"I don't see different colors, different races. I just see eleven people on a pitch"

Due to its immense popularity across cultures, sports prove to be of particular interest to sociologists and various other disciplines that take up an interest in the machinations of a particular culture. The Cultural Studies perspective has become one of the most prominent and influential paradigms in the study of sports, which it views as a site where struggle takes place over a diverse range of topics such as race/ethnicity, gender, nationality and the body. Most people watch sports by way of the mass media, sites that (re-)produce and transform ideologies and ideas about these same topics. Textual analysis has shown how these ideologies and ideas circulate in mediated sports. However, still little remains known as to what extent actual viewers take up or resist these ideas. Starting from the point of view that audiences are not passive, but active in the creation of meaning, this study tries to identify the dominant discourses that television viewers use to assign meaning to race/ethnicity and gender in football on television. Utilizing eleven different focus groups that were comprised of 44 British university students, the goal is to show as to what extent the discourses used by the students are influenced by hegemonic media representations. The results are further compared with various other reception studies and related to a larger social context.