Football and community empowerment: how FC Sankt Pauli fans organize to influence

Identifying Civic Opportunity Structures Within Professional Football Fan Clubs

“…attending home and away matches, initiating informal social gatherings) that rear civic opportunities, their associational involvement indicates attributes that shape their complex value structures. Aligning with the assertions of scholars, such as Totten (2015, 2016), who scrutinized the culture of FCSP, their value structures are comprised of complex sets of ideals that explain their engagement in football activism. Both fan clubs unveil their propensity to include assimilating sets of values in their activist agenda, which include socio-cultural and symbolic aspects, social issues, and political ideologies, in which less emphasis is placed on the performance side of football.…”

“…To secure a representative sample size, 15 fan clubs from the two teams were identified as showing recognizable variance in different dimensions. Several studies, especially those of Totten (2015Totten ( , 2016, examined the fan behavior of FC St. Pauli fans to understand their identity, expressed as left-wing, and how it is transferred in the greater civic arena as they show a widened scope of civic engagement. On the other hand, despite the widespread recognition of being distanced from any political orientation, which is shared within the wider football community in Germany, discussion on the fan identity of its city-rival, HSV, has not been academically investigated.…”

“…Embracing values representing the left end of the political spectrum, FCSP and its supporters capture a unique niche not just in professional football but also in the extended sociopolitical sphere. According to Totten (2016), the supporters of FCSP are known for their "political credentials, fostering a coalition of leftist and libertarian thought, and expressing support for a plethora of libertarian causes," (p. 705) whose ground for civic participation oftentimes surpasses the boundaries drawn according to the individual organizational level. Hence, the act of expressing leftist ideals through the means of football, which necessitates a broadened spectrum of engagement beyond professional football, may be considered a sufficient condition to rear a similar (if not identical) civic opportunity structure.…”

How are fans affected by the commercialization of elite sports? A review of the literature and a research agenda

“…Fan resistance can motivate fan communities to reshape the meanings and identities of clubs (e.g. Daniel and Kassimeris, 2013; Torchia, 2016; Totten, 2016). An extreme example is how fans' resistance to commercialization of a football club (in this study, Manchester United) can result in fans creating a new club (FC United of Manchester), based on former traditions and values (Torchia, 2016).…”

Three-sided football: DIY football and social transformationalism

“…(Numerato, 2019, p. 157) As such, there are a number of useful comparative studies into alternative football tournaments which foster inclusive cultural contexts for players and fans to come together around augmented sporting forms. In these DIY football settings (and in order to foster atmospheres of sporting inclusion, political solidarity and anti-racism) teams may be randomised, rules, hierarchies and structures subverted, as the goals of football are re-oriented towards comradeship, reciprocity and fun (Kuhn, 2010;Totten, 2016). Identifying these socio-sporting spaces as liminal sites of 'radical possibility', Sterchele and Saint-Blancat identify that the horizontalist 'anti-structure' of DIY Football temporarily 'enables participants to experience bodily movements and technical moves as a pleasure per se rather than instrumentally oriented to the achievement of whatever goal ' (2015, p. 118).…”