Female Football Players and Fans

Intruding into a Man's World

Gertrud Pfister, Stacey Pope, Gertrud Pfister, Stacey Pope

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137590251
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia dello sport

This volume draws upon social science and historical approaches to provide insights into the world of women's football and female fans. It gives an in-depth analysis of the development of the women's game in different European countries and examines the experiences of female fans. An overview about women's football in Europe shows the rise and development of the game and the increasing inclusion of girls and women in football and fan communities. To date, there has been a lack of research on female participation in football, but drawing on research studies from various European countries, the volume explores a range of issues, including how girls and women become football fans and players, how women combine football with their everyday lives, and how they may encounter stereotypes and barriers when they challenge male dominance by entering this traditionally male sport.

This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including sportssociology, sport sciences, gender studies, leisure studies, women's studies as well as fandom and cultural studies.

© The Author(s) 2018

Gertrud Pfister and Stacey Pope (eds.)Female Football Players and FansFootball Research in an Enlarged Europehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59025-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Stacey Pope¹ and Gertrud Pfister²

(1)

School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University, Durham, UK

(2)

Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Stacey Pope

is an associate professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. She is especially interested in issues of gender and sport and has published widely on the topic of women’s sports fandom. She is author of The Feminization of Sports Fandom: A Sociological Study (2017) and her work has appeared in a range of journals. Her research is interdisciplinary, incorporating sociology, history, sports studies, physical education, gender and leisure studies. Her research to date has included a number of areas, for example, the sociology of football and rugby union, comparative research in sports fandom, women, sport and place, the meaning of sport for women, and the formative experiences of female sports fans.

Gertrud Pfister

gained a PhD degree in sport history, followed by another PhD in sociology. From 1980 to 2000, she was employed as a professor at the University of Berlin and she worked at the University of Copenhagen since 2002. She received two honorary doctorates and was awarded with Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Pfister conducted several large national and international research projects and published more than 200 articles and 20 books. She played and still plays a leading role in various sport-related scientific communities. Since 2016 she is professor emerita and has time to read and write. All her life, Gertrud Pfister has been active in sport, in particular, in skiing, tennis and long-distance running.

End Abstract

Introduction

In many countries and regions of the world football (better known in the United States as soccer) is the most popular sport; it attracts millions of participants and billions of people who are interested in the game. Football plays a crucial role in the everyday lives of many fans who identify with their clubs, teams and players. Numerous fans attend football games in the stadium, and some may even plan their everyday lives around the match schedules of their teams. But football is not only important to those fans who (can) attend matches in the stadium, but also to billions of people who watch the game on television or via live streaming on their digital devices, which allow football fans to follow football from wherever they are.

Players have also become increasingly accessible and recognizable to football fans—even to those with no interest in the sport. Whannel (2002, p. 108) showed how transformations of the media industry led to changes in the nature of sport stardom between 1945 and 1965 and describes how the rise of television coverage was crucial in this process: television brought ‘the faces of the famous’ directly into the home and ensured that male football players acquired a ‘celebrity’ status. In recent times, web 2:0 technology , global media and new networking sites have helped to make football and football players even more accessible. Current players can, for example, use social media such as Twitter and Instagram to intensify old and build new relationships with supporters and fans and also to connect with others involved in the sport including coaches, referees, pundits and former players (see The Football Collective 2016).

Besides being the most popular spectator sport with billions of fans, football is also the most popular sport by participation. Although the game is still predominantly played by boys and men, the number of female players is continuously increasing. Whereas a FIFA survey in 2006 estimated that 26 million girls and women played football worldwide, both as registered and as occasional players (Kunz 2007), the FIFA Women’s Football Survey 2014 showed that the number of girls and women who play this game had increased to over 30 million, and that over 4.8 million players were registered (FIFA 2014). In Europe , statistics have also shown that there has been an increase not only in the numbers of female players, but also in the number of coaches and referees in recent years (UEFA 2017).¹ Although some caution needs to be exercised around how these statistics have been compiled, especially when estimating the numbers of female participants (see Williams 2014), there is no doubt that football is the most popular sport in the world in terms of both participation and spectatorship (Bridgewater 2014).

It is not surprising, therefore, that there are innumerable popular and academic texts about football which cover a multitude of aspects—from the knee injuries of the forwards to the love affairs of popular players. Football fans , too, gained and continue to gain increasing attention among scholars. In particular, the appearance and the behaviour of various men’s fan groups, such as hooligans and ultras, were and still are at the centre of attention, not only of scholars but also of journalists and the general public (e.g., see Armstrong 1998; Braun and Vliegenthart 2008; Rookwood and Pearson 2012; Spaaij 2008; Stott and Pearson 2007). However there are numerous questions which have not even been asked, let alone answered, and this refers in particular to female football followers and fans.

What motivates so many men and a growing number of girls and women to spend time at the stadium or in front of TV screens following men’s teams and male players? What are the women’s experiences as fans in a men’s world and what benefits do they gain? Does football create a bonding and an understanding among fans from different countries and cultures or does it create tensions and animosities between fans of different teams? Does football contribute to the development of a European identity among the people living in various countries and regions or does it create or increase animosities? These and other questions motivated a group of scholars from eight countries to apply for a research project on ‘Football Research in an Enlarged Europe: Identity dynamics, perception patterns and cultural change in Europe’s most prominent form of popular culture’. This project focused on football and fandom in a European context and explored among other issues the social and sport-related backgrounds of football fans, their roles and behaviour at the stadium, as well as their social relations in and beyond the boundaries of their countries. In short: the FREE project —Football Research in an Enlarged Europe—investigated fandom and its influences on cross-cultural dialogues in Europe. One of the six sub-projects had a focus on the role of girls and women in intercultural dialogues of fans and was conducted by one of the editors of this book, Gertrud Pfister , and a PhD student. The questions addressed in this sub-project included the initiation of girls and women into football fandom, their roles in the fan communities and the integration of fandom in their everyday lives. These issues were explored via a survey, qualitative interviews and participant observations.

Some of the results of the FREE project are presented in the contributions of Pfister, Lenneis and Mintert in this book which contains an edited collection of football studies. It includes not only results of the FREE project, but also some of the presentations given at a conference on the topic of ‘Women’s Football: Played. Watched. Talked About’ which was organized by three sociologists and football researchers working at the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports at the University of Copenhagen in 2013. During this event one of the conference organizers, Gertrud Pfister , and Stacey Pope, one of the keynote speakers, conceived the idea of publishing a book to include not only some of the conference presentations, but also studies based on research and discussions that followed the conference. We chose a provocative title: Female Football Players and Fans: Intruding into a Man’s World because we wanted to emphasize that, despite the recent gains girls and women have made in the various fields of this sport, football remains a largely ‘male preserve’ (Dunning 1994; Magrath 2017).

Some of the articles of this book draw upon the extensive body of work on female football players, but focus on new aspects of, and perspectives to this topic which has already attracted the interest of a number of scholars (e.g., see Agergaard and Tiesler 2014; Caudwell 2004, 2012; Dunn 2016; Dunn and Welford 2015; Williams 2003, 2007, 2013). In addition, the book addresses the dearth of research on female football fans and provides insights into gender issues which have not been addressed in the existing fan studies (e.g., see Cere 2012; Dunn 2014; Jones 2008). Although there has been a growing interest in female fans (e.g., see Cere 2012; Dunn 2014; Jones 2008; Lenneis and Pfister 2015; Pfister et al. 2013; Pope 2011, 2016, 2017), many issues and perspectives of this phenomenon have not been the focus of the—mostly male—football researchers. In contrast to the large body of knowledge about male football supporters, studies on female fans are at present still few and far between and there is still much work to be done to redress the under-representation of women in research on sports fandom (Mewett and Toffoletti 2011). As Pope has argued in a recent book, there is a need for research on sports fans in general to incorporate women’s experiences ‘rather than either: ignoring women and focusing solely on issues which are not relevant for women (as has been the case in the body of work of fan rivalry and hooliganism), labelling women as “inauthentic” supporters; and/or “adding” female fans to research which is primarily focused upon male fans’ (Pope 2017, p. 4).

Furthermore, this edited collection of studies on female fans is also of considerable importance because football has become an increasingly popular spectator sport for girls and women. Pope (2017) has argued that there has been a Feminization of Sports Fandom in contemporary society which indicates the increasing numbers of female fans and their opportunities to become involved in foo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Women’s Football and Female Players
• Part II. Female Football Fans and their Experiences
• Back Matter