How do Hong Kong fans choose their favourite overseas football club? Origins of transnational fandom in late modernity

Abstract

Despite the importance of transnational fans to the globalisation of European football, there have not been many studies that aim to understand why they support specific overseas clubs. On the basis of qualitative interviews with transnational fans in Hong Kong and supplemented by findings from an online fan survey, I argue that most of them lack genuine choices when choosing their favourite overseas clubs. Even when all English Premier League matches are shown live in Hong Kong and with information about many European clubs available on the Internet, transnational fans tend to support teams that they were familiar with when they were still young, and clubs that star players play for. Such clubs are usually the richest ones that can help them achieve success on the pitch. Also, family members and peers can be influential to the origin of football fandom, but there is little pressure to support the same overseas club as their family members or peers. The choices of transnational fans based in Hong Kong should also be understood by taking the historical context of the city into account. Such findings suggest that globalisation has freed Hong Kong football fans from geographical constraints, but the individualisation thesis in the late modern era needs to be qualified since the wealth of European clubs and fans’ immediate social context do often have important impacts on their decision to support an overseas club.

Locating the Supporter Liaison Officer in the football field: Bridges, brokers and the ‘supporter gaze’

“…Sociological analyses of European football can reveal important insights, and, following King (2003), European football represents a prominent field where social relations in European societies are periodically remade. Particularly, in the European setting, the changing role of football fan groups has been subjected to much academic analysis from the 1990s onwards (Fitzpatrick and Hoey, 2022;Garcia and Llopis-Goig, 2021;Giulianotti, 2002;King, 1998King, , 2003Lee, 2023). To holistically understand the emergence of the SLO, it is necessary to gain a socio-historical overview of football's structural changes and fans' involvement in football's governance, since this enables an appreciation of the sociological context in which SLOs were operationalised, and currently operate within.…”

Online sports fans communities: humor, trivial knowledge, and anti-modern tendencies

“…Even when there is a low sense of attachment, as in the case of new fans who follow a club's recent success or because of an interest in a particular player, "the sports fan" is usually a supporter of a particular team rather than the sport as a whole. Although some people support two clubs, one local and one from a top foreign league, supporters choose their favorite club based on various factors and develop loyalty to it (27). Nonetheless, along with supporting one team, individuals, who are more likely to be men than women, also define themselves as general fans of a sport (28).…”