Introduction: perspectives on fans and identities in soccer

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this volume, soccer and football are used almost interchangeably except for cases where ‘football’ is defined differently in a specific national/local context.

2. We come across a great variety of works on sports-spectators and fans in general since the publication Allen Guttmann’s Sports Spectators in 1986. A few of these need require here: Wann and James, Sport Fans; Tarver, The I in Team; Osborne and Coombs, Routledge Handbook of Sport Fans and Fandom; Crawford, Consuming Sport Fans, Sport and Culture; Quinn, Sports and Their Fans; Toffoletti, Women Sport Fans.

3. Here, I use the term ‘followers’ as a broad discursive category to refer to all who with varied intentions and in different capacities follow the game. Thus, it is not in tune with the way Richard Giulianotti describes the follower as ‘traditional/cool spectator’ (Giulianotti, ‘Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flâneurs’).

4. Despite a wide variety of works on these different kinds of spectator identities in professional soccer from global to local contexts, Richard Giulianotti’s article ‘Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flâneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities in Football’ still remains a classic exposition of spectator typologies.

5. Mention should be made of some important works in the first category such as: Armstrong and Giulianotti, Football Cultures and Identities; Brown, Fanatics!; Brown, Football Fans around the World; Krøvel and Roksvold, We Love to Hate Each Other; Millward, The Global Football League; Pearson, An Ethnography of Football Fans; Brandt, Hertel, and Huddleston, Football Fans, Rivalry and Cooperation; Cleland, Doidge, Millward, and Widdop, Collective Action and Football Fandom; Numerato, Football Fans, Activism and Social Change; Niemann, Brand, and Weber, Football Fandom and Identity in the 21st Century; Lawrence and Crawford, Digital Football Cultures; Kassing, and Meân, The Art of Tifo. The second category, too, has a number of significant contributions to recount: Redhead, The Passion and the Fashion; Gibbons, English National Identity and Football Culture; Onwumechili and‎ Akindes, Identity and Nation in African Football; Anders, Between Soccer and Politics; Kennedy and Kennedy, Fan Culture in European Football and the Influence of Left Wing Ideology; Chiwese, The People’s Game; Kossakowski, Nosal, and Woźniak, Politics, Ideology and Football Fandom. However, there are also many works that overlap in terms of spatiality.

6. In the context of sport, why and how, and at times what, who, where and when, a fan connects with the sport she/he follows create/s this identity.

7. Giulianotti, ‘Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flâneurs’.

8. It may be of contextual relevance here to cite some interesting works and papers on this diversity of typologies and identities of football fandom in various contexts: Giulianotti, Football; Fillis and Mackay, ‘Moving Beyond Fan Typologies’; Gantz and Lewis, ‘Sports fanship changes across the lifespan’; Hay and Joel, ‘Football’s World Cup and its fans’; Biscaia, Hedlund, Dickson and Naylor, ‘Conceptualising and measuring fan identity using stakeholder theory’; Chiweshe, ‘Understanding the processes of becoming a football team fan in an African context’; Sullivan, Zhao, Chadwick, and Gow, ‘Chinese Fans’ Engagement with Football’; Clark, ‘“I’m Scunthorpe’til I Die”’; Clarke, ‘Football and Working Class Fans’; Foroughi, Nikbin, Hyun, and Iranmanesh, ‘Impact of Core Product Quality on Sport Fans’ Emotions and Behavioral Intentions’; Hart, ‘The “Club Versus Country” Debate’; James and Ridinger, ‘Female and Male Sport Fans’; Sumino and Harada, ‘Affective Experience of J. League Fans’; Tapp, ‘The Loyalty of Football Fans’; Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport; Tuan, Topophilia; Tuan, Landscapes of Fear; Bandyopadhyay, ‘In Serach of a Football Ground in Twentieth Century Urban Bengal’; Wann and Branscombe, ‘Die-Hard and Fair-Weather Fans’; Dunning, Murphy and Williams, The Roots of Football Hooliganism; Armstrong, Football Hooligans; Armstrong and Giulianotti, Fear and Loathing in World Football; Giulianotti, ‘Participant Observation and Research into Football Hooliganism’; Divisova, ‘Euro 2016 and its security legacy for football supporters’; Testa, ‘The all-seeing eye of state surveillance in the Italian football (soccer) terraces’; Banyard and Shevin, ‘Responses of Football Fans to Relegation of their Team from the English Premier League PTS?’; Dorsey, ‘Pitched Battles’; Pantelick, ‘Fanaticism and the “Ultras” Movement’; El-Zatmah, ‘From Terso into Ultras’; Joern and Havelund, ‘Ultras in Denmark’; Kassimeris, ‘Fascism, separatism and the ultràs’; Kossakowski, Szlendak, and Antoniwicz, ‘Polish ultras in the post-socialist transformation’; Nuhrat, ‘Ultras in Turkey’; Spaaij and Viñas. ‘Passion, politics and violence’; Williams and Vannucci, ‘English hooligans and Italian ultras sport, culture and national policy narratives’; Cashmore and Dixon, ‘Why football violence made a comeback in continetal Europe but spared England’; Grodecki et al., ‘Hooligans are coming home’; Guschwan, ‘Fan politics’; Irak, ‘“Shoot some pepper gas at me!”’; Kennedy, ‘A contextual analysis of Europe’s ultra football supporters movement’; Merkel, ‘Football fans and clubs in Germany’; Totten, ‘Sport activism and political praxis within the FC Sankt Pauli fan subculture’; Viñas and Parra, ‘Global Expansion and the Fan Clubs in England, Scotland and Ireland’; Ben-Porart, ‘Overseas Sweetheart’; Doidge et al., ‘The impact of international football events on local, national and transnational fan cultures’; Carrington, ‘Black Panther’; Gong, ‘Reading European Football, Critiquing China’; Millward, ‘The Limits to Cosmopolitanism’; Tamir, ‘The Decline of Nationalism among Football Fans’; Benkwitz and Molnar, ‘Interpreting and Exploring Football Fan Rivalries’; Telles, We’re Queer And We Should Be Here; Magrath, LGBT Football Fans; Elwood-Stokes, LGBT; Beasley and Burkett. Football’s Coming Out; Dixon, Cleland and Cashmore, ‘Banter and the rise of LGBTQ+ awareness in football cultures’.

9. See for example: Lawrence, ‘“We are the boys from the Black Country”!’; Mehus and Kolstad, ‘Football team identification in Norway’; Webber and Turner, ‘Standing here’.

10. See for example: Hognestad, ‘Transnational Passions’; García and Welford, ‘Supporters and football governance, from customers to stakeholders’; Gerke, ‘“For club and country?”’; Liang, ‘Marketization Impact on the Relationships between Supporters and Football Clubs’; Tan, ‘Football “Hooligans” and Football Supporters Culture in China’; Garcia, and Llopis-Goig. ‘Club-militants, Institutionalists, Critics, Moderns and Globalists’; Guțu, ‘“Casuals” culture’’; Karlén and Radmann, ‘Swedish supporter culture’; Nash, ‘Contestation in modern English professional football’.

11. For more layers on fandom in the context of present volume, see: Kossakowski, ‘From Communist Fan Clubs to Professional Hooligans’; Onwumechili, ‘African fandom’; Jiang and Bairner, ‘Paolo Rossi and the Origins of Football Fandom in China’; Ben-Porat, ‘Football Fandom’; Davis, ‘Football Fandom and Authenticity’; Dietz-Uhler and Lanter, ‘The Consequences of Sports Fan Identification’; Jones, ‘Football Fandom’; Bairner and Shirlow, ‘Territory, Politics and Soccer Fandom in Northern Ireland and Sweden’; McFarland, ‘Building a Mass Activity’; Merkel, ‘Milestones in the Development of Football Fandom in Germany’; Bale, ‘Virtual Fandoms; Futurescapes of Football’; Brown, ‘“Our Club, Our Rules”’; Best, ‘Liquid fandom’; Mukherjee, ‘The otherness of self’; Carlsson and Backman. ‘Juridification of fandom’; Chiweshe, ‘Online Football Fan Identities and Cyber-fandoms in Zimbabwe’; Fletcher, ‘These Whites Never Come to Our Game, What Do They Know about Our Soccer?’; Ncube, ‘“Highlander Ithimu Yezwe Lonke!”’; Ncube, ‘Intersections of nativism and football fandom in Zimbabwean online spaces’; Gong, ‘Reconfiguring Transnational Fan Experience through Digital Media’; Lee, ‘How Do Hong Kong Fans Choose Their Favourite Overseas Football Club?’; Lee, ‘Transnational Football Fandom in Hong Kong’; Stanfill, Mel, and Angharad N. Valdivia. ‘(Dis)locating Nations in the World Cup’; Zhuang, Huang, and Chen. ‘Idolizing the Nation’; Mitra and Naha, ‘Politics and International Fandom in a Fringe Nation’; Naha, ‘Of Magic and Mania’.

12. Some of the defining works on the Ultras deserve mention here: Doidge, Kossakowski, and Mintert, Ultras; Jones, Ultra; Doidge and Lieser. The Ultras; Testa and Armstrong. Football Fascism and Fandom; Close, Cairo’s Ultras; Kossakowski, Hooligans, Ultras, Activists.

13. The journal, however, had earlier published a number of special issues on supporters, fans, and related issues. These include: Kennedy and Kennedy, Football Supporters and the Commercialisation of Football; Kennedy and Kennedy, Fan Culture in European Football and the Influence of Left Wing & Progressive Ideology; Guschwan, Football Fandom in Italy and Beyond; Hodges and Brentin, Fan Protest and Activism; Doidge et al., The impact of international football events on local, national and transnational fan cultures; Radmann and Hedenborg, Female Fandom; Bandyopadhyay, Face to Face.

14. There have been a few important works published in the past decade dealing with female fans: Dunn, Female Football Fans; and Jakubowska, Antonowicz, and Kossakowski, Female Fans, Gender Relations and Football Fandom Challenging the Brotherhood Culture. I have already referred to a few works on LGBTQ+ fans in earlier notes.