Sport as a Cultural Model: Italian Women's Soccer over the Past Ten Years

The paper presents sport as an important cultural model in modern Italian society, fully integrated into the logic of consumption, communication and spectacularisation. In this sense, sport emerges as a field in the Bourdieuan sense, or rather, ‘a socially defined independent sphere with strong frameworks of sense and meaning’. Sport creates social and cultural capital, often objectified in the result (record), and it also reproduces and reinforces social distinction within each particular sport. An example is provided by the case study presented here on Italian women's soccer over the past ten years. The research, carried out on a representative sample of one hundred female players, shows that stereotypes and social prejudices associated with gender dominate the game. At the same time, it can be observed that the dynamics of communication and consumption, closely related to one another in the sphere of sports over the last ten years, reproduce and subsequently reinforce the separation of men and women in social relationships also found in society. For a long time the history of sport was characterised by a clear male predominance, and even today sports are marked by deep gender differences: men participate more in sports in general and at the same time male sports are more relevant economically and culturally.