Routledge Handbook of Sport Fans and Fandom

Danielle Sarver Coombs, Anne C. Osborne, Danielle Sarver Coombs, Anne C. Osborne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000552461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This is the first book to explore the full significance of sport fans and fandom from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, across different sports, communities and levels of engagement. It gives a comprehensive overview of the undeniable economic and cultural influence of sport industries for which fans are the driving force.

The book examines different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of fans, including typologies of fandom, and presents cutting-edge discussion across broad thematic areas such as performance and identity, the business of fandom, and fandom and media. It considers the experiences of diverse and marginalized fan groups, with an emphasis on intersectional analysis, and shines new light on key contemporary themes such as fan activism, violence and deviance, mobility and migration, and the transformative effects of digital and social media. This volume includes chapters by many of the leading scholars responsible for having laid the foundation for sport fan research as well as early-career scholars who examine the newest developments in media technologies, legalized betting, gaming, and fantasy sports.

Including perspectives from disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, management, economics, and media studies, this book is essential reading for anybody interested in the study of sport and wider society or fans and subcultures more broadly.

1Editors’ Introduction

Danielle Sarver Coombs and Anne C. Osborne

DOI: 10.4324/9780429342189-1

The importance of sport fans and fandom is evident around the world. Professional sports are multi-billion-dollar industries, and fans are an essential market for owners looking to maximize their profits. Our definition of sports is constantly evolving, as evidenced by discussions about whether or not e-sports should be part of the Olympics, how aesthetically oriented sports such as ice skating are judged, and the long-standing debate over whether or not professional wrestling (notably the WWE) is really a sport. Likewise, the ways fans can experience their sports and their teams continue to develop. A 2018 Supreme Court decision allowing sports betting is a landmark moment in the United States, and the continued growth of fantasy sports—both for money and for glory—reimagines how fans can and do align with players and teams, changing our perceptions of what it means to be a loyal fan. These topics and others are essential to understanding sport fans and fandom, and this handbook provides an excellent overview of the various ways scholars are studying fans and related phenomena.

While sports research often is treated as “less serious” than other areas of academic scholarship, we argue that the immense economic and cultural impact of sports cannot—and should not—be ignored by scholars, particularly in terms of exploring and examining the power and influence of fans. The extraordinary work in this handbook is a testament to how very central sports fan and fandom studies are to understanding the global impact of this area. This collection is centered on the fan perspective and thus is intrinsically tied to the cultural and political issues so prevalent around sports (e.g., trans/intersex athletes, fair pay and gender equity, team finances, etc.). The fan perspective often is lost in these discussions until an explosion occurs, often in response to decisions that make clear the power of money within elite sporting organizations. A prominent example of this occurred in April 2021 when football/soccer clubs tried to create a breakaway league for the top teams in La Liga (Spain), the Premier League (England), and Serie A (Italy). This “Super League” quickly exploded in the wake of vocal and passionate fan outrage, providing circumstantial evidence that the promise of international fanbase expansion fans likely outweighed the perspectives of local fans.

Developing this Handbook

Editing a handbook provides a unique opportunity to identify gaps in the field and start offering potential solutions. While that often entails looking at subject areas that have been foregrounded (or ignored) in literature, we also recognized the extraordinary opportunity we had to offer a platform for scholars who represent a range of perspectives. As such, when developing the plan for this book, we explicitly worked toward the goal of providing as comprehensive and wide-spread representation of sports fan and fandom studies as possible. To that end, our chapters were crafted by 51 authors from across the world, including some of the most prominent scholars in sports fan studies. As is the case in our field overall, the majority come from scholars in North America, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand, a widely recognized limitation which is discussed as a challenge for our discipline in Chapter 12. We also sought to ensure a gender balance among our chapter contributors, including some of the most influential women in this field. Finally, we deliberately leveraged this opportunity to give younger scholars—students, recent graduates, and budding faculty still building their research portfolios—an opportunity to contribute to this work and metaphorically stand alongside some of the most prominent names in our field.

A particular challenge faced by sports researchers as a whole, but sports fandom researchers specifically, is the frequent “silo-ing” of our work within our major disciplines; because most universities around the world do not have sports-centered programs that focus on issues other than the physical act of sports playing and the physical exercise of human bodies, scholars in this area find themselves working within a massive range of home disciplines. The natural outcome of this is our work rarely intersects incidentally; we are at different conferences and often publishing in different journals, so our traditional professional modes of knowledge sharing cannot sufficiently support true interdisciplinary scholarship. Unfortunately, this causes inherent limitations for the questions we ask, the ways we approach those questions, and how we understand or interpret what we learn. In an effort to begin building connections and fostering conversations across subject areas, this book includes chapters written by expert scholars from across relevant disciplines, including sociology, gender studies, kinesiology and health studies, economics, sport and urban policy, cultural studies, psychology, marketing, business, communication, media, gaming, and sport management. This provides a unique opportunity to explore some of the ways scholars are examining sports fans and fandom in a more catholic or universal way. In order to make this as accessible as possible for readers across disciplines, chapters include a mix of high-level syntheses of extant literature as well as new research that shows these areas “in action” to give examples of the kinds of work being done.

Ultimately, this range of contributor disciplines demonstrates the tremendous importance of sports fan and fandom research. As so many of our authors ably note, the experience of sport fandom is one that creates shared meaning and opportunities for engagement across an increasingly segmented world. Global mega-events like the Olympics or the World Cup or even massive one-game events like the National Football League’s Super Bowl offers rare opportunities to come together for shared viewing and engagement. Whether in person or through mediated channels, sports viewership brings fans together. There are very few—if any—other areas that cast as wide a net as sports fandom; while pop culture-centered fan communities around such areas as comics and K-Pop are notable for their passion, they often are identified explicitly by their uniformity and exclusivity. Sports fandom, however, cuts across ages, genders, nationalities, socio-economic status, education levels, and all other demographic categories. Anyone can be a sports fan, and as we broaden our definition of “sport”—such as the inclusion of break dancing, surfing, and skateboarding in the Summer Olympics—we likewise expand what we think of as a “sports fan.” Sport often is at the core of culture and community. It merits serious scholarship, and we are proud that this volume foregrounds the importance of studying sports fans and fandom.

While our chapters do represent a broad range of disciplinary approaches, we were delighted to discover common themes that emerged. As will be the case with any examples of scholarship centered on sports fans, the use of media—both traditional and social media platforms—is an essential component of examining how fans perform and experience their fandom. We also note the connections and contradictions of both the global and local in fandom, including fan experiences within stadia and in countries thousands of miles away. Several of our chapters explore business practices that are employed to engage with fans as consumers, exploring the ways teams and leagues think about and address their fan bases. Finally, this handbook offers a collection of chapters that explore gender, sexuality, and fandom in quite important ways.

As is always the case in collected works like this, we could not cover all of the topics and perspectives that an ideal handbook would include. In some cases, the limited number of scholars with sufficient expertise were not available to write the necessary chapters; in others, so little work has been done that we could not even extend an invitation. We particularly hope that future editions of this handbook (or books like this) will be better able to represent the Global South and include voices from Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. We also encourage scholarship in key areas of popular discussion around sports that have not yet made their way into mainstream scholarship, including youth sports, expanding the operationalization of “sports” to include more traditionally feminine-defined activities such as dance and cheerleading, and exploring the impact of sports (especially mega-events) on the environment and sustainability. We also anticipate the aforementioned “Super League” debacle will spark scholarship on fan activism and engagement in shaping their clubs, teams, and leagues and we welcome increasing scholarship on this extremely important area. Finally, we hope to see more connections being drawn across the various disciplines represented in this handbook and general fan/fandom studies that often center on pop culture. While we are extremely proud of the collected works in this handbook, the opportunities for growth are endless.

Previewing the Handbook

This text has been organized into three parts. In the first, What Is a Fan and How Do We Know?, our contributors offer an exceptional overview of approaches to and perspectives on understanding fans and fandom. In Chapter 2, Michael Butterworth explores sport metaphor in American politics and what this means for democratic culture, using the example of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and appointment to the United States Supreme Court. In Chapter 3, Daniel Wann examines the individual and societal needs that are met through sports fandom, including such aspects as the need to belong and the search for meaning in life (individual needs) and aiding in socializing as well as fostering integration among society’s members (societal needs). Toni Bruce and Margaret Henley take a fascinating look at women fans of an almost exclusively female sport in Chapter 4, presenting some of their own research on netball in New Zealand to add new understanding to the ways we think about women fans. Continuing the theme of women fans and sports fandom, in Chapter 5, economist David Berri provides a historical perspective on the growth of men’s sports to demonstrate that women’s sports are following the same trajectories and that time will allow for these leagues to flourish. Continuing the economic implications of sports, in Chapter 6 Turkish scholars Selçuk Özaydın and Cem Tınaz turn their attention to the effects of capitalism and industrialization on European football leagues, which ultimately leads to increased costs for fans as customers. In Chapter 7, Timothy Kellison and Beth A. Cianfrone take a more local look at how fans engage with their teams, using the Atlanta Braves’ (Major League Baseball) move to a new suburban ballpark to explore how stadia can strengthen local identity and establish a community’s political, economic, and cultural distinctiveness.

In the second part of this section we shift attention to “how do we know,” centering on the ways we build knowledge of sports fans and fandom, beginning with Jessica Richards, Keith D. Parry, and Daniela Spanjaard (Chapter 8) advocating the use of ethnographic methods to offer a more holistic perspective that allows for deeper insights to emerge. In Chapter 9, Mark Turner explores the use of framing studies as an approach to understanding sports fans, situating this scholarship in the broader use of framing studies in media and journalism. Finally, Courtney M. Cox (Chapter 10) explores issues of power and possibility in this research, using her own ethnographic work on women’s basketball to construct a methodological framework for fans and the structures around fandom.

The last two chapters in this section broaden the discussion to ask questions we should be considering as sports scholars and spark discussion among those of us doing this work. In Chapter 11, philosopher Ben Bradley explores and then argues against Tännsjö’s argument that we should not admire athletes, instead making the case for when that is appropriate. Finally, the editors of this handbook write a call to action in Chapter 12, noting the dearth of research centering on race and fandom and encouraging more work to be done to continue expanding our perceptions and assumptions about fandom in the future.

Part II, Who Fans Are, helps contextualize the calls made in that chapter by offering a range of perspectives on sports fans as they have been explored in extant literature. We begin with Shannon Kerwin and Larena Hoeber’s excellent analysis of fan identity and performance in Chapter 13. In Chapter 14, Katharine Jones, Stacey Pope, and Kim Toffoletti focus on women fans specifically, summarizing current debates and emergent issues in this research and including a preliminary model of two female fan types (“hot” and “cool”). In Chapter 15, focus shifts to the sports fanship lifecycle by Irene I. van Driel, Walter Gantz, and Lawrence A. Wenner. This chapter uses Carstensen’s Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) to explore the lifecycle of sports fanship, finding that changes over time depend on fanship avidity. We then shift from fan groups to an event focus, with Andrew C. Billings, Samuel Hakim, and Qingru Xu (Chapter 16) analyzing the demographics of Olympics sports fans and Linda K. Fuller’s (Chapter 17) examination of Paralympics fandom and sports organizations.

The next two chapters in this section present original research to help address gaps in scholarship on sports fans. In Chapter 18, David Letts and Rory Magrath present results from the first-ever academic research centered on the experiences of LGBT+ fans. John Williams takes an autoethnographic approach in Chapter 19, using Stuart Roy Clarke’s legendary photographs of British football clubs to explore his own experiences with sporting transformations. Chapter 20 moves us to Brazil, with Ana Carolina Vimieiro’s cultural and historical analysis of the ecosystem of football supporter cultures in Brazil.

The last two chapters in this section shift to understanding how media inform the ways sports fans are understood and defined. In Chapter 21, Joshua R. Pate and Robin Hardin focus on athletes with disabilities’ self-presentation use of social media, exploring how these athletes can leverage social media to better connect with fans and promote their sports and own personal brands. Wrapping up this section, in Chapter 22 Dorothy Collins examines the ways media can be used to expand fanbases beyond geographic limits, thus also expanding how we can and should think of “sports fans” in our research.

As the last section of the handbook, Part III shifts toward what we know about What Fans Do. The section starts with Heather Kennedy, Josh Gonzales, and Ann Pegoraro’s (Chapter 23) examination of digital sports fandom, including an examination of how fans, teams, and athletes interact and engage and a discussion of why sports fans use digital media. Kathryn Coduto expands this further in Chapter 24, focusing specifically on how sports fandom is presented and enacted through social media channels and examining the parasocial relationships that develop between fans and players.

Broadening the ways we think about sports fan activity and engagement, Jason Kido Lopez (Chapter 25) writes about the construction of sports fandom by sports betting companies, positing a framework to organize fan and gaming possibilities in sports betting. Brody J. Ruihley and Robin Hardin further the examination of fandom and fantasy sport in Chapter 26, including motives of competition, sport socialization, self-esteem, and surveillance. In Chapter 27, Steven Conway shifts attention to how sport videogames extend the ways we think about fandom by exploring this as a way fandom is available and performed. Anji L. Phillips and Dunja Antunovic return ...