ABSTRACT
Football fandom, as it is firmly integrated into an increasingly global sphere of semiotic exchange, functions as a vehicle for the articulation of values and beliefs. As fans actively participate in the discourses of the public sphere through the patterns of their consumption, their fandom manifests a form of ‘DIY citizenship’. The nature of such participation in public discourse is in turn structured by the economic, social and cultural macro transformations of rationalized, consumerist capitalism. Similarly, I have documented how capitalist consumerism has been instrumental in the rise of global ‘third cultures’, which have translated into a growing transnational system of signs and texts. Through the growing interrelation between local and global dimensions of everyday life in a process of distanciation of space and time, fans are able to choose from an endless variety of semiotic resources. This, in turn, provides the ground on which social, cultural and political discourses and citizenship are formed and membership of communities becomes voluntary. Communities have thus lost their singular link to territorial place, which is replaced by a complex interrelation between global, deterritorialized communities and local face-to-face interaction. These processes form the spaces in which fandom is exercised as an extension of self. In the global semiotic system every act of consumption becomes a matter of choice (even though such choices are predetermined) and thus of articulation and communication. All accounts in this study illustrate these choices, which at the same time reflect the values and beliefs of fans. These are choices made in a global mediasphere and lived locally. Whether fans choose to support a club on the other side of the world in order to express their identity (for example white fans of Chelsea FC in South Africa) or choose to support a club on the other side of town (for example fans in Leverkusen), such choices reflect fans’ Weltanschauung and ultimately function as an extension of fans into the world. Thus fans cannot escape from globalization, yet the way in which they participate in global cultures constitutes a form of self-expression. The implications of this dialogue between global production and local indigenization and consumption are manifold. The nation, formerly marking the boundaries of the public sphere and providing borderlines of semiotic exchange, appears to occupy an increasingly marginal position in the dynamic interaction between local and global dimensions in the everyday life of
fans. Consequently, the condition of modern football fandom is not formed by the cultural or economic hegemony of nation states. In contrast to general claims of the americanization of sport (Houlihan 1994), fandom has been shaped by contemporary global consumerism. What is at stake in football fandom is not the hegemonic struggle for power by nation states but the interrelation of diverging cultural and economic forces.
