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.Footnote1 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.