ABSTRACT
Football fandom as a form of consumption allows football fans to engage in a process which is aimed at communicating essential coordinates of the self, including class and gender positions, and related value and belief systems. In this sense, football fandom creates a space used by fans for the articulation and reflection of self. To borrow and invert Marshall McLuhan’s useful phrase (1964), football fandom constitutes an ‘extension of self ’. My hypothesis is the following. Football fans – through consumption in a supermediated world – communicate a projection of themselves. The main object of consumption in football fandom and hence the crucial, if not exclusive, vehicle for this act of articulation (and projection) is the football club, as fans as consumers of performances constitute an audience engaged with a text. Hence the questions I want to pursue are: how are such texts read by their audiences? and how do such readings enable processes of self-reflection and projection?
