Summary to Part I

Football fandom is based on a series of (intrinsically modern) consumption practices. Analysing fans as consumers, I have located football fandom within the cycle of industrial production and consumption. Drawing on Bourdieu’s model (1984) of taste and habitus I have argued that football fans essentially communicate through their fandom. Yet, as the accounts of the interviewees in Part I illustrate, the consumption practices of football fans, reflective of their habitus, do not articulate their objective cultural, social and economic position, but their subjective understanding of this position. Fans are able to appropriate clubs (which are either mass mediated or directly experienced texts) as spaces of projection for their values and Weltanschauungen and, hence, as spaces of self-reflection. Consequently, and this is crucial for my further analysis, football fandom is dependent upon the textual openness of clubs, in other words the polysemic nature of the fan text. While Bourdieu correctly assesses acts of consumption as structured and structuring structure, consumption in football fandom also involves more direct modes of identification. I have illustrated how football fans employ clubs as an extension of their selves. This is exemplified by fans’ use of ‘we’ when speaking about their club.