Autonomy or loyalty? Community-within-community interactions of a local football fandom group

Abstract

Fandom communities adopt diverse consumption practices to cope with an overwhelmingly commodified football. Drawing upon literature on consumer communities, this paper examines a local football fandom community in multifarious relations with its broader fandom through divergent consumption practices, which create tensions and ambivalences in terms of the former’s autonomy from and loyalty to the latter. Based on observations and interviews with community members, the paper describes how the community’s production and consumption of its own products are experienced as matters of autonomy within and difference from broader communities, whilst the consumption of merchandise is regulated and performed as expression of loyalty to broader fandom. Findings demonstrate how a community can use multiple consumption practices to manage, mitigate and sustain its community-within-community tensions.

Fã cínico: falando a verdade descaradamente

“…Cova et al, 2007;Goulding et al, 2013) ou de comunidades de marcas (Guschwan, 2012;Muñiz & O'Guinn, 2001;Yeritsian, 2021). Mais recentemente, foram associados ao prossumo visto que colaboram com outros agentes de marketing (Chen, 2021;Souza-Leão & Costa, 2018;Sugihartati, 2020) acerca da sua própria experiência de consumo (Ay & Kaygan, 2022;Fuschillo, 2018;Seregina & Weijo, 2017).…”

“…Seja como for, os fãs caracterizam-se pela intensa relação com tanto com os produtos midiáticos (e.g., música, desporto, filmes, séries) através de elevados níveis de envolvimento e conhecimento sobre estes (Ay & Kaygan, 2022;Chen, 2021;Hewer et al, 2017), quanto com outros fãs e comunidades de consumidores que os aproxima (i.e., fandoms) (Fuschillo, 2018;Guschwan, 2012;Kozinets & Jenkins, 2022). Ambos os aspectos indicam como suas práticas são constitutivas da identidade (Arsel & Thompson, 2011;B.…”

Just one screen is not enough: Social TV role to Brazilian fans of Major League Soccer

“…It is not by chance that this market segment has endeavored to expand the reach of its consumers by stimulating their presence at sporting events (Ay and Kaygan, 2022;Sung and Mills, 2018), by broadening its television (TV) audience (Hewer et al, 2017;Jones, 2017), and, most recently, by encouraging their interaction on social networks (Abeza et al, 2017;Moura and de Souza-Leão, 2019). The sports industry has transitioned from delivering value to cocreating it (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004), since fans started co-creating their consumer experiences (Kolyperas et al, 2019;Thomas, 2018) or expressing their loyalty to sports brands (Jewell, 2017;Majumdar and Naha, 2020), or even taking on production functions associated with what is consumed by them (Andrews and Ritzer, 2018).…”

“…It is not by chance that this market segment has endeavored to expand the reach of its consumers by stimulating their presence at sporting events (Ay and Kaygan, 2022; Sung and Mills, 2018), by broadening its television (TV) audience (Hewer et al. , 2017; Jones, 2017), and, most recently, by encouraging their interaction on social networks (Abeza et al.…”

“…Overall, sports are seen as a market segment capable of expanding and popularizing the glocalization phenomenon, mainly because its consumers are a specialized and proactive group, namely: fans (Andrews and Ritzer, 2018; Delia and Katz, 2019; Giulianotti and Numerato, 2017). Sports fans have long been investigated in studies conducted by consumer researchers who aim at better understanding how a given cultural object reflects on market relations (Ay and Kaygan, 2022; Hewer et al. , 2017; Jones, 2017; Smart, 2018).…”