FANSREF · Football fandom, reflexivity and social change

Football fandom, reflexivity and social change

The fellowship provided a theoretically framed analysis of the dynamics between football supporters and football and political authorities. The main objective was to critically examine football fan activism and its impact on the culture of fans and football culture more broadly. A particular emphasis was given to the role of supporter liaison officers (SLOs) in these processes. The design of the research was qualitative. In total 78 semi-structured qualitative interviews lasting between 45 minutes and 2 hours were carried out primarily in the Czech Republic, England and Italy, but also in Germany and with several relevant actors at the European level. Among the respondents were supporters, policy-makers, journalists, politicians, football federations’ officials and football clubs’ representatives. The interviews were substantiated with numerous short informal interviews and with 247 hours of observations (mainly non–participant) at relevant events (workshops, seminars, supporters’ events, tournaments etc.). Last but not least, the data corpus was further enriched by digital collection of data; as foreseen by the proposal, the online material was used as a secondary archive. The data corpus contains 450 documents gathered through a continuous monitoring of online discourses (e.g. newspaper articles, policy statements, blogs contributions, website posts, open letters, tweets supporters’ declarations, petitions, message board posts). The research project produced empirical, theoretical and methodological outcomes. One of the key empirical focus was on the SLO implementation in Europe. There are significant variations in the SLO implementation processes across and within European countries. Several patterns of the SLO implementation were identified: pure adoption, alternative adoption, strategic adoption (such as politicisation, commodification and securitization) and formal adoption (e.g. mimetic isomorphism). The emergence of these patterns is influenced by the approach of national football federations and leagues, single football clubs, relevant stakeholders (security agencies, policy-makers) and by supporters. While the first mentioned pattern, pure adoption, has the highest potential to foster empowerment and civic engagement of football fans, the processes of formal adoption have the lowest potential to do so. In addition to SLOs, a particular emphasis was given to fan activism. The research conclusions suggest that football fan activism is internally heterogeneous, multi-faceted and encompasses a broad range of topics, aims and initiatives. The growing, yet still quite marginalized critical mass of fan activists is internally differentiated alongside prioritized themes, beliefs, values, lifestyles and ideologies. I use the term “football fan activism complex” to label this complexity. In general terms, the agenda of fan activism consists of the topics that are either directly related to football, or address wider, non-football social problems. The first category of fan activism in football encompasses the topics of socio-cultural aspects of the game, security measures, atmosphere, match-day experience, performance and football governance. The second category of football fan activism through football uses sport as a vehicle of broader societal and political development and change. The collected data suggest that the dynamics between football supporters and football authorities differ across analysed countries. The strongest dialogue between both parts exists in England. This is enhanced by a strong tradition of supporters’ associational life in the UK. Furthermore, it is facilitated by a relatively homogeneous supporters’ scene and due to a significant transformation of football terraces since 1990s. The situation in Italy differs due to persisting problems with supporters, isolated acts of violence and aggression that lead to the criminalization of the overall supporters’ movement. Furthermore, the potential for dialogue is undermined due to internal heterogeneity of Italian supporters, lack of collaborative atmosphere and lack of willingness to enter into dialogue with authorities. Last but not the least, the Czech environment and civic engagement of supporters is limited to several clubs. The dynamics between Czech football authorities and supporters suffers of crisis of legitimacy of the Czech football federation on the one hand and of the incapacity of Czech supporters’ movement to work collaboratively and express the discontent in in a credible and legitimate manner. As regards the methodological outcomes of the research project, the fellow assessed the potential of digital methodologies while reflecting upon the combination of online and offline research techniques. The use of both techniques represents a necessity in order to (as much as possible) holistically explore the relationship between civic engagement and supporters’ activism, and social change. It is argued that the uses of both digital and offline must be reflected with relation to both an empirical duality and analytical dualism. Last but not the least, the research project had theoretical implications. The exploration of reflexive process was focused on the transformations of the specific configuration between the meta-form, social forms and contents over time, during the dynamics between the reflexive subject and the reflected object. The capacity of reflexive action for social change can be understood by analyzing the transformations of these configurations in time. Focusing on the case of football supporters and different configurations between the meta-form, social forms and contents, the project identified six different dynamics between fans and football authorities with a different capacity to enhance social change: transmission, auto-referentiality, appropriation, alteration, loosening and anti-reflexivity. It is argued that these dynamics can have an explanatory utility for further analyses of citizens’ empowerment outside the sphere of sport. The official project Website is available at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/fansref/. As part of the Marie Curie Fellowship, the fellow achieved numerous training objectives. The fellowship enhanced the management skills of the fellow (Project Management in the Real World, Time management or Becoming an effective leader), deepened his language skills (Grammar, Punctuation and Proofreading, Lecturing with clarity in English) and strengthened his skills in proposal preparation to request funding (Successful Applications, How to write a competitive proposal for individual fellowships). Last but not least, the fellowship had a significant impact in terms of fellow’s career development. In particular, Dino Numerato got a Faculty position at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Charles University in Prague, where he will start there since January 2016 as Assistant Professor and Head of Department of Sociology.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз