MT240 Unit 7 Identity and Community Paper Example

A 2017 Club Wearing a Mill That Closed in 1982: A Unit 7 Identity and Community Paper on a Midwestern Soccer Supporters' Group

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT240: Sport in Society

Unit 7 Identity and Community Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The city, the club, the supporters' group, the mill and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Case

The composite city is a mid-sized former steel town on a Great Lakes river. Its largest mill closed in 1982, and the city lost about a third of its population over the next three decades. In the 2010s, a hospital system, a university expansion and lower housing costs drew younger residents from larger cities, and the downtown began to recover. In 2017, a group of investors founded a professional soccer club that now plays in a second-division league before crowds averaging about 5,900.

The club's colors are the rust red and gray of the old mill's buildings. Its crest shows a ladle pouring molten steel. Before every home match, the supporters' group, about 640 members, marches from a bar near the old mill site to the stadium behind a banner showing the mill's blast furnace, chanting songs about steel and the river.

A survey of supporters' group members, conducted by the group itself, found that about 70 percent had moved to the city within the past ten years, and fewer than one in five had family members who worked in the mill.

Social Identity

In the social identity theory of Tajfel and Turner (1979), belonging to a group becomes part of who a person is, and people protect that part of themselves by valuing their group and setting it apart from rivals. A sports club offers an easy group to join, with clear symbols, rivals and rituals. For newcomers to a city, joining the supporters' group provides an instant identity as a local, along with friends and a weekly routine.

The mill symbols do important work here. They give the new group a history it did not earn, so a resident who arrived in 2019 can march behind the furnace banner and feel part of a story that began long before. The symbols make membership feel deeper than a ticket purchase.

Basking in Reflected Glory

Cialdini et al. (1976) found that university students were more likely to wear school clothing and to say "we won" after their team's victories than after losses, a behavior they called basking in reflected glory. The club's supporters show the same pattern on a city scale. When the team won promotion playoffs in 2023, attendance and scarf sales rose sharply, and newcomers spoke of "our city" in interviews with local media. In losing seasons, attendance fell, but the supporters' group's core held steady, which suggests the identity runs deeper than winning for its committed members.

An Imagined Community

Anderson (2006) described nations as imagined communities, because members will never meet most of their fellow members yet feel a deep bond with them. The club creates a smaller imagined community around a city, linking people who share nothing but the team and a borrowed history. The mill is the shared past that makes the community feel real.

Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) showed that many traditions presented as ancient were in fact invented recently to create continuity with a suitable past. The club's steel imagery is a clear case of invented tradition: it was designed by a branding agency in 2016, though it draws on real history.

The furnace on the banner went cold before most of the people carrying it were born.

Who Is Left Out

The same success that built the new community has priced some older residents out of it. When the club launched, season tickets cost about $150 and most matches did not sell out. After promotion, season tickets rose to about $340, the supporters' section sold out each year by December, and the club ended its weekday discount for residents of the neighborhoods around the stadium, many of whom are retired mill workers and their families.

A retired steelworker interviewed by the local newspaper said he liked seeing the mill on the scarves but could not afford to sit near the people wearing them. In a sense the club honors the mill's workers while making its matches harder for them to attend. Giulianotti (2002) distinguished supporters with deep, local ties to a club from more consumer-like fans whose attachment is mediated by the market, and the city's stadium is moving toward the second group even as it celebrates the first.

The Club's Choices

The club has made choices that affect who belongs. It sells its scarves at a premium. It partnered with a craft brewery whose taproom is a gathering place for newcomers. It has done little outreach in the older neighborhoods beyond a single community day. None of these choices is wrong for a business, but together they shape the community the club creates.

The March as Ritual

The pre-match march deserves a closer look, because it is where the borrowed history becomes something people do with their bodies. Members gather at the bar two hours before kickoff, sing songs written in 2017 about a mill none of them worked in, and walk the old route that mill workers once took to the gate. The march has its own rules: the banner leads, the drummers follow and newcomers learn the songs from a printed sheet handed out at the bar. Within a season, a newcomer who did not know the city's history can recite a song about the 1982 closing. The ritual turns a story into a habit, which is how invented traditions become real ones.

Counterargument

One could argue that the club has helped older residents by reviving interest in the mill's history and bringing money downtown. Some retired mill workers have been invited to raise the banner before matches, and the club funded a small plaque at the old mill site. These gestures are real, but they treat older residents as part of the display rather than as members of the crowd.

Conclusion

The club's success shows how sport can create identity and community quickly by borrowing a local past. Social identity, basking in reflected glory and imagined community explain why newcomers embrace the mill symbols. The pricing and marketing choices explain why older residents are honored on the banner but absent from the stands. A club that wants its tradition to be more than branding could set aside affordable tickets for long-time residents, partner with the steelworkers' retiree association and bring the people the symbols honor into the community the symbols created.

References

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso.

Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(3), 366-375. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.34.3.366

Giulianotti, R. (2002). Supporters, followers, fans, and flaneurs: A taxonomy of spectator identities in football. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 26(1), 25-46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723502261003

Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.