Autonomy or loyalty? Community-within-community interactions of a local football fandom group

Abstract

Fandom communities adopt diverse consumption practices to cope with an overwhelmingly commodified football. Drawing upon literature on consumer communities, this paper examines a local football fandom community in multifarious relations with its broader fandom through divergent consumption practices, which create tensions and ambivalences in terms of the former’s autonomy from and loyalty to the latter. Based on observations and interviews with community members, the paper describes how the community’s production and consumption of its own products are experienced as matters of autonomy within and difference from broader communities, whilst the consumption of merchandise is regulated and performed as expression of loyalty to broader fandom. Findings demonstrate how a community can use multiple consumption practices to manage, mitigate and sustain its community-within-community tensions.