'What nationality he is doesn't matter a damn!': Football, mediated identities and conditional cosmopolitanism

Sport, and, in particular, football, has become an important lens for examining processes of globalisation and, increasingly, cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I explore the ways in which competing national and cosmopolitan discourses are articulated by and through the media’s reporting of football. Analysing coverage of the appointment of three recent managers of the English national team, two foreign, one English, I show how ideas about (national) self, other and place are being scrutinised and negotiated in the contemporary era. However, rather than rendering national modes of thinking obsolete, these debates point to the periodic emergence of conditional forms of cosmopolitanism.