Abstract
In trying to find positives from Europe's golfing demise in the 2008 Ryder Cup, British journalist Owen Slot reported that ‘if there is one department in which Europeans remain superior here, it is in their mastery of football chants. Americans, it turns out, cannot even fathom the basic rhythms’. In this article, I will seek to challenge the assumptions behind such statements and investigate the role of the football chant as an exercise in historicity, fan diaspora, mediations of space and place, migrations across mono‐ and multicultural affiliations, big business against and/or in tandem with locality, differing (even competing) engagements of national and international fan associations, and the creation, appropriation, and reinterpretation of chants impacting on issues of personal, group and cultural representation and identity/identities. Moreover, in reviewing these areas, I will be presenting a multidimensional reading of the fan chant, over and above melodic analysis and socio‐cultural examinations (nominally centred on race and class), to situate fan chants and fandom in both their local and global context(s).
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