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Club-militants, institutionalists, critics, moderns and globalists: A quantitative governance-based typology of football supporters

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posted on 2019-07-19, 09:41 authored by Borja Garcia-GarciaBorja Garcia-Garcia, Ramon Llopis-Goig
This article presents a quantitative typology of football fans’ attitudes towards governance. Data collection is done through an online survey in six European countries: France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Results reveal the existence of five types of supporters: Club-Militants, Institutionalists, Critics, Moderns and Globalists. The critics, moderns and globalists fans share a preoccupation for football governance problems but differ in the intensity of their views. At the same time, critics and globalist are heavy consumers of football games and merchandise. The results suggest that existing fan typologies that understand supporters in dichotomic terms of authenticity or consumerism fail to explain the complex reality of a game that has developed new structures over the last decades. Existing typologies need to be superseded in favour of a more multi-disciplinary approach that integrates a governance turn to inform a more nuanced and better understanding of football’s social reality.

Funding

This article presents research part of the FREE Project (www.free-project.eu), supported by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for research, technological development & demonstration (FP 7) [grant number 290805].

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Volume

55

Issue

8

Pages

1116 - 1135

Citation

GARCIA, B. and LLOPIS-GOIG, R., 2020. Club-militants, institutionalists, critics, moderns and globalists: A quantitative governance-based typology of football supporters. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 55 (8), pp.1116-1135.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Acceptance date

2019-07-17

Publication date

2019-08-22

Notes

Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright. Users may download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission. This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Review for the Sociology of Sport and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690219868661

ISSN

1012-6902

eISSN

1461-7218

Language

  • en