Rethinking Sports Fandom: The Case of European Soccer

Abstract

By locating them within wider debates about changes in sports fandom and late‐modern identity construction around sport, this paper explores, as a case study, the new relationships and tensions that are evolving between domestic and trans‐national soccer competitions in late‐modern Europe. It argues that recent academic work on sports fandom in Europe challenges the old binaries and taxonomies of earlier accounts and also the distinctions that have been drawn between ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic’ forms of fandom, and emergent ersatz new ‘consumer’ identities. More specifically, the paper critically examines three new empirically informed theoretical contributions to the sports/soccer fandom debate in this context. It then goes on to apply aspects of this new work in order to evaluate recent assertions that emerging European and domestic soccer oligarchic elites are producing chronic problems of increasing inequality and predictability in the sport and, as a consequence, a corrosive diminishing of the local and popular appeal of domestic sports clubs. The paper concludes with a return to some reflections on how we might begin to use these new contributions in order to re‐theorise late‐modern sports fandom and the associated emergent new global relations of sports production and consumption.