ABSTRACT
The condition of football fandom reflects the deep-running ambiguities of industrial rationality. The transformations of football production, whether in situ or in the televisual representation of football, confirm a tendency towards the growing contentlessness of football texts and the progressive elimination of social and cultural referents within the production of football. Instead ‘super-clubs’ that are televisually accessible around the globe strive to offer a semiotic vacuum, which in turn constituted the ground of the diverse, reflective readings of these texts. As the super-clubs are freed of any pre-given meaning, they constitute ideal spaces of self-reflection and projection. Hence football clubs become increasingly universally accessible and form suitable objects of fandom across different sociodemographic and cultural groups. Football clubs and their landscapes become spaces of consumption which are selected upon individual and voluntary grounds, further eroding the interconnection between place, locally coherent communities and fandom.
