Abstract
Against conventional patterns of fandom loyalty, it is interesting to examine the behavioral patterns of enthusiastic fans who specifically choose to distance themselves from their favorite team and from reality during decisive matches. The present study explores the reasons and implications of such behavior, based on in-depth interviews with 19 soccer team fans in Israel who practice such purposeful avoidance. Findings show that such purposeful avoidance of games is generally motivated by a desire to avoid a source of stress or can be attributed to an illusion of influence, where purposeful avoidance is part of rituals whose irrationality is recognized by the fans themselves. Today, in the era of ubiquitous smartphones and social networks, purposeful avoidance becomes a true challenge.
Fandom in general, and soccer fandom in particular, has attracted extensive academic attention. Research has focused on fan characteristics, lifestyles, practices, and other features. Researchers concur that being a sports fan typically involves an entire lifestyle that includes rituals, purchase of team products, extensive consumption of sports media, and especially a deep commitment to a team and the community that evolves around it. Consequently, the classic model of fandom demands that community members attend games, view them on the media, or at least closely follow the developments of their team’s games.
Against this backdrop, it is interesting that some fans choose to intentionally distance themselves from their team’s match in real time. During certain games, these fans tend to escape to quiet, isolated locations to avoid learning about the events of the game as it unfolds, in seeming contradiction to their own interests and accepted community custom. The current study examines the motives of these fans who purposefully avoid their teams, which is a special challenge in the era of new media, where individuals share information in real time and news updates are incessantly pushed to mobile phones.
To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted in-depth interviews with staunch fans who meet the criteria of the traditional category of warm fans, and who systematically avoid their teams during important or decisive games. Hopefully, findings will contribute to our understanding of soccer fans’ lifestyles and attitudes to their favorite teams, and shed light on the status, function, and significance of sports in society.
Literature review
Sports and society
Sports is a broad cultural phenomenon that affects all strata of society and plays an important role in the social lives of most societies in the world (Tamir and Galily, 2010). More than merely entertainment for the masses, sports is effectively a “religion” with hundreds of millions of global believers (Price, 2001). Sports functions as a sphere of national and international political action and sentiment (Nygard and Gates, 2013), and is an enormous global industry that generates huge annual revenues (Ben-Porat, 2009). The sports discourse covers many issues, including sports as a social agent, sports as an instrument of politics, sports as an arena of economic activity, sports and leisure culture, and sports and the media.
As a social agent, sports contributes to the adoption of the principles and values required to maintain the proper working order of social, civic, and democratic frameworks (Clifford and Feezell, 1997; Green, 2008). Activities that are regularly and routinely performed on sports fields promote the adoption of values such as obedience, acceptance of authority and hierarchy, discipline, and tolerance, to name a few of the activities that contribute to socialization. For example, sports functions as an educational tool that is instrumental in teaching children such values as leadership, team work, and competitiveness (Kremer-Sadlik and Kim, 2007). As a social agent, sport also promotes social mobility and helps individuals and groups break through the “glass ceilings” of social stratification (Hartmann-Tews, 2006). Golfer Tiger Woods and tennis champions Serena and Venus Williams have proven that achievements in sports can demolish a traditional “white” hegemony.
In contrast to the classic sports ethos the politics-sports nexus has grown stronger in recent years (Houlihan, 2008). At the international level, sports functions as a means for strengthening social, economic, and political ties between countries, but also constitutes a source of national disputes that affect the global arena (Jackson, 2013).
In Israel, the link between politics and sports continues to pervade sports and the bitterest rivalries in Israeli soccer are related to the country’s political and national tensions.
Economically, sports has changed from a game to a commodity in recent years, a development that reflects sports’ growing status in society. Many sports clubs have gradually become financial corporations that generate enormous revenues from sales of tickets, merchandise, and broadcasting rights (Ben-Porat, 2009). Huge salaries of sports stars and large-scale sports tourism are additional illustrations of sports’ enormous economic clout (Badenhausen, 2014; Giulianotti and Robertson, 2012; Ntloko and Swart, 2008). Growing interest in sports also spurred the development of entire public relations systems, due to the large number of stakeholders in the field (Tamir et al., 2015).
From a cultural perspective, sports assumes an important place in the leisure culture of western societies. Sports promotes health-related values, and studies have emphasized that health is a primary motive for involvement in sports activities (Galily et al., 2012). Furthermore, increasing consumption of sports activities and events is evident (listening to radio programs, reading newspapers, and viewing sports broadcasts on television and the internet).
The final sphere discussed in this article is the connection between sports and the media. In the past five decades, the connection between sports and the media in general, and specifically sports and television, has been described as “a match made in heaven.” On the one hand, the growing popularity of sports stems from extensive television coverage; on the other hand, media corporations pocket revenues of advertising sales, which come from such coverage (Galily and Tamir, 2014). As a result, it is not surprising that sports has become a highly sought-after genre by broadcasting corporations, and international sports events are typically broadcast live to an enormous number of viewers (Galily and Tamir, 2014; Rowe, 2011, 2012). In the era of new media, social networks, and websites, the boundaries between teams become blurred as globalization of sports broadcasts increases. For example, the Internet constitutes an alternative arena for sports fans who lack the resources to view games on traditional media (Samuel-Azran et al., 2014).
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and FIFA, which controls the global soccer industry, is one of the largest international organizations in the world. From games for amateurs played in schools in 19th-century England, sports has become commercial corporations that operate professional, commercialized games, a format that has spread throughout Europe (Ben-Porat, 2009). Through its enormous popularity, there is hardly any aspect of modern life that is unaffected by soccer.
Fans: Categories, practices, and the changing consumption of sports media
The development of sports in general, and specifically soccer, in recent years has prompted in-depth analyses of the features of fans, their lifestyles, fandom practices, and the changes in the consumption of sports media (Gantz and Lewis, 2014; Giulianotti, 2002).
Defining fans and categories of fandom
Fans can generally be defined as individuals whose lives revolve around soccer and to whom soccer match outcomes are consequently of importance. But soccer fandom is more complex and fandom is affected by numerous factors including age, gender, family status, education, occupation, and others factors (Ben-Porat, 2010). Giulianotti (2002) proposed a model of fandom based on two axes—warm versus cold, and traditional versus consumerist—that, together, combine to create the main four categories of fandom:
Supporters
Supporters are traditional-warm fans who have deep emotional ties to a club and demonstrate whole-hearted solidarity with the club. For supporters, the club is above all else. Players, owners, and coaches come and go, but the club is the entity that remains constant. These fans make extensive efforts to attend home games and express absolute solidarity with the club, even during times of crisis.
Followers
Followers are traditional cold fans who manifest knowledge and interest in the club but, in contrast to supporters, their identification with the club operates through mediators, generally due to the team’s historical values and background, and is less a function of their experience of the game itself. As a result, followers have a more distant attitude toward the team.
Fans
Fans are warm consumers. These are the modern fans who view players as celebrities. As a result of their powerful sense of affinity to the players, fans purchase posters and might even name their children after the players. In effect, the relationship between fans and players is not a reciprocal relationship due to physical distance and differences in status, etc. In contrast to supporters, fans’ solidarity and support are measured through their consumer behavior (the purchase of merchandise). Changes in the economic market, such as the acquisition and sale of players, have the greatest impact on fans’ behavior because they are, first and foremost, consumers.
Flaneurs
Flaneurs are cold consumers. Flaneurs are typically affluent middle-class males affiliated with high culture, for whom an interest in soccer is titillating. For flaneurs, soccer is a fashion and therefore their solidarity with a team is limited and is reinforced by international soccer events such as the World Cup games. For flaneurs, soccer clubs are like fashionable clothes that they view in a store window.
The current study focuses on traditional-warm supporters, for whom the group is the center of their lives.
Supporter rituals and lifestyle
A young child does not become an adult supporter overnight—the transformation occurs in a comprehensive process of socialization that typically includes the acquisition and assimilation of the love of soccer through support for a specific team. A love of soccer depends mainly on environmental factors such as family, status, and gender, which function as the key socialization agents for young supporters (Ben-Porat, 2010).
The daily and weekly schedule of a “true” supporter revolves around the schedule of his favorite soccer team. He is totally committed to fandom rituals such as attending games on the weekends in the company of other supporters, talking about soccer, purchasing team products (shirts, scarves, etc.), adopting the team’s colors and avoiding colors of rival teams, and, of course, extensive consumption of sports media (Ben-Porat, 2014; Giulianotti, 2002). For example, according to a study by Ben-Porat (2007) involving 143 traditional-warm soccer fans in Israel, 50% preferred to attend their team’s game rather than go to a family event if the two events overlap. Fans also were aware of the price they pay for the priority they give to their team, which comes at the expense of their relationship with their family. Their willingness to pay such a price may be related to the fact that fans strongly believe that their presence on the bleachers affects the outcome of the games and increases their team’s chances for a victory (Moskwitz and Wertheim, 2012).
Another aspect of fandom is fans’ deep personal identification with their team, to the extent that they speak of their teams in first person plural (“we”; Ben-Porat, 2014). In recent years, fans even prefer their team’s interests even when these interests collide with the interests of the national team (Tamir, 2014).
Changing habits of sport media consumption
In the 21st-century, sports capitalism has developed significantly due to the growing prevalence of new media (Galily and Tamir, 2014). For example, a survey among NBC viewers found that during the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, more than half of the Americans used a smartphone, laptop or tablet to obtain statistical data during the broadcasts (Bauder, 2014).
Fans use the Internet both to express protest and campaigns against corporations that charge exorbitant broadcasting fees for sports events, and to facilitate sports consumption in response to the commercialization of sports broadcasts in general, and soccer broadcasts in particular (Samuel-Azran et al., 2014). Other scholars, however, argue that new media has not caused a genuine change in the nature of sports broadcasts; on the contrary, they contend that the consumption of sports material on the Internet feeds the interests of traditional media, teams, players, and commercial corporations in a desire to market their merchandise to their young fan base. As a result, they argue, media heighten neo-liberal and capitalist practices rather than moderating or tempering them (Bellamy and McChesney, 2011; Dart, 2014).
According to another view in the field of sports media, in the new media era, fans can circumvent the obstacles of traditional media: They can customize content according to their interests and wishes with the click of a button, and use social networks to express loyalty to their teams to larger audiences, and to interact “directly” with team stars. Fans can thus experience the game and related contents simultaneously, in a uniquely personalized manner. Consequently, the viewing experience in the stadium is becoming less essential for fans (Galily, 2014; Gantz and Lewis, 2014).
Methodology
The current study explores an interesting phenomenon involving sports fans who meet the definition of supporters (warm, traditional fans) and who, contrary to community conventions, purposefully avoid their teams’ games, either by refusing to attend or view games or listen to broadcasts or game-related news on the media, as the game unfolds. In this study, we define purposeful avoidance as intentional physical distancing from both typical viewing venues and the typical sources of information on the games. In effect, purposeful avoidance occurs when fans avoid stadium bleachers, television screens, smartphones, and computers. The current study explores what leads warm traditional fans to purposefully avoid specific team events and how these fans manage to achieve such purposeful avoidance in the age of new media.
The current qualitative study is based on a series of in-depth interviews, in which interviewees tell their story. Through these stories, we understand the interviewees’ experiences and the significance they attribute to them. An in-depth interview is a method that is mid-way on the scale between quantitative surveys that use closed-end questionnaires and unstructured discussions. In in-depth interviews, interviewers guide interviewees to focus on several general topics in order to help interviewees reveal their stories and present their significance (Czarniawska, 2014; Jones et al., 2013). Interviews are analyzed using interpretative thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006).
In the present study, the study population comprises fans who meet the definition of warm, traditional fans. These are fans who actively keep abreast of team events, exhibit a strong sense of identification with the target team, attend all home games and most away games, have strong opinions on club events, and invest several thousands of shekels every year to purchase subscriptions and merchandise. What these fans all have in common is that in specific games (against a specific rival), they are unable to watch the game or be in a place where they have access to or receive unsolicited information on the game’s developments. These fans were recruited using the snowball method and fan group Facebook pages. Interviews were conducted and recorded on dates convenient to interviewees, in their homes, their place of work, or in public places. Interview duration was 40 minutes on average (range 30–58 minutes). The qualitative data analysis began with reading the transcripts, followed by identifying themes, metaphors, notions, and categories that explain and provide interpretation for the fans behaviors and experiences (Burns and Grove, 2005).
Participants in the current study were 19 male fans of various soccer teams in Israel, representing a diversity of communities, geographic locations, social status, and political ideologies. All the interviewees are Jewish-Israeli citizens between age 18 and 39 (mean age 28).
Findings and discussion
Regarding supporters’ relationship with their team, the current study found that purposeful avoidance is not an easy action for these fans: it is both conceptually and technically challenging. Findings show that avoidance is generally a behavioral response to avoid a source of anxiety—the game itself. Fans’ identification with their teams is so strong that they are unable to view the teams suffer a defeat and therefore prefer to stay away. Even as these fans avoid the teams at those times, they continue to imagine the game as if they are present in the stadium. To a large extent, the experience of these avoiding fans who distance themselves from a game recalls amputees’ experience of phantom pains. The current study also found that fans believe in their ability to influence the outcome of a game and that their presence might harm the team and therefore believe that their avoidance will help their team obtain a better outcome. The ease of access and potential exposure to content in the new media era seriously hampers these fans’ efforts to completely avoid their teams at these times, and requires that such purposeful avoidance be carefully planned in advance.
I can’t stand the tension!
Zealous fans may suffer from physical and psychological symptoms following a defeat, which may lead to stress, heart attacks, eating disorders and other conditions (Schwartz, 2013; Wilbert-Lampen et al., 2008). Psychological symptoms such as tremors, perspiration, palpitations, accelerated pulse rate, dizziness or fainting reflect an anxiety disorder or attach and may seriously impair everyday functioning. As a result, fans may prefer to avoid watching their team in action. We found that many fans who chose purposeful avoidance recounted that their anticipation of a game is accompanied by the physical symptoms of an anxiety disorder: So let me tell you exactly how it is. The moment that see this team [Hapoel Tel Aviv], I get pains in my chest; you know what chest pains are? Pains just like a heart attack … for all intents and purposes it’s a heart attack! When my heart tells me to do something, I can’t dismiss that. It’s because I love the team that my heart tells me, ‘Listen, it won’t be good for you, so don’t watch the game, because tension builds second by second, and your pulse races’ … This year, they made progress and so you come back to [watch] the team again, you return to the fold. On the one hand, at the finals you are in a dilemma. You tell yourself – it unthinkable not to see them if they win. Do you understand? On the other hand, you’re afraid to watch. Yes, really afraid … my heart can’t take it. I don’t sit and watch television because I simply can’t do that. When the team makes it up another stage, my enthusiasm rises and my sense of madness also rises. For example, I can’t envision myself watching the finals. I just can’t. I get tense, I perspire, and shake all over. I get up and walk around, and then come back. I feel pressure in my chest and I tremble all over, I perspire all over … Some people, for example, see a snake and get a panic attack, an anxiety attack. The same thing happens to me with Hapoel. The same thing! Pains in my chest. Unbelievable stress, you feel as if you’re panicking … After we lost to them I told myself that I would never watch another game against them … they caused me such a trauma … I couldn’t believe they we would lose. Why [did this terrible thing happen]? What did I do wrong? … I choose not to watch the game, it’s not good for my heart … Eran Zahavi [Player], may his name be obliterated, kicked a goal in the 90th minute … Those [expletive] took the championship in our home game! It’s something I will never forget as long as I live. Even when I talk about now, I get goosebumps. At the time, I thought I would be sick. Now, I can start crying in a moment … trauma. I can’t watch them, I can’t watch the game … I’m afraid. Afraid! Understand that this comes from a place of love, and because of my love and my fear that my heart will break … I just can’t do it, I’m too stressed out.
“I’m the black sheep”: The illusion of influence
Findings show that fans clearly link their attendance or actions to the game’s outcome. A large proportion of the interviewees genuinely believe that they are responsible for the team’s successes and failures. The interviewees tended to attribute significance to their own actions, and discuss proof of their influence. For example, if there’s a certain shirt that I wore when the team won, then that will be my [lucky] shirt, because if I change it, it will bring bad luck and be of no help. I can’t not show up without my Beitar shirt, because if I wear a different shirt, it’s as if I believe that Beitar can’t play well because of that … We had a group of three friends who watched all the games together … a closed circle, it was like when one of the three was absent, the group was less powerful. I know it sounds stupid but in reality … it’s just a superstition, just a feeling. We have three TVs at home. If I watch the game on one TV and the team wins, then I will watch their games only on that TV from then on and no one can move me from that TV screen. I won’t move one millimeter. Rituals such as these help fans reduce their anxiety and their fear of the game’s outcome: It means getting there four hours before the game starts … I don’t know, it’s a kind of superstition … to scan the atmosphere in advance. I had a regular spot and people knew not to sit there. I had a shirt and a scarf that I always wore, and said the same prayer before each game … it was nothing, it was just … Looking up toward heaven for a minute and mumbling something about wishing for the game to go well—and if I don’t say that prayer then I’m scared, scared of what might happen. It was that game when they really chewed us up, yeah … Listen, it was a horrible, awful experience! Since that game, I haven’t gone to any more games against Hapoel so that I don’t put any bad luck spells on the team … … You imagine this feeling, that if you don’t watch, the team will do better. You say to yourself, if I watch them, I’ll ruin it for them … and it really helps you [not watch the game] … Good things happen … When the game starts, I take a shower. [If] the team wins—and I am sure that the players don’t know that I’m in the shower—but I do it again in the next game. It’s idiotic, really it’s idiotic, but it’s power powerful than me. It’s a team [Maccabi Haifa] that we weren’t winning against at all and in my heart I believed that it has to do with me … I said, I’ll disconnect from everything, I’ll go play a computer game and wait for the game to end, and maybe somehow the fact that I won’t watch … it’s a superstition, I don’t know … Now I feel stupid telling you about it.
Phantom pain: Staying away but feeling as if you’re there
Fans who purposefully avoid their team during a game were in a state of extreme stress: they knew that their team was playing and they were not watching. They were aware that they were out of their natural element, which was alongside their team. To cope with the stress created by their avoidance, fans obsessively think about the game and imagine it, even as they purposefully avoid it. … The TV is off, the phone is off, and there’s music in the background so I can sing … [but] the game is in my head, I imagine the moves, make believe … If the game is broadcast on TV and my kids are watching, I leave the house and ride around the city in my car, listening to music. I don’t want to hear about it or anything … I ’m stressed out, but then I ask myself – what’s happening now? Who did they bring in? Who is being replaced? What’s the score? In my head I visualize the field. Whenever I don’t go to a game I feel as if there is something itching inside me … After all, it’s unnatural for me not to attend a game. I think about the game all the time. Like I told you, I feel as if something is missing, you know, my whole body itches. You do guided imagery. You imagine the moves that aren’t really happening, they’re only happening on your PlayStation, but maybe they are happening, you know? I feel as if judgment day arrived and there’s no tomorrow.
In the new media era, it is all the more easy to experience a game and its related contents (scores, statistics, replays, etc.) from anywhere (Galily, 2014; Gantz and Lewis, 2014). As contemporary fans have almost unlimited access to content (Hutchins, 2014), purposeful avoidance becomes more challenging. The following interviewees spoke of the challenge that purposeful avoidance entails, as content consumption is increasingly easy through smartphones and social networks: I tried all kinds of things because it’s hard to escape the game. Everywhere you can find hints. That’s the reason that I tried to go to the beach during the game. Otherwise I try to find something to do or occupy myself. Even if I don’t have anything special to do, I walk away from the TV and go eat, take a shower, or something … In just a moment you can access Facebook and see the score, who made the goal, and other stuff … You feel scared about receiving real time updates. In truth, I didn’t peek. Really.
Conclusion
Soccer fandom dictates an entire lifestyle that includes fan rituals such as attending games at the stadium every weekend, making soccer the main focus of conversations, purchase of team-related products, alignment of political opinions to fit the team, and extensive consumption of all types of sports media (Ben-Porat, 2014; Giulianotti, 2002). These rituals become more pronounced among followers (warm, traditional fans) who are fully committed to and strongly identified with their team.
The current study explored the interesting phenomenon of purposeful avoidance by fans who, despite their strong identification with and loyalty to their team, or maybe because of it, intentionally avoid critical team games. Through a series of in-depth interviews, this study explored the motives underlying such purposeful avoidance and how these fans manage to disconnect from their teams in the era of all-pervasive new media.
Findings from the interviews indicate that fans’ purposeful avoidance is typically anxious avoidance of a source of stress (the game). For these fans, the game has become a conditioned stimulus that triggers anxiety, and they avoid exposure to the game as a defense mechanism. Some fans furthermore expect the worst—which exacerbates their sense of anxiety.
Purposeful avoidance is not easy or natural for followers, in view of their relationship with their teams. When performing purposeful avoidance, fans were aware that they were out of their natural element, and not at their team’s side. To cope with this feeling, fans incessantly obsess about the game while avoiding it. This is akin to an amputee who continues to feel phantom pain, or two couples whose emotions and bodies have become strongly interconnected. In contrast to the classic pattern, reflected in fans’ practices and rituals ("You'll never walk alone"), some fans expressed their loyalty to the team through avoidance of the game. Even though, in practice, the avoidance was limited, because of the deep connection between the fans and their team.
In the era of smartphones and social networks, several fans reported being challenged by their desire to maintain continuous distance from the game, due to the ubiquitous presence of material, and therefore they tended to escape to remote locations.
Another reason for fans’ purposeful avoidance is their illusion of influence on the game’s outcome. Some fans truly believe that by distancing themselves from the team, they will help tip the balance in their team’s favor. Although most are conscious of the irrationality of such rituals and actions, they continue to practice them. Effectively, these fans are sacrificing their own enjoyment (watching the game) for their team, because they believe that by doing so they are protecting the team from any negative effects that their presence might cause.
Fans feel boundless love toward their team, which is so powerful that fans’ health is affected when they watch their team. Even when they purposefully avoid the team, they continue to think about the game, like a worried mother who cannot stop thinking about her children.
The current study largely reinforces our knowledge about soccer fans’ attitudes toward their teams, yet adds an additional layer of understanding about soccer fans’ behaviors and commitment. The assumption that fans will follow their teams “through hail and high water” acquires a new meaning through the findings of the current study, which highlight the extent of sacrifice that followers are willing to make for their team.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.