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In the highly competitive professional sports industry, managers of a newly established competition face many challenges, including “converting” or gaining the allegiance of new groups of consumers (fans, spectators) to their colors. One critical aspect in the converting process relates to the “ideal” game-day experience as perceived by would-be consumers. Gaining knowledge about this area could be critical to professional sport marketers in enhancing the perceived quality of sport events. This study examines the ideal football experience among 1,412 fans of an Australian A-League football (soccer) club. The importance of a lively atmosphere, that of high turnouts of spectators and the opportunity to watch quality and attacking football are highlighted in most comments, even relegating the game’s final score (winning) to a more marginal level of importance. Some of the implications of the findings for professional football marketers and avenues for future research are presented and discussed.

In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing within a complex variety of social processes, from the circulation of global, mass media representations to inter- and intra-personal interactions. I present data collected from a study on K-pop music consumption in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia with an insatiable thirst for foreign culture. The data show how a group of Singaporean K-pop fans were regularly bombarded with largely negative messages about what it means to be K-pop music fans, and how these meanings affected their own negotiations as fans. K-pop fandom provided a sense of shared identity and status within popular youth culture, yet their experiences were often soured by negative media portrayals of deviant fans, whose behaviors risked stigmatizing the K-pop social identity. This paper thus deals with some of the problems for self that being a music fans entails.

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the performances of Chinese football teams, especially the national team, have failed to impress the world, football remains the most popular because of millions of supporters with loyalty and passion. Most studies related to fans mainly focus on the economic and political implications of spectatorship along with the rise of China. Nevertheless, few articles are available to answer the fundamental questions, such as ‘When did these supporters come out?’ and ‘What were the factors of the development of fandom?’. By going through archival records and published documents over the last decades, this chapter offers a comprehensive and historical analysis of the development of football fandom in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and deals with these unanswered questions. As such, this chapter does not intend to be the most authoritative one but is one of the rare sources to lay down the foundation for research on Chinese football fandom. Furthermore, this chapter also proves that studies on football fandom can be a useful window for observing Chinese society.

By applying Erving Goffman’s concept of role embracement (1961), I analyze the role of a hardcore music fan, online and offline. I collected ethnographic data from discussion boards, an online questionnaire, interviews, emails, private messaging, and field observation to provide support for the usefulness of Goffman’s concept to illuminate aspects of online and offline role performances. “Attachment,” “demonstration,” and “engagement” are the three elements of role embracement that illustrate aspects of the hardcore fan’s passion for the Rolling Stones, expressed both on the Internet and in everyday face-to-face situations. The study shows that Goffman’s ideas about a person’s commitment to a role and the handling of potential stigma (1963) in relation to it can help researchers understand how fans or those belonging to a special interest community enact their roles in the ever-growing seamlessness of the offline/online spheres.

This introduction provides the methodological framework for the book, approaching the business of football through the lens of its most reliable consumers – the fanbase. Fan cultures necessarily inform the normative understanding of a football club, due to the popularly held belief that it is the fan’s – or some reified idea of the fan – that is the permanent feature of a football club and that provides its identity. Players and owners come and go, but the relationship between the club and the fan is, theoretically, never-ending. In truth, this is never a real fan who could exist, but a constructed image of the fan built out of other narratives and that, at some level, football fans associate themselves. This fan is no one in particular, but is drawn from a close reading of football culture and identifying the directives of the traditional fan. Utilising a combination of critical theory and the existing literature on football club ownership, our goal is to reveal the distinction between how people talk about the social dimension of football clubs, and how they actually relate to their fans and the wider world in the era of late capitalism. A club is not simply the romanticised notions held by those within the games, but, as with all businesses, it is also the product of it conducts itself in a series of other networks of exchange. Often irreconcilable with the aforementioned romantic notions, these networks often get hidden by the prevailing discourse.

In this chapter, inventory and sales data from a small business with seven showrooms are evaluated to forecast future sales and maximize total profits. In each showroom, three major brands of ceiling fans are sold and a limited amount of products from each brand are displayed. Each showroom varies in their sales volume, display capacity, and profit margins. Using historical data, the optimal display configuration was determined for each showroom; that is, the proportion of products from each brand to display in the limited display grid, while acknowledging existing constraints. Next using the optimal displays, profit for the next year is forecasted. Finally a comparison is made between actual and forecasted results and profits pre and post the optimal product display.

The character of Miss Moneypenny, whilst minor, is a staple in the cinematic universe of the James Bond film franchise, and she has been portrayed by various actresses throughout the years. Her character forms an indispensable part of the MI6 office. However, Miss Moneypenny remains sexually unattainable and the one woman that James Bond has not managed to bed: ‘The muffled eroticism of Moneypenny and Bond has survived for over [fifty] years, forming the longest unconsummated screen relationship’ (Brabazon, 1999). Fans of the James Bond film franchise, however, may feel differently about the relationship between 007 and Miss Moneypenny, hoping for a romantic conclusion to the banter and flirting that has continued throughout the film franchise. This chapter will analyse comments made on two fan-made YouTube videos that are supercuts of all the scenes between James Bond and Miss Moneypenny, in order to understand fans’ opinions of the relationship between the two characters. This chapter will make use of fan studies and participatory culture in order to understand the manner in which fans perceive the relationship between James Bond and Miss Moneypenny, and how these two characters will always be in the ‘friend-zone’.