ABSTRACT
In March 2020, as a consequence of the restrictions on public gatherings associated with the COVID-19 health crisis, European football seasons stopped for two to three months. When they resumed, it was behind closed doors, audiences not being allowed inside the facilities to prevent the spread of the virus. From the standpoint of television broadcasts, matches played in empty stadiums were affected by a clear atmosphere problem, as football fandom is normally responsible for highly engaging sonic practices that are crucial to the broadcast’s poignancy. Against the backdrop of an ethnography of the musical practices of organised fandom in Florence, and the sonic dimensions of football, this chapter describes and critically analyses the strategies that the major European leagues and television broadcasting companies experimented with to replace the sonic agency of fans in pandemic football. Following a consideration of technical aspects of Virtual Audio features resorting to mediatisation of fandom’s participatory musical practices, the associated ethical issues are then explored: in fact, the pandemic highlighted problematic and hardly visible facets of modern football such as the commodification of chants, and the appropriation of supporters’ cultural expressions for purposes of profit.
