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Contradictions in Fan Culture and Club Ownership in Contemporary English Football: The Game's Gone
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83549-024-2

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Publication date: 3 April 2024

Christopher McMahon and Peter Templeton

This chapter builds upon the analysis of the last chapter, as fans have to deal with the issues that arise from their team’s financial superiority. Here, we question what happens…

Abstract

This chapter builds upon the analysis of the last chapter, as fans have to deal with the issues that arise from their team’s financial superiority. Here, we question what happens when that financial superiority is accompanied by significant moral and ethical issues. Recent involvement of state actors in the ownership of English football has been evidencable and occasionally appears clear. Various reflexes and cognitive distancing occur from fandoms when football club ownership engages in practices that, according to the normative models that fans ascribe to their clubs, are mutually exclusive with the values of the fanbase and the club’s history. A common form of fan reflex often takes the form of distancing the players on the pitch from the club’s institutional structures, effectively teasing out the matchday experience from the structures that benefit from the raw emotion it generates. Another reflex is questioning why the fan should surrender their club when a morally, ethically problematic ownership model has acquired it. Here we have perhaps the greatest challenge to the normative model and, rather than negotiating that tension, as often as not the response is to try and ignore it.

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Contradictions in Fan Culture and Club Ownership in Contemporary English Football: The Game's Gone
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83549-024-2

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