‘No to Modern Football’: The Digitized Amplification of Collaborative Glocalization among Extreme Fan Communities: An Abstract

Abstract

Emerging from the growth of consumer fandom, global football brands have become some of the most profitable in the world, while the football industry can be categorized as big business. Thus, market-orientated practices such as branding, have become synonymous with the spectacle of sporting events. However, the prominence of capitalist ideology within the marketplace has diminished the liberties of extreme football fans, resulting in marketplace exclusion. Extreme fans no longer see their football clubs as symbolic representations of the local community or local culture, but as an embodiment of a globalized, cosmopolitan, market-driven world, detached from the people it originally represented. Digitized communities, including those communities that transcend online environments, have been a topic of great debate among marketing academics, with recent studies advancing the understanding of a number of research contexts, such as; gaming communities, therapeutic communities, and educational communities. Knowledge surrounding the conceptualizations of consumption communities has also advanced, with new modes of online consumer participation emerging within academic literature, such a brand publics. However, despite such advancements, Moufahim et al. (2018) state that critical conversations must continue, specifically pertaining to the darker side of online communities and interaction, which exert forms of social control, exclusion, destruction, and hostility. This netnographic study focuses on how extreme football fans engage in collaborative glocalization, with implications for the manifestation of fan resistant practices which are proliferated and celebrated through the utilization of digital sharing platforms. Extreme fans are no longer engaging in reflexive social performance solely based upon their own experiences, but also the experiences of similar ‘others’. Thus, the current study shows how extreme fan cultures engage in various forms of collaborative glocalization as they seek to align their own identities with that of the broader fan culture ideology. The prevalence of digitized technologies within this resistant fan culture, results in an amplification of deviant acts which permeate transnational boundaries. Such enhances the understanding of how the darker aspects of fan communities manifest through online platforms, and the impact of same.