Why Fans Matter?

This book explores the meanings, significances, and impacts of the complex identities that soccer fans, especially those of men's soccer, represent worldwide. The chapters in this volume construct and reconstruct fandom in terms of diverse fan affiliations from local to global level, and from national to transnational spaces. Soccer or (association) football is a game where fans come alive with one goal. It is soccer's fanbase that has made it the most popular mass spectator sport in the world. Since the sport's growth and its codification in the late nineteenth century, soccer and its followers became markers of varied identities. This volume is an attempt to understand the soccer fan's tryst with such identities, mostly at the level of professional men's football in different parts of the world. Fans create, represent, break, recreate, transcend, complicate and confuse diverse identities in their attachments with and loyalties to particular clubs, nations, continents, spaces, communities, races, ethnicities, and players. These identities are given shape through the display and observance of diverse forms of fandom and fan subcultures. Against this wider backdrop, the book brings out the commonalities, conflicts and tensions within these fan identities. Why Fans Matter? Fans and Identities in the Soccer World will be a fascinating read for anybody with an interest in sport and its intersection with disciplines such as sociology, political science, history, media studies, or cultural studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

Kausik Bandyopadhyay is Professor of History at West Bengal State University, Kolkata, India. Formerly a Fellow of the International Olympic Museum, Lausanne and the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, he is also Deputy Executive Academic Editor of Soccer and Society (Routledge).

Introduction: perspectives on fans and identities in soccer 1. Race and whiteness in football talk amongst English fans: audience receptions of televised national team coverage 2. 'Liverpool daft': the growth of British football clubs' supporters' clubs in the late twentieth century in Ireland - a history 3. The end of terraces? Fans' identity in times of crisis in Poland 4. Why win a World Cup? Thirty-six years of football and nation(alisms) in Argentina 5. Multiple football codes and their spectators, fans and supporters in Australia 6. Club, nation, player: conflicted fan identities in African soccer 7. Becoming a Chinese football fan: an examination of the influence of national and local identities on the development of Chinese football fandom 8. 'Could have been a god but chose to be a Devil'. The 2004 European Championships and Wayne Rooney's departure from Everton Football Club 9. Does anyone care where they are from? The importance of locally trained players in English football 10. 'You, me, we': shared identities of African professional footballers' diaspora in Thailand 11. 'Weeping at Vasermil': players, fans and tears 12. The role of soccer and identity in Egyptian society: fans and players 13. Symbolic identities in football: a view from political science 14. Taking sides in conflict and the question of antisemitism in Scottish football 15. 'Brigate Verde...a terrible beauty is born': an exploratory examination of the social leadership of the Green Brigade 16. Eurocentric globalization of football. Coloniality, consumption, social distinction and identities of transnational fans in Latin America 17. East Bengal-Mohun Bagan football fans and Indian politics: parochialism and nationalism in simultaneity? 18. Beyond 'good' and 'bad' fans: exploring the mechanisms enabling football fans' position as a stakeholder in the management of circulations 19. Africa united: exploring the fandoms around the African Men's Qatar 2022 World Cup teams among fans in Harare, Zimbabwe 20. Victory for Africa or the Arab world? Moroccan nationalism, Arab exceptionalism, pan-African solidarity and digital fandom during the 2022 FIFA World Cup 21. Nationalism or cosmopolitanism? How Chinese football fans viewed the Japanese team and Japanese fans during the 2022 Men's World Cup 22. The quest for authenticity amid activism and sportswashing: a netnographical study of Chinese satellite fans during the 2022 FIFA Men's World Cup 23. 'Our team will definitely win the cup': the Keralan support of Brazil and Argentina during Men's World Cup 2022 Epilogue: The football commentator and the social commentator: a conversation