Speaker
Description
During the last decade, football fans in Europe became more active and participated in different (symbolic) struggles for power in football and beyond. Nummerato (2018) compared fan activism in different European countries and detected both similarities and national singularities. This presentation aims to go a big deepeer and compare the reasons and dynamics of fan activism over a decade in two specific national settings: Germany and Ukraine.
The presentation’s evidence is based on an analysis of publicly available online documents, like the fanzine www.faszination-fankurve.de for Germany or ultras.org.ua for Ukraine. Furthermore, websites and social media channels of individual groups are used. Thus, fan activism from 2012 to 2022 is categorised and analysed based on reasons, tactics, structures, and spaces in which activism takes place.
In both countries, fans become increasingly visible in the public discourse. Two reasons are postulated for this development: Firstly, media outlets are more likely to report on fan activism since the public is primed for this phenomenon by previous protests. Secondly, a trend of PR-professionalisation is observed in the ultra groups themselves.
In Germany, fans mainly engage on the level of football governance, including a declared war on the national football federation. In Ukraine, fan activism is rather related to national politics. Also, here, fans try to increase their influence at the club level, too. The difference is among other things caused by the Russian occupation since 2014. As a result, fans' nationalist attitudes increased and several of them joined the nationalistic, eventually right-wing, Azov regiment.
