ABSTRACT
Introduction Sport has historically been (and in many respects still is) a profoundly male preserve (Theberge, 1985). Arguably, for some male fans the football stadium represents one of the few spaces in today’s society where they can prove that they are ‘real men’ (P ster et al., 2013: 858). Twoand-a-half decades ago Duke (1991) called for more research in the sociology of football to examine women’s experiences and Free and Hughson (2003: 152) have similarly expressed the hope that ‘women’s voices will be heard in future studies’ when commenting on the ‘startling’ absence of women in ethnographies of male football supporters. But most academic research on football fandom to date has typically focused upon male supporters, including (male) hooligan cultures and/or issues of fan rivalry (see, for example, Armstrong, 1998; Stott and Pearson, 2007; Spaaij, 2008). Thus, the experiences of female football fans have been largely neglected by this male-centric approach to the study of football fandom. This is especially surprising when we consider that female fans now make up a substantial minority of fans at the football stadium. In the UK, female fans are estimated to make up around 15-19 per cent of all Premier League fans and around one-quarter of fans at some clubs (Williams, 2001; European Professional Football Leagues Website, 2015). P ster et al. (2013) suggest that in Denmark around 10 per cent of fans are women and in Germany this gure is as high as 20-30 per cent at some Bundesliga matches.
