Football Fans Rivalry And Cooperation

Football is undoubtedly the sport with the largest following in the world, attracting billions of fans across the globe. These fans play an integral part in determining the identity of the football club they support. Many studies have focused on the intense rivalry between clubs, their fans and the opposing identities they represent. However, little attention has been paid to examples of cooperation between rival fans. This book is the first to explore antagonistic cooperation in football; the idea that rival fans can work together despite their animosity. With examples from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Croatia, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, the UK, the US and Zimbabwe, this book brings together case studies on rival fans working together and explores how and why such cooperation takes place. Showcasing original research from a team of international football scholars, it sheds new light on the social and political complexities of contemporary football fan culture. Football Fans, Rivalry and Cooperation is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in football studies, the sociology of sport, sport and politics, or sport and social theory.

Football is undoubtedly the sport with the largest following in the world, attracting billions of fans across the globe. These fans play an integral part in determining the identity of the football club they support. Many studies have focused on the intense rivalry between clubs, their fans and the opposing identities they represent. However, little attention has been paid to examples of cooperation between rival fans. This book is the first to explore antagonistic cooperation in football; the idea that rival fans can work together despite their animosity. With examples from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Croatia, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, the UK, the US and Zimbabwe, this book brings together case studies on rival fans working together and explores how and why such cooperation takes place. Showcasing original research from a team of international football scholars, it sheds new light on the social and political complexities of contemporary football fan culture. Football Fans, Rivalry and Cooperation is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in football studies, the sociology of sport, sport and politics, or sport and social theory.

While rivalry is embedded in any sporting event or performance, soccer, the world’s most popular mass spectator sport, has been an emblem of such rivalries since its inception as an organized sport. Some of these rivalries grow to become long-term and perennial by their nature, extent, impact and legacy, from the local to the global level. They represent identities based on widely diverse affiliations of human life—locality, region, nation, continent, community, class, culture, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Yet, at times, such rivalries transcend barriers of space and time, where soccer-clubs, -nations, -personalities, -organizations, -styles and -fans float and compete with intriguing identities. The present volume brings into focus some of the most fascinating and enduring rivalries in the world of soccer. It attempts to encapsulate, analyse and reconstruct those rivalries—between nations, between clubs, between personalities, between styles of play, between fandoms, and between organizations—in a historical perspective in relation to diverse identities, competing ideologies, contestations of power, psychologies of attachment, bonds of loyalty, notions of enmity, articulations of violence, and affinities of fan culture—some of the core manifestations of sporting rivalry. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

The study of football fandom is a fast-growing area of research in the sociology of sport. The first work of its kind, this book explores football fan activism and its impact on contemporary football culture in England, Italy and the Czech Republic. Presenting a comparative study of fan activism in national and transnational contexts, it explores the characteristics of each country’s football fan culture as well as the varying and at times volatile dynamics between fans, authorities and the mass media. Its chapters address key themes and issues including: fans’ reactions to policing and security measures in football stadiums; the socio-cultural significance of symbols and rituals for fans at football games; and fans’ critical engagement with football club ownership and management. Offering original insights into the power of fan activism to influence social change, this book has wider implications for understanding social movements in other cultural and political spheres beyond Europe. Football Fans, Activism and Social Change is fascinating reading for all students, scholars and football fans with an interest in sport studies, fan culture, politics and society.

This is the first book to examine the growing movement of organised networks of LGBT+ football supporters, exploring activists' biographies and the meanings they ascribe to participation in identity politics-centred social movements. The book draws upon in-depth original research into the Pride in Football LGBT+ football supporters' network in the UK, alongside comparative material from other countries. It is also the first book to apply a cultural relational sociological framework to the study of football fans and supporters’ groups, marking an important theoretical step forward that opens up new perspectives in the sociology of sport, the sociology of collective action and social movements, and the sociologies of genders and sexualities in the twenty-first century world. As the struggle for cultural rights and recognition of LGBT+ communities continues, with football fandom providing an important site for understanding of these issues given its historically-embedded hegemonic masculine culture, and in the aftermath of gay male football player Jake Daniels’ ‘coming out’ in May 2022, the book offers timely insights into new social movements, the consumption of sport and the experiences of people from a diversity of sexualities. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport, football, fandom, gender, sexualities, social theory or social movements.

This Handbook offers an analysis of the relation between football and politics, based on over 30 case studies covering five continents. It provides a detailed picture of this relation in a wide number of European, American, African, and Asian states, as well as a comparative assessment of football in a global perspective, thus combining the general and the local. It examines themes such as the political origins of football in the studied country, the historical club rivalries, the political aspects of football as a sports spectacle, and the contemporary issues linked to the political use of football. By following the same structure with each study, the volume allows for the comparison between largely investigated cases and cases that have seldom been addressed. The Handbook will be of use particularly to students and scholars in the fields of sport studies, political science and sociology, as well as cultural studies, anthropology and leisure studies.

This is the first book to examine football (soccer) through the lens of diaspora studies. Presenting case studies from across four continents, it considers how diasporic minorities develop a sense of belonging between their national and transnational ethnic communities through an active participation in football. Bringing together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars working in anthropology, communication, cultural studies, history, psychology, politics, sociology and sport, it unearths the connections between culture, identities, politics, nationalism, globalization, and how those manifest in the lived experience of diasporic peoples. Against a background of the continued internationalization of sport and pervasive global migration, it explores key themes in the social sciences including migration, acculturation, and assimilation; sport, identity, fandom, and representation; and nationhood, citizenship, and politics. As the book focuses on diverse ethnoreligious groups dispersed around the world, it covers a wide range of geographic locations, with cases addressing the Bolivian, Ethiopian, Moroccan, Zimbabwean, Croatian, Irish, and Basque diasporas. It is fascinating reading for anybody working in sport studies, diaspora studies, political science, sociology, cultural studies, international history or social history.

This book examines the topic of identity and collective memory in football fandom. Drawing on global research in history, sociology and political science, the book looks at how, where and why football fans and supporters’ groups introduce particular role models into their self-identity and performative narratives. The book presents original, cutting-edge research that illustrates the complex, multidimensional nature of the (re-)formulation of collective memory and the elevation of role models. It looks at the processes by which some supporters’ groups celebrate historical and contemporary figures – including political leaders, warriors, revolutionaries, or armed resistance groups – that they believe embody patriotic, regional or nationalist virtues, as well as supporters’ groups who define their patriotism in opposition to these figures. The book presents cases ranging from Ukrainian football ultras in the shadow of Russian aggression, and Jewish role models in Germany’s collective football memory, to the symbology of Che Guevara and Diego Maradona in Brazilian and Argentinian football, to hero formation and the myths of national identity in Australian football. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology, culture or politics of sport, or in fandom, identity, nationalism more broadly in sociology, political science or history.