Research Papers

Secondary fandom is an interesting phenomenon that attracts increasing interest in international football research (Ranc 2012, Lesterlin 2011), although almost exclusively on the level of club supportership. With the growing 'Europeanisation of the national game' (Niemann, Garcia and Grant 2011) the phenomenon has become increasingly transnational. As football, due to its fundamental design of binary opposition, systematically invites the spectator - even if his/her 'own' team is not involved - to take sides and express partisanship in order to enjoy the thrill of the game and respond to his/her own 'quest for excitement" (Elias 1987; Bromberger 1995), a championship like Euro2012 provides a wonderful opportunity for tentative research on secondary fandom on the level of national teams, as expressed in media discourse, football blogs and fan forums. The paper will focus on spectators of those countries whose teams either have not qualified (such as Turkey or Austria) or are eliminated in an early stage of the tournament. It will try to find out how spontaneous sympathies are expressed and justified, and to what extent such a large-scale event, that draws huge audiences across the continent, may provide insight into affective, horizontal bonds between Europeans beyond their national identities. The paper is embedded, as preliminary study to a large-scale European survey, in the FREE project (www.free-project.eu), an FP7 project funded under socio-economic sciences and humanities (2012-2015).