Why Fans Matter? - Fans and Identities in the Soccer World

This book explores the meanings, significances, and impacts of the complex identities that soccer fans, especially those of men''s soccer, represent worldwide. The chapters in this volume construct and reconstruct fandom in terms of diverse fan affiliations from local to global level, and from national to transnational spaces.

Soccer or (association) football is a game where fans come alive with one goal. It is soccer-s fanbase that has made it the most popular mass spectator sport in the world. Since the sport-s growth and its codification in the late nineteenth century, soccer and its followers became markers of varied identities. This volume is an attempt to understand the soccer fan-s tryst with such identities, mostly at the level of professional men-s football in different parts of the world. Fans create, represent, break, recreate, transcend, complicate and confuse diverse identities in their attachments with and loyalties to particular clubs, nations, continents, space