Speaker
Description
This paper presents final conclusions on perception of club football rivalries in Central-Eastern European countries of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary.
The subject of presented research results concerns the issue of importance of particular rivals for football fans in this region. Who do they consider crucial rivals? Which rivals are perceived as current and which as traditional-historical? What are the non-sportive underpins of those rivalries?
Despite numerous attempts of both qualitative or quantitative research on football fans all around the world, no comprehensive study on perception of club football rivalries has been ever conducted using the triangulation of both qualitative and quantitative research methods and techniques.
Adopted methodological framework that includes qualitative component (series of ca. 100 in-depth interviews with football fans from Central-Eastern Europe, mainly of Legia Warszawa from Poland, Slavia Praha from Czechia, Slovan Bratislava from Slovakia and Ferencvaros from Hungary) and qualitative component (CAWI questionnaire open to 20 000+ club football fans from Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary) has never been used in that scale before to research football fans.
Previous stages of this 4-years research project has been presented and discussed at the World Congresses of Sociology of Sport in Lausanne (2018), Otago (2019) and Tubingen (2022), covering theoretical and methodological issues, initial results of the qualitative study and framework of quantitative research.
The main impact of this paper is a demographic profile of club football fans in Central-Eastern Europe that also includes relevant data on their socio-political views which can be presented in comparative manner.
