as a discourse resource in the (virtual) soccer fandom of Nigeria, specifically in the so-called ‘viewing center’. Through a combination of participant observation and interview methods, it was revealed that the fans used both single teases and teasing turns to realize Boxer and Cortes-Conde’s (1997) continuum of bonding, nipping, and biting. Moreover, the fan as teaser was found to be different from the fan as target, with the latter being less accommodating of the teases than the former.

Foisted on the broad manifestation of discourse as action and face work, fandom teasing has been illustrated as a group, rather than an individualistic, enactment. The fan teases to project his group’s (e.g. the Arsenal supporters, club) positive image, not really for self-esteem but for group-esteem purposes. The teasing is then one macro face-maintenance strategy of group solidarity employed by one group of fans to position itself positively in relation to others.

And Cutting’s (2008) spoken context has been richly invoked in this fandom: fans’ knowledge of the game is its ‘situational context’; prior and present actions taken by fans to tease about the prior and present positions of their teams (on the EPL table) reflect the ‘background knowledge context’; and, how fans coherently and cohesively link utterances to construct meaningful communication falls within the remit of co-textual context. So, teasing here is relational and co-constituted, both because of the fans’ continually evolving relationships and because of the viewing center’s context of co-fanhood and co-spectation. The viewing center is fast emerging as a close-knit social network, whose members deploy verbal and non-verbal resources to ascribe meanings to football fandom. I then submit that, despite the face threats of most of the teases, the context of EPL football fandom, in South-Western Nigeria, subsists in bonding or face support, since the fans remain friends or acquaintances or siblings after each game, and ultimately wish to continue to share the experience of football spectation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer(s) whose corrections and insights made this article better than it was originally.

Funding

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

Notes

Author biography

Akinbiyi Adetunji holds an MPhil degree in English Language from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He has published in peer-reviewed journals, including California Linguistic Notes, Language, Society and Culture, MARANG, and Ife Studies in English Language. He has also published in volumes (for Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Lincom Europa, Centre for Black Arts and Culture), and has co-edited two international volumes, Perspectives on Media Discourse (LINCOM, 2007) and Studies in Slang and Slogans (LINCOM, 2010). His area of research interest is, broadly, discourse analysis. He is at present a PhD student of Linguistics (English) at Texas A&M University-Commerce, USA.

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