Fandom Essay

It is impossible to not talk about fandom when we try to analyze modern football, as one of the basements of the house, fandom has been affected by many aspects of social stratification. In terms of class, it also played a significant role in changing the status of fandom. Social class is regularly defined by the occupation, which splits the class into the manual (working-class) and non-manual (middle-class) occupation (Malcolm, 2008). And having acknowledged of this definition, we will take a closer look into how these two diverse classes, majorly the working class, shaped the fandom in England and the special pub football culture brought by the working class.

According to Pope (2015), football in England is traditionally regarded as a sport for the “working class”, and we can also see an uneven number of participants in football are working class (Malcolm, 2008). Considering the low cost of competing in the game and the wide-spread popularity across the country, it is hard to argue that nowadays people participate in football are not constrain by the social class. However, being a football fan is another story, it will cost much more money to watch people play than kick the ball around by yourself. As Giulianotti (2002) defined in his journal, he divided fandom into four different sectors in terms of hot & cool, traditional & consumer: supporter, fan, follower, flaneur. And each different category would occupy different amount of money and time. For the hot & consumer
For instance, in the city of Manchester, it is commonly being seen that the Man City represents the working class and the Man United represents the middle class, and public do view their fans contrarily due to the different club represents (Hughes, 2014). This is the situation when the social class influences the regional rivalry and set up the background for the club