A bitter taste? Todd Carney, masculine football culture and scandal

he idea of celebrity is not new, although it is only with the increasing massification of media that we see the rise of the notion of the celebrity as a person who has been positioned or is viewed to possess the quality of being able to attract attention.

The celebrity status of high-profile sports players in produced by the media machinery of sporting organisations, clubs and leagues which promote their sports not as a game but as a brand. But because celebrity status can attract attention not only to the sporting prowess of the brand's stars but to their misdemeanours, slip-ups, crimes or boyish transgressiveness, celebrity is always a risk-hence the harsh disciplinary environment in which sportsplayers find themselves and the regimentary controls over their private, non-sporting lives.

Scandal emerges where discipline fails-and that can sometimes be a discipline that wrongfully enslaves a sportsplayer by insisting on control of every portion of their private lives despite knowing that those lives have become 'interesting' because of the celebrity status that was actively produced by clubs, leagues and institutions.

Carney, in this sense, is the victim of the celebrification of his life and yet the failure of controls over how he conducts that life. Joking around with his own urine only becomes scandal and then a sackable offence because the very institution which 'made him' felt it could not 'control him' according to their own standards and their own public relations goals.

Bodies and Behaviours

While the reaction of the board of the Sharks is undoubtedly related not to where Carney was putting his bodily fluids, but to the fact that this was the latest strike from a player who had, in the past and while at other clubs, been convicted of drink driving offenses, scandal reports of him having set a man's pants on fire and allegedly urinated on a man in a Canberra nightclub, was implicated in a vandalism spree in Goulburn-all of which might be said to be more offensive and dangerous (to others) than urinating on himself.

However, the focus on the image, and the fact it went viral has nothing to do with public disgust or outrage over his laddish urination prank.

While Carney needs to be accountable for his own actions, his off-field behaviour becomes scandal not because he has made some stupid choices or done things that make him look a fool, but because he himself is the product of the expectations his sport places on him to become a masculine, nationally-heroic larrikin celebrity-available to scandal and expected to perform in scandalous ways.

He would be right, perhaps, to be concerned at a sacking over this image by a club that hired him after his-more justifiable-prior sackings for genuinely unethical behaviour. In other words: accountable, but perhaps the institutional machinery of the sport ought to be scrutinised too for the kinds of players it produces, the kinds of hiring decisions it makes, the kinds of practices of off-field bonding the game demands of its players, and the PR-led disciplinary environment it has built.