Abstract
This critical reflection tries to understand sports fandom and sports fan culture by framing it in wider forms of fandom: music fandom and SF fandom. The reflection involves a review of key literature on sports fandom and wider fan cultures, but the main methodological focus is a critical reflection on the author's own fandoms. Specifically, the reflection returns to a PhD on rugby league and rugby union in the north of England, the first major ethnographic study undertaken by the author, before re-engaging with other forms of fandom in his personal life and his published research. New research is undertaken for this project in the form of personal reflections on fandom in the author’s own autobiography. The author argues that fandoms are important leisure spaces shaped by commodification, but which are still spaces where identity and community can be constructed by individual agency.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The home of the Rugby Football Union, English rugby union’s governing body, in the commuter belt of London.
It may have been the other way round.
At the moment I am wearing Wytch Hazel, a Christian epic metal band from Preston in Lancashire.
References
Adorno, T. (1991). The culture industry. Routledge.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.
Archer, A., & Matheson, B. (2019). Shame and the sports fan. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 46(2), 208–223.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity.
Bennett, L. (2012). Patterns of listening through social media: Online fan engagement with the live music experience. Social Semiotics, 22(5), 545–557.
Blackshaw, T. (2010). Leisure. Routledge.
Brett, T. (2015). Autechre and electronic music fandom: Performing knowledge online through techno-geek discourses. Popular Music and Society, 38(1), 7–24.
Cameron, A. (1976). Circus factions. Clarendon.
Cohen, A. (1985). The symbolic construction of community. Tavistock.
Connell, R. (1987). Gender and power. Stanford University Press.
Connell, R. (1995). Masculinities. Polity.
Dixon, K. (2013). Learning the game: Football fandom culture and the origins of practice. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 48(3), 334–348.
Duffett, M. (2013). Understanding fandom: An introduction to the study of media fan culture. Bloomsbury.
Dunkle, R. (2013). Gladiators: Violence and spectacle in Ancient Rome. Routledge.
Elias, N. (1978). The civilizing process: (Vol. one). Blackwell.
Elias, N. (1982). The civilizing process: (Vol. two). Blackwell.
Elias, N., & Dunning, E. (1986). The quest for excitement. Blackwell.
Ferreday, D. (2015). Game of Thrones, rape culture and feminist fandom. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(83), 21–36.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from prison notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart.
Golden, M. (1998). Sport and society in Ancient Greece. Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, volume one: Reason and the rationalization of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, volume two: The critique of functionalist reason. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. Routledge.
Hoad, C. (2017). Slashing through the boundaries: Heavy metal fandom, fan fiction and girl cultures. Metal Music Studies, 3(1), 5–22.
Hobsbawm, E. (1990). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. Cambridge University Press.
Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press.
Hill, R. L. (2016). Gender, metal and the media: Women fans and the gendered experience of music. Palgrave.
Hughson, J., & Free, M. (2006). Paul Willis, cultural commodities, and collective sport fandom. Sociology of Sport Journal, 23(1), 72–85.
Jenkins, H. (2012). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge.
Kalman-Lamb, N. (2020). Imagined communities of fandom: Sport, spectatorship, meaning and alienation in late capitalism. Sport in Society, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2020.1720656
Leonard, S. (2005). Progress against the law: Anime and fandom, with the key to the globalization of culture. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(3), 281–305.
Melnick, M. J., & Wann, D. L. (2011). An examination of sport fandom in Australia: Socialization, team identification, and fan behavior. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 46(4), 456–470.
Redhead, S. (2002). Post-fandom and the millennial blues: The transformation of soccer culture. Routledge.
Rossolatos, G. (2015). Servicing a heavy metal fandom posthumously: A sociosemiotic account of collective identity formation in Dio’s memorial. Social Semiotics, 25(5), 633–655.
Schimmel, K. S., Harrington, C. L., & Bielby, D. D. (2007). Keep your fans to yourself: The disjuncture between sport studies’ and pop culture studies’ perspectives on fandom. Sport in Society, 10(4), 580–600.
Serazio, M., & Thorson, E. (2020). Weaponized patriotism and racial subtext in Kaepernick’s aftermath: The anti-politics of American sports fandom. Television & New Media, 21(2), 151–168.
Shefrin, E. (2004). Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and participatory fandom: Mapping new congruencies between the internet and media entertainment culture. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(3), 261–281.
Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2020). Brexitland. Cambridge University Press.
Spracklen, K. (1995). Playing the ball, or the uses of league: Class, masculinity and rugby. In G. McFee et al. (Eds.), Leisure cultures: Values, genders, lifestyles (pp. 105–120). Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association.
Spracklen, K. (1996). Playing the ball: Constructing community and masculine identity in rugby, Unpublished PhD Thesis: Leeds Metropolitan University.
Spracklen, K. (2007). ‘Negotiations of belonging: Habermasian stories of minority ethnic rugby league players in London and the south of England. World Leisure Journal, 49(4), 216–226.
Spracklen, K. (2011a). Dreaming of drams: Authenticity in Scottish whisky tourism as an expression of unresolved Habermasian rationalities. Leisure Studies, 30(1), 99–116.
Spracklen, K. (2011b). Constructing leisure: Historical and philosophical debates. Palgrave Macmillan.
Spracklen, K. (2014). There is (almost) no alternative: The slow ‘heat death’ of music subcultures and the instrumentalization of contemporary leisure. Annals of Leisure Research, 17(3), 252–266.
Spracklen, K. (2015). “To Holmgard… and beyond”: Folk metal fantasies and hegemonic white masculinities. Metal Music Studies, 1(3), 354–377.
Spracklen, K. (2016). Theorising northernness and northern culture: The north of England, northern Englishness, and sympathetic magic. Journal for Cultural Research, 20(1), 4–16.
Spracklen, K. (2017). Bravehearts and bonny mountainsides: Nation and history in Scottish folk/black metal. Rock Music Studies, 4(2), 102–116.
Spracklen, K. (2018). Leisure, popular culture and memory: The invention of Dark Age Britain, Wales, England, and Middle-earth in the songs of Led Zeppelin. International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure., 1(2), 139–152.
Spracklen, K. (2019). Opeth not metal: Making sense of the symbolic boundary work in the leisure spaces of musicians and fans. International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, 2(3), 267–284.
Spracklen, K. (2020a). Metal music and the re-imagining of masculinity, place, race and nation. Bingley.
Spracklen, K. (2020b). Performing science-fiction fandom through debating controversy: Communicative leisure, collective memory, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story below the line at The Guardian. Journal of Fandom Studies, 8(1), 103–117.
Spracklen, K., & Spracklen, B. (2012). Pagans and Satan and goths, oh my: Dark leisure as communicative agency and communal identity on the fringes of the modern goth scene. World Leisure Journal, 54(4), 350–362.
Spracklen, K., & Spracklen, B. (2014). The strange and spooky battle over bats and black dresses: The commodification of Whitby Goth Weekend and the loss of a subculture. Tourist Studies, 14(1), 86–102.
Spracklen, K., & Spracklen, B. (2018). The evolution of goth culture: The origins and deeds of the new goths. Bingley.
Spracklen, K., & Spracklen, C. (2008). Negotiations of being and becoming: Minority ethnic rugby league players in the Cathar country of France. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 43(2), 201–218.
Spracklen, K., & Spracklen, L. (2021). Simply the best, or remembering when Tina Turner met the Winfield Cup: Nostalgia and the construction of authenticity in rugby league online spaces. Sport in Society, 24(1), 74–87.
Spracklen, K., Lucas, C., & Deeks, M. (2014). The construction of heavy metal identity through heritage narratives: A case study of extreme metal bands in the north of England. Popular Music and Society, 37(1), 48–64.
Spracklen, K., Timmins, S., & Long, J. (2010). Ethnographies of the imagined, the imaginary, and the critically real: Blackness, whiteness, the north of England and rugby league. Leisure Studies, 29(4), 397–414.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Spracklen, K. Sports Fans and Fan Culture: A Critical Reflection on Fandom as Communicative Leisure in a Commodified World. Int J Sociol Leis 5, 283–295 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-021-00093-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-021-00093-4