Putting the football back into football stardom: A case study of Gareth Bale as a national football ‘star’

Work on footballing stardom has struggled with positioning on-field performance within the image of notable players. This is mainly born out of early scholarship that positioned the topic primarily within a celebrity studies framework, leading to a far greater concentration on footballers’ private lives away from the field of play. ¹ This paper argues that the closely related, but meaningfully different, star studies framework (traditionally applied to analyse film stardom) provides a more appropriate model for interpreting footballing fame. Unlike celebrity studies, which does not separate the on-screen (or on-field) from the off-screen (or off-field) image, star studies positions the relationship between the two identities as more central to forming the overall star persona. This article develops this approach based upon a case study analysis of Welsh footballer Gareth Bale.