A European mind? Europeanisation of football fan discussions in online message boards
Across Europe, national professional football leagues have seen increasing numbers of players from other EU states, while the Champions League and the Europa League have become a focal point for ma...
Cosmopolitans and communitarians: A typology of football fans between national and European influences
International audience; The past 25 years have seen an unprecedented Europeanisation of the structures and governance in football across the continent. A European (and global) transfer market for players and managers has become the norm and a pan-European league system has been established that regularly exposes supporters to transnational competitions and players from all over Europe. At the same time, manifold typologies of football fans have been established, distinguishing groups of fans based on, for example, fan intensity, fan behaviour or their attitudes towards different actors in the field. The attitudes towards Europe and the self-identification of these fans within Europeanised f…
Europeanised identifications among football fans. The analysis of discussions in online message boards.
International audience; Across Europe, national professional football leagues have seen increasing numbers of players from other EU states, while the Champions League and the Europa League have become a focal point for many teams. This article seeks to investigate how far this Europeanisation on the organisational level of football is reflected in identities and discourses of fans. We develop a framework to analyse Europeanisation of identities among football fans. In the empirical part we conduct a qualitative content analysis of fan discussions on publicly available message boards among fans of four first league teams in England and Austria. Our empirical findings indicate that fans’ iden…
Non-elite conceptions of Europe: Europe as reference frame in English football fan discussions
International audience; Discursive approaches to Europe usually focus on elite discourses and target a narrow political understanding of Europe. Against the backdrop of rising Euroscepticism and the known elite-mass divide on issues of European identity, it seems important to shift the focus toward non-elite discourses on Europe. Given that club football is largely Europeanised (player markets, continent-wide club competitions and broadcasting of matches), we analyse how fans of the English Premier League club Manchester United discursively construct ‘Europe’ in relation to their sport. Our main research question aims at identifying how identifications of fans have been unconsciously Europe…