When do football fans tend to acquire a more Europeanised mind-set? The impact of participation in European club competitions

ABSTRACT

How has the Europeanisation of football at the level of governance (due to for example the effects of the Bosman ruling and the formation of the UEFA Champions League) – influenced the identities of football fans? This paper explores how such structural Europeanisation in football is influencing identifications among fans. Based on an analysis of articulations in selected online message boards, we distil the positioning of fans towards ‘Europe’ in football, and the factors which shape it. We control for three main avenues of impact: the club level, the league level, and the societal context. Our inquiry is based on a set of paired comparisons of fan scenes for football clubs in four different European countries. Results show that the factor carrying the most explanatory power is the club’s participation in European-level competition. Although this broadly confirms a ‘contact hypothesis’ – according to which the more fans are exposed to cross-border contacts, the less relevance they attribute to aspects of national belonging – significant variations of how frequent exposure to European-level competition translates into more Europeanised perceptions do exist. For European identity studies, the work corroborates that a lifeworld arena such as football can foster Europeanised identifications, albeit not in a uniform manner.

KEYWORDS:

• Europeanisation
• identity
• cross-border interaction
• football
• lifeworld

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In our analysis, we focus on players markets and assessments of players. Admittedly, the Europeanisation of football at the level of coaches and trainers, most notably in the case of the English Premier League (and to some extent predating the Bosman ruling), adds an interesting aspect to the discussion and has drawn scholarly attention over the years (cf. Head 2004; Smith 2019).

2. Through the Bosman ruling, the European Court of Justice banned restrictions on EU foreigners within national professional sports leagues and allowed players to move to another club in the EU at the end of their contract without a transfer fee (Duval and van Rompuy 2016).

3. Cf. e.g. Eurobarometer (2016a, 2016b). Questions covered: ‘Do you see yourself as … “nationality only” … “European and nationality” … ?’; ‘How attached do you feel to … “Europe?” … “the EU?”’; “Does the EU conjure up a ‘positive’/’negative’ image?”.

4. In one case (Wacker Innsbruck), two smaller forums were used (in the absence of a forum similar in size to those used for the other clubs).

5. The postings were included based on their date. Our sample includes all posts that were written between 01 Aug 2016 and 31 Jul 2018. In some cases, posts cover matches that were officially part of the following season (2018/19), as posts often precede matches.

6. An in-depth discussion that includes all three contexts can be found in a larger publication (Niemann, Brand, and Weber forthcoming).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported through a grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant no. 386268084.