ABSTRACT
Studies on football fans are mostly focused on club supporters. For many reasons they provide more material to analyse in terms of stadium activity, political commitment or involvement in local issues. However, national team fandom offers a number of issues to examine. Fans of national teams are permanently transforming: they are affected by many factors (social, economic, political) and react to them. The fandom of respectively the 1990s, 2000s or 2010s was substantially different, and its members used diverse forms of expression, cooperation and consumption. They also presented various patterns of supporting. Consequently, the historical perspective on national team fans provides a broader understanding of wider social processes, especially when we consider social changes ignited by the fall of communism. This chapter considers the transformation of supporters of the Polish national team. Although it mostly focuses on their political commitment, another goal of this chapter is to present the bigger picture of fans’ transformation with regard to changes in sport, media and the economy. The chronology suggested in this chapter is intended to emphasise the most important aspects of this transformation. The chapter consists of ten sections presenting ten periods (from 1921 to 2019) of the Polish national team supporters’ political involvement.
