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Description
While sports athletes have empirical links to multi/trans/nationalities, the different links to the nation and national identity are not outdated within the cultural sports media landscape (Rowe, 2013). Because hockey has long dominated the bulk of media narratives about sport, its heroes, and Canadian nationalism, soccer, "the global game" as opposed to the “our game”, offers a new perspective on national narratives in its recent emergence as a Sport Media Spectacle in Canada. The dynamics inherent in the transformations of identity stories, offer us other relevant (and unexplored) narratives of what it is to be Canadian, especially for multinational citizens embodied in athletes like Alphonso Davies. This paper focuses on the media coverage of this Canadian soccer star from 2016 to 2022, and pays attention to "negotiating belonging" as a key dimension of narratives within the media/sports cultural complex where the sports stars' multiple nationalities are played out. Alphonso Davies’ trajectory as a refugee from Liberia, born in Ghana and raised in Canada, suggests in its own way the fluidity of national identities, as he has already crossed three nations, and now a fourth as a player for Bayern Munich in Germany. He is a testament to several transnational movements, but also to the persistence of the nation when it comes to time to "choose" the nation in the Canadian sports media landscape. His case suggests the different ways of choosing the nation, but also the fate of those who do not choose "the right" nation.
