Identity Work in Online Fan Forum Discussions

Our first empirical chapter analyses the discourses among fans of eight selected football clubs across Europe. Based on the results of a thorough qualitative discourse analysis of online message boards, we show how fans position themselves towards the Europeanisation of football. Our inquiry is structured around three sets of four paired comparisons of clubs’ fan groups. This research design allows to control for three conditioning factors influencing fan attitudes in terms of Europeanised mindsets: the club level (sporting success), the league level (Europeanisation of player markets) and the embedding societal context (extent of Euroscepticism). Our analysis reveals that the factor, which carries the most explanatory power, is the extent of someone’s beloved club’s participation in, and exposure to, European-level competition.