Whether bringing down Jose Mourinho, marching against their club’s owners or pushing back against plans to commercialize football, these stories remind us that fan activism is more than a passing fad. They show that the stadium as a seminal leisure space allows fans to mobilize around issues of governance, social justice, and identity.
Often, these activities are not explicitly political but rather moral. In a match at Blackburn, for example, one fan protested the club’s ownership by letting a chicken run free on the pitch – an action that reflected his belief that the club should hold itself to certain moral standards.
A number of these stories also show how the use of popular culture can help fans mobilize around their causes. Jonathan Gray demonstrates how appropriations of images from Star Wars and other blockbuster franchises proliferate during labor rights protests, drawing on the emotional, imaginative properties of these popular cultural icons to inspire a sense of shared identity and community.
Other papers explore how fan activism intersects with gender, race and class. Rookwood and Hoey show how digital spaces enable fans to express their voices and engage in debates about ownership and other political issues, while Allison outlines how the search for authenticity amongst networked fan actors animates protests in and through football stadia. Finally, Cheuk Yi Lin examines why sexually ambiguous pop stars in Hong Kong offer fans new language and images to express their own erotic identities, while illustrating how these fans’ responses do not coalesce into institutional politics around a particular stance on sexual diversity.