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SUPPORTERS, FOLLOWERS,
FANS, AND
FLANEURS:
A Taxonomy of Spectator
Identities in Football
Richard Giulianotti
This is a copy of the Author’s Original Text of an article whose final and definitive from, the
Version of Record, has been published in Journal of Sport and Social Issues [copyright Sage
Publications], DOI: 10.1177/0193723502261003
To Cite: Giulianotti, R., (2002) Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of
Spectator Identities in Football, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 26:1, 25-46.
Published Version Available At: http://jss.sagepub.com/content/26/1/25.abstract
World football (or soccer) has undergone an intensive hypercommodification over the past
decade or so. This article examines the impact of this process on forms of spectator
identification with top professional football clubs. Drawing upon previous analyses by Taylor
and Critcher (on football) and the theories of Bryan Turner (on body culture), the article
advances four ideal types of spectator identity: supporters, followers, fans, and flâneurs. The
broad trend in sports identification is away from the supporter model (with its hot, traditional
identification with local clubs) and toward the more detached, cool, consumer-orientated
identification of the flâneur.
Introduction
No one would deny that world football (or soccer, as it is sometimes known) has undergone a
fundamental structural transformation. At the elite level, football’s finances have grown
exponentially, while there have been major changes in the cultural organization of the game as
experienced by players, spectators, and media commentators. The United Kingdom (particularly
England) has perhaps witnessed the most dramatic change in football’s social and economic
standing, because in the mid-1980s the English game was synonymous in the global public
imagination with spectator violence and an entrenched infrastructural decline.
One area of substantial discussion over the past decade has concerned the impact of football’s
new political economy on its grassroots custodians, the football spectators. In the United
Kingdom, there have been persistent criticisms of this boom on the basis that established (but
relatively poorer) football spectators are being squeezed out of any stakeholder position within
their clubs, most notably the biggest ones, in exchange for wealthier new spectators.
1
The
Guardian newspaper described these disenfranchised spectators as “football’s new refuseniks.”
2
Football’s burgeoning popularity, its increasingly serpentine ties with corporations and other
business institutions, the reduction of stadium capacities to create high-priced seating, and the
advent of pay-per-view television are four key ingredients identified in this process of
commodification. A government-appointed football task force, with a mandate to identify and
recommend on spectator interests, produced two rival, concluding reports and has had a
negligible effect beyond promoting antiracist work within the game. Nevertheless, concern with
the impact of this commodification remains strong in the public sphere, notably in the United
Kingdom and also in Spain, Germany, Italy, and France.
In this brief article, I seek to examine the impact of football’s commodification on spectator
identities relative to their association with professional football clubs. The article is divided into
two broad sections. First, I consider in some detail the major arguments advanced by UK
sociologists Ian Taylor and Chas Critcher during the 1960s and 1970s to explain the growing
commercialization of football at that time. Second, I set out a model of four ideal-type spectator
identities that may be found in the contemporary football world. In doing so, I seek to redefine
more precisely and sociologically four particular spectator identities, and these are supporters,
followers, fans, and flâneurs.
The analysis mapped out here applies principally to professional football clubs, particularly those
whose corporate structures are owned or controlled on market principles by individuals or
institutions. These privately owned clubs are most apparent across Western Europe (with the
partial but declining exception of some clubs in France, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, and
Portugal) and increasingly in Eastern Europe. Similar processes of commodification look set to
affect other football societies and other sporting codes. In Latin America (as in Iberia), clubs
have traditionally existed as private associations, under the ownership and political control of
their many members (socios). However, there are signs, notably in Brazil, that future legislation
will enable single investors or institutions to buy a controlling interest in football clubs. In North
America, elite baseball, basketball, American football, and, to a lesser extent, ice hockey have all
undergone extensive commodification and remarketing, resulting in different and new kinds of
spectator relationships to clubs.
3
In Australia, there have been intensive attempts in recent years
to construct national leagues for elite level clubs in Australian Rules Football (AFL), rugby league,
and soccer (A-League). The AFL appears to have been most successful in constructing a popular,
lucrative national profile for its sport and in the process generating new kinds of spectator
identification, which have experienced resistance from more traditional supporters (Hess &
Stewart, 1998). This apparent trend toward a homogenization of the corporate structures of
professional sports suggests that the arguments presented here do not just pertain to football but,
instead, have a cross-code and cross-cultural purchase.
The article develops critical sociological and normative arguments presented elsewhere on the
nature of football’s commodification (Giulianotti, 1999; Giulianotti & Gerrard, 2001a; Walsh &
Giulianotti, 2001). Following earlier work, I take commodification to mean that process by which an
object or social practice acquires an exchange value or market-centered meaning.
Commodification is not a single process but an ongoing one, often involving the gradual entry of
market logic to the various elements that constitute the object or social practice under
consideration. As I argue below, the marked intensification of this process in recent years is of a
different order to that which was experienced up until the late 1980s, and so might now be
described as a period of hypercommodification.
ENVISIONING THE FOOTBALL CONSUMER: TAYLOR, CRITCHER, AND
OTHERS
The earlier work of sociologists Ian Taylor and Chas Critcher provides a crucial starting point for
any analysis of football’s commodification from the 1960s onward. Writing separately, they
marshaled a set of Marxist arguments to explain the apparent problems besetting English
football during the 1960s and 1970s (notably spectator hooliganism, but also declining
attendance). Generally, it was submitted that football support was being commodified, most
obviously through a pursuit of wealthier audiences to attend games, a process underpinned by
the attempts of the game’s controlling forces to reinvent its social relations. Ian Taylor (1971a,
1971b) identified a corporate-driven transformation of football that had been under way since
the early 1960s. The old working-class supporters—with their subcultural “soccer consciousness”
that centered on the local team, masculinity, active participation, and victory—were being
squeezed out, to be replaced by the “genuine,” middle-class spectators and their presumed
interest in family football, spectacle, skill, and performative efficiency (Taylor, 1971a, pp. 359,
364). Working-class fans during the 1930s might have seen themselves as members within a
participant culture at football clubs, but after the war, club directors perceived a need to
repackage their “product” to challenge other cultural sites of conspicuous consumption in the
emerging “society of leisure” (Taylor, 1971b, pp. 145, 147-148).
4
Concomitant to this
“bourgeoisification” of football culture were the processes of internationalization and
professionalization, involving more fixtures with overseas teams and the growing socioeconomic
and cultural gulfs between local supporters and celebrity players (Taylor, 1971a, pp. 356-357;
1971b, p. 149). Critcher (1979) developed Taylor’s themes and drew on Raymond Williams (1961)
to elucidate the changing cultural relationships of spectators to football clubs. Williams identified
three kinds of historical relationships that individuals or social groups hold toward institutions:
members, customers, and consumers. With Taylor, Critcher (1979, p. 170) stated that traditional
fans viewed themselves as club “members,” an identity rooted in the unbreakable reciprocal
relationship between fan and club, and which is structured through obligations and duties, with
the supporter holding some “representative” status for the club. Taylor had described this
arrangement as an informal “participatory democracy” within local clubs. The customer,
however, has fewer fixed loyalties; club involvement is relatively more instrumental, being rooted
in “the satisfaction of public wants.” If these wants are not secured, the customer will probably
take his or her money and emotional investments elsewhere. Conversely, the consumer has no
brand loyalty but is instead a sporting variant of economic man, an exemplar of rational choice.
The consumer maximizes information about the plurality of market alternatives before
calculating which product will bestow the greatest personal benefits. Critcher was less explicit as
to how the customer and consumer models might be applied to football spectators. One might
speculate here that the customer will follow the local club so long as it meets some associative
purposes and its players can “do the job” on the pitch; otherwise, match attendance and interest
in the club becomes irregular. The consumer supporter is very likely to switch clubs or follow
those that offer winning teams or which are more socially suited to advancing the spectator’s
social and economic mobility. Nevertheless, Critcher is critical of the market-driven approach of
club directors and football officials in their attempts to replace traditional spectators with
consumers.
Both Taylor and Critcher used their analyses of changing club-spectator relationships, which are
rooted in the commodification of football, to explain the growing phenomenon of football
hooliganism (rooted in class and generational forms of cultural alienation) from the early 1960s
onward.
5
I have argued elsewhere that to explain football hooliganism in this way may be rather
economically reductive and pay too little attention to the internal subcultural dynamics and
empirical complexity of violent spectator groups (Giulianotti, 1999, pp. 40-42). In addition, in
elucidating the identity of spectators, both Taylor and Critcher were cautious to qualify their
validation of the traditional spectators’ claim to a “membership” status. Such a self-perception
among spectators could be “wrongly” or “illusorily” inferred (Critcher, 1979, p. 145; Taylor,
1971b, p. 145). One might speculate that working-class spectators who have lived through the
deeply disempowering realities of the post-war British class system would consider themselves to
have a real membership status or to operate within a participatory democracy that is really owned
and controlled by a handful of local businessmen.