ABSTRACT
When two teams meet to play a football match, both teams want to win. When two teams of the same city meet, the story changes significantly. The derby is not just a game like any other, much more is at stake, and even winning does not suffice. The rivalry between the derby teams’ fans does not last just 90 minutes but the whole year. Notwithstanding the importance of this game, the derby has been largely ignored by academic research on football. This chapter intends to fill this gap. Without ignoring the mythologies of the big differences that populate the saturated non-academic football literature on the derby, this essay emphasizes and argues for the importance of the minor differences in derby rivalries—a focus that can be traced back to Freud’s theory of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, which I will draw and build on with recourse to Sara Ahmed’s more recent theory of emotions. With the help of numerous examples of derbies, I argue that what is at stake in these unique games is a subtle interplay between love and hate that is almost exclusively based on small differences, which, cherished narcissistically, become overloaded with affect.
