The Malditas, The Filipinas, and The Azkals

Nicknames in sports can serve a wide range of social and semantic functions. Assigning nicknames to athletes and teams can allow fans to identify with them. Such names can also become symbolic resources that fans and teams turn to when asserting their identity. Nicknames in sports come to convey varied meanings and interpretations understood within a set of contextual properties. This paper fills an empirical gap and investigates nicknames of national sports teams used in Southeast Asia. The investigative focus is on the nicknames of the Philippines men’s and women’s national football teams. Employing Leslie and Skipper’s socio-onomastic framework, this investigation reveals that, despite a certain degree of arbitrariness of nicknaming national teams, these names reflect aspects of gender performance for the women’s team, and reinforce pervasive cultural narratives of the underdog for the men’s football team. At the same time, these nicknames highlight issues around identity politics for both gendered teams. The paper concludes that the use of these nicknames and their acceptance, or rejection, can be a political act negotiated between the namer and the named.