Football Fandom Research

This chapter examines the current state of the art in football fan-related research. It starts with a discussion and refinement of the notion of “football fandom” and continues with a thematic and temporal contextualisation of fan identification research, covering heterogeneous literature traditions in sociology, sport studies and sport management research. A particular emphasis is put here on the most significant typologies developed to categorise football fans. Delving into this strand of fandom research, different construction principles are explained in order to subsequently differentiate various typologies and their thematic guideposts. Reviewing and analysing the literature allows us to identify a key research gap—that is, lacking focus on the transnational dimension of football fandom—which provides a starting point for our investigation.