ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how cross-cultural sports fandoms have been digitally reconfigured in late modernity through a case study of Chinese fans’ engagement with European football. Based on an understanding of sports consumption as part of fans’ everyday life, I analyze the various ways in which European football supporters in China appropriate digital media to form localized fan practices that speak to their identities and subjectivities. The ethnographic evidence reveals their use of social media and digital platforms in three different forms of fan practices: televised spectatorship, community building, and online deliberations. These transmedia practices combine to show the role of digital technologies in the formation of an “individualistic virtual collectivity” among Chinese European football fans. Conditioned by the specific technological arrangement of reforming China, this contradictory fan subject shows how the digitized engagement with globalized sports simultaneously enables ideological contestations and refrains further substantial activism, thus foregrounding both the potentials and limitations provided by new technology for achieving connectivity, productivity, and empowerment in transnational sports fandom.
