The 12th Man: Fan noise in the contemporary NFL

Abstract

The study of sound is largely absent from scholarship on sport in general and sport fandom in particular. Sound, however, plays a crucial role in the cultivation, maintenance, and performance of sports fandom. Using Seattle’s 12th Man and the discourses surrounding it, this essay examines the relationship between sound, space, and fandom in the contemporary National Football League. We consider how fans’ sonic labor is constitutive of their place within a fan community; the relationship between sound and fandom’s spatial and affective dimensions; and how contemporary sport and media organizations capitalize on fans’ production of sound and the embodied experience and communal identity it fashions. By investigating the 12th Man’s sonic relations to fandom, space, games, and television, we demonstrate how the league has shifted from regulating fan noise as an interruption to cultivating it as a communicative resource that adds value to games.