'Pogba x Stormzy’ and the Politics of Race and Representation: An Introduction to Stuart Hall and British Cultural Studies

In August 2016, two things happened which served as the basis for this chapter. Firstly, French central midfielder Paul Pogba rejoined Manchester United Football Club in a world-record fee of £89m, generating a social media frenzy. Simultaneously, I started reading scholarship which applied Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s approach to decoding media representation in sport. Subsequently, this chapter synthesises the two and uses the example of the viral social media video which announced Pogba’s transfer to Manchester United, featuring Pogba and British grime musician Stormzy, to explain Hall’s approach – a transfer labelled on Twitter by Musa Okwonga as the ‘blackest transfer ever’. In this chapter, I decode the media’s representation of Pogba’s Blackness and discuss the ideological meanings signified within the ‘Pogba x Stormzy’ video. I consider affirmations of Black youth culture, commodified Blackness and the racial politics of association football.