We Love to Hate Each Other

This collection of fifteen essays explores football (American soccer) fan culture in a number of contexts, but also the various media that connect them. They look at how television, the Internet and other technologies affect the way football is consumed and produces different kinds of fandom, and how these affect the sport itself through such processes as commercialization. They draw on surveys, observations and textual analysis. Chapters 3-6 draw on newspaper sports reporting to understand the formation of local, national and even international identities. Chapters 7-12 consider the differences between fan-identities that journalists report and those that, with the advent of fan-sites online, fans do themselves. The last few chapters focus on film and TV, the representation of minorities, and the pedagogic role sports are called on to fulfill. The contributors are academics mostly from Europe with backgrounds in sociology, media studies, cultural studies, anthropology and journalism.