Abstract
Although sports fandom and fan fiction are often thought of as different worlds, in the contemporary media environment, this is not the case. Sport is a popular source text for fan fiction, and high-level European football, one of the world's most watched sports, has long had an online fan fiction presence. In a study of the LiveJournal community Footballslash over the 2011–12 European football season, I investigate what makes football a suitable source text for fan fiction, especially slash fan fiction; what fan fiction authors are doing with football; and what this suggests about how football and fan fiction are used in the present day. I present a new understanding of football as a media text to be transformed as well as provide an in-depth look into how this type of real person slash is developed and thought of by its practitioners. In doing so, I show what happens when fandoms and fan practices converge in the 21st century.
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