Contribution
A vocabulary that is still standard. It splits “fan” into four ideal types by two independent axes, against the older binary of traditional supporter versus consumer (Taylor; Critcher, after Raymond Williams’s members, customers and consumers). It adds a historical thesis: the commodification of elite football since the late 1980s is a change in kind (“hypercommodification”) that pushes spectators from hot, traditional identification towards the cool consumer.
Key insight
How much a club matters to someone (hot or cool) and on what basis it matters (place and inheritance, or the market) are different questions. A fan can be hot and still a consumer, loving a club through its shirts and its stars at a distance. A follower can be cool and still traditional, tracking a friendly club through ties to their own. Talk of “the fans” usually means only one of these.
Assumptions
- Ideal types, Weberian. The categories “allow for degrees of empirical variation” (§ “Principles”). No spectator is claimed to be pure.
- Bryan Turner’s hot/cool and thick/thin solidarity (1999, on body marks), with McLuhan’s and Baudrillard’s hot/cool media. Hot loyalty goes with thick solidarity, cool with thin.
- A political economy: Lash and Urry’s “disorganized capitalism”; commodification as “that process by which an object or social practice acquires an exchange value or market-centered meaning”.
- Privately owned clubs in Western Europe are the principal domain; member-owned clubs (Spain, Latin America, Germany) are partial exceptions (Introduction).
Key results
The four types (§§ on each), each with an identification, a motive and a relation to place:
- Supporter (traditional/hot). A long-term, obligatory, kin-like tie (“mothers” and “sons” in South America). Switching to a rival is “impossible”; supporters are “culturally contracted to their clubs”. The club is a totem of its community, and match rituals are “a ceremony, through which the supporters worship themselves”. The relation to the ground is topophilic, the ground is “home”. Subcultural capital accrues to those who kept attending in bad years, and cannot be bought.
- Follower (traditional/cool). Follows clubs and football people through mediated, vicarious communion, often via ties to their own club (shared players, ideology such as St. Pauli or Barcelona, ultras’ friendships). Holds “nested identities” (Cohen 1978) with no fixed ranking. Knows which combinations are illegitimate: “Only flâneurs would declare a penchant for both Liverpool and Manchester United”. Place matters only as a stage.
- Fan (consumer/hot). Intense but “inordinately unidirectional” affection for a club or its stars, authenticated by consumption (merchandise, shares, subscriptions): Thompson’s “non-reciprocal relations of intimacy with distant others”. Thicker forms can “collectivize and agitate to unseat the incumbent controllers” (sack the board, form shareholder associations). Most fans are “politically passive”. Under celebrity commodification fans “learn to cool their affections”.
- Flâneur (consumer/cool). A bourgeois, cosmopolitan window-shopper of clubs, players and even national teams, engaged through television and the internet. Wears club signifiers “as if adopting a temporary tattoo”. Belongs to “a virtual community of strollers”. At home in Augé’s non-places. Switches affiliation “like television channels”.
- Trend and paradox (final §). The historical drift is from supporter to flâneur, with follower and fan as “intermediary retreats”. But the two poles depend on each other. Clubs court flâneurs for revenue, and flâneurs consume a spectacle that supporters create: “if supporters become flâneurs, then the spectacle that is created by the spectators themselves will be threatened” (after Walzer: the cosmopolitan “is parasitic on people who are not cosmopolitans”).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Spectator identification with clubs varies on two independent axes, traditional–consumer and hot–cool, giving four ideal types | conceptual; a classification, argued not tested | §§ “Principles”, types |
| C2 | Football’s commodification since the late 1980s differs in kind from that of the 1960s–70s (hypercommodification) | weak: illustrated (pay-TV, club equity, the G14), not measured | § “Hypercommodification” |
| C3 | The historical trend is away from supporters and towards flâneurs | weak: asserted from the political economy; no data on spectator composition | abstract, final § |
| C4 | Supporters and flâneurs are interdependent: commercial football consumes a spectacle that traditional supporters produce | weak: an argument, with an analogy to Walzer | final § |
Concepts
- hypercommodification: the intensified commodification of football since the late 1980s, driven by satellite and pay-TV, telecoms, merchandise transnationals and stock markets.
- hot / cool: the degree to which the club is central to the individual’s project of self-formation.
- traditional / consumer: a long, local, popular-cultural basis of investment, versus a market-centred one.
- thick / thin solidarity (after Turner).
- topophilia: love of place (note 7).
- subcultural capital (after Thornton, from Bourdieu).
- nested identities (Cohen 1978): an unranked set of allegiances integrated by the self.
Connections
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Biel (NOTE-1299) cites this paper for the varieties of fandom. Its European fan identifiers, heavy viewers of foreign leagues, resemble followers and flâneurs more than supporters.
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Self-categorization theory. “Nested identities” without fixed ranking anticipates SCT’s levels and the common in-group model’s dual identity (NOTE-1251). Giulianotti’s account is sociological and motivational, not cognitive.
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CASE-105 (the Washington Senators). Topophilia gives a reason a supporter’s continuity follows the ground and the city rather than the franchise: the club’s “ground is always ‘home’”. That is consistent with the case’s point that franchise, city and supporters separate.
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Parasocial relationships. The “fan” type’s “non-reciprocal relations of intimacy with distant others” (Thompson) is the parasocial relationship that Archer’s ethics of parasocial relationships (LIT-172) treats. Added 2026-10-29.
Bearing on the record
- Source of THEORY-1111 (Proposed): the four-type taxonomy, and its historical trend claim, filed with a promote_when that asks for the trend to be measured.
- QUESTION-119 and CASE-104. The taxonomy answers part of “who is ‘the fanbase’?”. Supporters, followers, fans and flâneurs relate to a club in different ways, and a public stance such as “the fans hate the owner” is likely voiced by the hot types, chiefly supporters. Flâneurs, by construction, do not take part. A fanbase’s credited stance is therefore weighted by type before any sampling bias. That is an inference; the paper does not discuss stances. Giulianotti’s “fans” forming shareholder associations to unseat boards is a route to the case’s fourth reading (corporate judgment).
- “Identification is not agency.” The record filed this work as a check against reading identification as corporate agency. Read, it supports the check: three of four types are passive or market relations, and collective action appears only in the thick forms.
- No ML instruction.
Limitations
- No data. Ideal types and a trend claim, illustrated by examples, mostly British.
- The text read is the pre-review original. The published version may differ.
- Normative weight. The analysis plainly favours supporters, and the flâneur is drawn as a caricature. Giulianotti acknowledges this in note 17.
- The axes may not be independent in practice, since market-centred consumption can deepen as well as cool attachment. The paper allows thicker and thinner variants within each type but does not measure them.
Open questions
- Can the four types be recovered empirically, for example by clustering survey responses on attachment, consumption and place? Several later studies (Biel cites Grau et al. 2016; García & Llopis-Goig 2020) may have tried; none is held.
- Has the share of supporters fallen since 2002, as C3 predicts? Longitudinal attendance and membership data would answer it.