Organized Sports Fans

Organized sports are a major part of our international society; they continue to be something that connects individuals across countries. This has led to very dedicated groups of sports fans developing for most major sports teams. These communities create strong identities that help define their interactions and ways of looking at life. For those who identify particularly strongly, they may develop an in-group/out-group look at fans in an attempt to distinguish casual observers from authentic fans. Since sports tend to be vastly reaching and most people are able to align themselves with at least one team, there are benefits to studying the subculture of sports fans, as it helps explain a substantial amount of human behavior. Authenticity

Davis (2015) also identifies two other types of fans beyond the supporter and the fan and defines the fan slightly differently. The fan is someone who follows a sport team based on celebrity players, such as Lebron James or David Beckham, and would change team allegiance if those players moved to another team. The follower is more closely related to Gibbons & Nuttall’s idea of a fan, as the follower is someone who supports a team but not with fervent passion. Lastly, a flaneur is someone who supports a team through use of technology in order to do so from afar. These ways of classifying fans are just a further way some try to classify what it means to be an authentic fan. Ideas on fan authenticity have rapidly been changing in a growing globalized world. It is no longer seen as a requirement to live in the general region of a country, as there is a growing ability to connect with teams in different parts of the country and the world (Davis, 2015). Additionally, the demographic that attends the games has changed, as Davis (2015) explained that those who typically attended English soccer games were the working class, but that is not solely the case