Abstract
The website MyFootballClub offers a novel experience for football fans. Through the design and operation of a website, it attempts to reinvigorate fan participation in a heavily mediated, multibillion-dollar global industry. Charging a membership fee of £35 (47), MFC purchased a controlling stake in a non-league English football club, with power over management decisions handed to online members. Attracting more than 30,000 members from over 70 nations, this exercise in online ‘football democracy’ is significant for more than its novelty value and the spawning of similar exercises in other countries. MFC offers an important case study in which ‘media space’ is privileged above all others, claiming to resurrect football-based organic community bonds that were supposedly disrupted by media, but doing so within media. MFC demonstrates how media sport synthesizes apparent contradictions, so that members can recreate football-as-folk-culture fantasies through the processes of mediation and commodification that are otherwise blamed for killing ‘the people’s game’.
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