Abstract

The omnipresence of social media is embedded in the way sport is consumed; by exploring the relationship between football fandoms and their influence on the game, we can see how social media has democratised football and empowered fan voices to influence the decision-making and wider culture surrounding football. This has resulted from social media’s accessibility by globalising a localised space of fandom. The extreme Ultras mentality is demonstrated by the protests against the European Super League, affecting systemic changes to how professional football is organised.

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Referred to as “The World’s Game,” football connects people across the globe by nurturing a common interest surrounding the sport. In the pre-social media age, fanatical fans would organise themselves into groups in support of teams. The footballing world has labelled them Ultras. Generally, fans were once restricted to their locale until the prevalence of social media in our everyday lives allowed them to support their favourite teams and players from anywhere in the world. The omnipresence and rise of social media as a feature and function of peoples’ lives have also empowered the voices and opinions of fans. Where once there was strong protection of officials and finality, now fans have significant sway in response to such decisions. Through social media, fans have harnessed the construct and characteristics of Ultras mentality in influencing structural decisions surrounding the sport. Exploring the fan reaction to The European Super League proposal in 2021, we can see how social media has changed the landscape of football fandom through globalisation, increased accessibility and ultimately empowers fans’ voices in influencing the structural decision-making in the game.

 

Ultras, localised collectivism, and limited influence

Rooted in 1960s Italian football, the idea of extreme fandom gave rise to the Ultras mentality stems from the localised nature of support as pointed to by Doidge et al. (2020), who sets this timeframe as a marker for when the first signs of uniformity and collective, organised support began to take shape in football fandom. The Leoni dei Fossi, a supporters group based in Milan, is largely considered to be the blueprint to which Ultras groups are built upon (Doidge et al., 2020). These groups mirror the concept of “imagined communities,” as explored by Hobsbawm (2012), in that they have strictly localised traditions and ways of thinking that are homogenous and exclusive to themselves.

Within the stadium, the actions of Ultras harken back to the sociological theory developed by Goffman (1971) as fans often perform certain actions in a “public-facing” manner to show their support for their team. In the same vein, Anderson’s (2006) concept of practicing regular rituals to unify individuals of a nation can be extrapolated to fit the construct of Ultras with their performance of traditions and actions in creating a sense of collectivism. Ultra groups build this sense of collectivism upon the acceptance and rejection of fandom in terms of created traditions that continually develop over time in the locale.

Resulting from this, the Ultras mentality fosters a way of thinking displayed in a pre-social media world that actively rejects the eventual globalisation of the sport, hanging onto the localisation of fandom within the terrace (King, 2003). This strong passion and pride fundamental to the Ultras mentality naturally bring the “power” to influence a certain sphere to a certain degree. While Stott et al. (2018) suggest that support can lean towards cosmetic performance, Choluj et al. (2020) suggest that Ultras can also significantly influence decisions made by the club they support. Simultaneously, the power that Ultras traditionally hold is confined within the terrace. The choreographed song and performance that usually accompanies an Ultra-group’s presence in the stadium, as described by Doidge & Lieser (2018), gives the fans a sense of contribution to a team’s results (Choluj et al., 2020). Further evidence of Ultras’ influence comes from Italy, where the connection between clubs and fans runs deeper than the prototypical show of support from other European Ultras as the tribal nature of these supporters is entrenched within this creation of the Ultras mentality.

These examples of pre-social media influence of ultras demonstrate that though the uniformity and collectivism intrinsic in the Ultras’ mentality could influence the decisions of certain aspects of specific teams, the nature of analogue support is heavily localised and that the sphere of influence that they have is relatively small when compared with the globalised nature of the sport today.

 

Creating virtual spaces, community and the relationship between fans and social media 

Muniz & O’Guinn (2001) offers a definition of community that holds true with the development of not only the digitalised space but is strengthened in the age of social media. They point to a “non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among brand admirers” (p. 412). Substituting the idea of a brand for a football club, we can see how the idea of community has shifted from a localised arena as per King (2003), to a space that stretches beyond the imagined walls of an analogue community. With the rise of social media and the creation of new and virtual spaces where football fans can interact, there is the creation of a community like one that is reminiscent of Ultras (Fenton et al., 2023). Mastromartino et al.’s (2020) emphasises these virtual spaces’ similarity when compared to the analogue way of support by pointing out how the pervasiveness of social media has allowed a sense of community to develop within these virtual spaces.

Additionally, Bradley (2010) and Cheong & Park (2015) highlight that much of the concept of social media, especially in the Web 2.0 context, hinges on collaboration and engagement with information. Thus, drawing on Mastromartino et al.’s (2020) theory of “social media being a place of forum for exchange built on a set of common interests” (p.1709). This further accentuates the ability for significant communities to be formed within online spaces that were once bound by the restrictions of geography and bypass the need to be physically present in a member’s contribution to the football fandom space.

 

A shift in the meaning of community and communication

With the development of virtual spaces comes a shift in the paradigm of how we view community and social media’s effect on the structure of fandom and football on a wider scale. The concept of globalisation is ingrained in the affordances of social media – in that it is economically and socially changed by these affordances (Flew & Iosifidis, 2020). Expanding on the concepts of community and globalisation concerning football fandom, we can see how social media has brought fans together regardless of geographic barriers in a virtual space and ultimately globalised the sport. This changes the way that discussion occurs around the sport. The active encouragement of engagement beyond the exclusive few has allowed people’s voices to be heard in ways that the traditional sense of community offline would not have (Mastromartino et al., 2020). An example is how platforms such as Twitter strengthen communitiesThe 12th Man- How social media has globalised the traditionally local space of football fandom and empowered fans’ voices in virtual spaces.

Politically speaking, the democratisation of communication in today’s age of social media has not only a place online but offline as well, with Hill et al. (2018) pointing to the mobilisation of football fans on the back of Castells’ (2013) view that the self-generated content can be used to mobilise movements. This builds from Castells’ (2007) theory that instead of top-down, one-to-many communication – being that of traditional mobilisation of community there is now the ability for horizontal networks and many-to-many communication. We can see how effective this is in an era of social media and football, where fans have mobilised themselves to change the structure and culture of football by harnessing the communities they have built across social media. This will be explored further in the case study involving the European Super League proposal and subsequent fan reaction.  

 

Case Study: 48 Hours of the European Super League 

In April 2021, twelve European football clubs announced a joint project that would have changed the structure of continental European football forever in the form of the European Super League (ESL) (Meier et al., 2022). The concept of the league would be like the closed system of Major League Soccer in the United States (Welsh, 2023). This is compared to the traditional structure of European football, which includes an open league system overseen by one governing body – The Union of European Football Association (UEFA) (Macedo et al., 2022). The significance is that the twelve clubs involved were statistically the richest in the world and were largely viewed as monopolistic in their venture.

During the initial 48 hours after the announcement of the ESL, there was prevalent opposition towards the proposal shown in discussions across social media. Fans, empowered by the accessibility and globalised nature of social media, quickly mobilised in opposition to the ESL. With Jungherr (2014) framing Twitter as a space of political communication, there are distinct similarities between a “traditional” political protest and the uproar displayed across the platform regarding the ESL. Considering Gruzd et al.’s (2011) research on imagined communities online and Hobsbawm’s (2012) research about imagined communities in the traditional sense, we can see how with the element of social media involved, the localised nature of organised support, as a staple of Ultras mentality, has bled into the digital space (Doidge & Lieser, 2018; King, 2003). This idea is further illustrated by Meier et al. (2022), who claim that fans had an imagined reality of “fan ownership” of clubs, carried over from the traditional Ultras mindset into the virtual space, which was challenged by the ESL proposal. This invoked strong, collective action among fans in online discussion spaces against the Super League proposal (Sutton et al., 1997).

Another aspect of fans’ response to the ESL proposal that demonstrates the power harnessed through social media by fans is the physical mobilisation coordinated online. This illustrates the bleeding of outcry online into an offline experience through various protests and demonstrations across the continent against the Super League (BBC Sport, 2021). This type of action was similar to the ones Liverpool fans took in Millward’s (2012) study, whereby they mobilised against the club’s owners. With the protests against the ESL, the rapidly increased accessibility and globalisation, fans were able to mobilise extremely quickly across the continent by utilising the affordances of the communicative tools and virtual communities on social media. The response overwhelmed the clubs, and they quickly disbanded the proposal.

In 48 hours, what was once a revolutionary idea from powerful figures in the world of football to attempt to privatise football in the hopes of offsetting the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic by eventually profiting from a closed league system was quickly abandoned on the back of overwhelming from social media and demonstrations across Europe (Wagner et al., 2021). Therefore, we can use this case study as an example of how social media allows for what Millward (2012) describes as “transnationalism and social movements” stemming from football fandom to influence decision-making by top officials (p. 634). 

 

Conclusion 

In the ever-changing landscape of football fandom, the omnipresence of social media has changed how communities are formed and maintained. Before the prevalence of social media in our everyday lives, football fandom was largely localised and tribal with the emergence and popularity of Ultras across Europe. This came with it a limited sphere of influence dictated by homogenous traditions. However, as football became more globalised through social media, there was simultaneously an increase in accessibility afforded by platforms that actively encouraged the creation of virtual communities not bound to the locale. Using the subsequent reaction of European football fans to the European Super League proposal in 2021, we can see how fans have used social media to mobilise both online and offline. Considering this, we can see how fans can use social media to harness the once-isolated Ultras mentality to influence top officials’ decisions and the sport’s structural organisation.

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