Consuming Sport: Fans, Sport and Culture

TLDR

Sport is consumed and experienced in everyday life, social networks, and consumer patterns, with fans developing a social and moral career over their life course. The book develops a new theory of sport fandom. It links this discussion to broader debates on audiences, fan cultures, and consumer practices. The book finds that while sport shapes identity for some, many consume it in mundane ways, and that research has overemphasized exceptional support, overlooking everyday experiences.

Abstract

Consuming Sport offers a detailed consideration of how sport is experienced and engaged with in the everyday lives, social networks and consumer patterns of its followers. It examines the processes of becoming a sport fan, and the social and moral career that supporters follow as their involvement develops over a life-course. The book argues that while for many people sport matters, for many more, it does not. Though for some sport is significant in shaping their social and cultural identity, it is often consumed and experienced by others in quite mundane and everyday ways, through the media images that surround us, conversations overheard and in the clothing of people we pass by. As well as developing a new theory of sport fandom the book links this discussion to wider debates on audiences, fan cultures and consumer practices. The text argues that for far too long consideration of sport fans has focused on exceptional forms of support ignoring the myriad of ways in which sport can be experienced and consumed in everyday life.