Evaluating the European Cup 2020: The dark side of fandoms

Sports, and more specifically sports teams, are a large part of many different cultures around the world. While some individuals may be more interested in idolizing and participating in Fandoms based around musicians’ or TV/Movie franchises, sports fans are a large and sometimes obnoxious part of society. Many different cultures may be intrigued with various sports, but a prominent sport the world seems to share is what American’s call soccer, but most commonly referred to as football. Europeans especially, engrain football as a notable part of their culture. But Europeans', passion for football is not similar to Americans' dedicated love for American football teams. It’s more than painting your face/body of the colors of the team or clapping your hands. The areas of these extreme European football fandoms have pushed the limits past excited and passionate sports fans to arguably toxic and even harmful situations.

Football has been an incredibly prominent part of European culture for centuries. In 1864, the Football Association was founded in England. Ebenezer Morley was considered as the “father” of the association. By the end of the 19th century, the game had spread to the rest of the world. Europeans don’t simply perform their love for their team by chanting defense in unison, they pass down traditional songs that have been an intricate part of the team, their area, and their culture. Although these traditions appear at first to be intriguing and positively passionate, areas of Europeans football fandoms have proven to be at times very hurtful centered around topics of race. Racism has been a forefront problem for European football over the years.

Gray (2019) also explains that anti-fandoms are key sites to explore whether hegemonic values are maintained or challenged through united dislike. He states, “One could hypothesize, for example, and as with the case of Cyrus, that, in a patriarchal society, female figures and texts aimed at or otherwise coded as designed for women, will prove easy default bad objects…” (Gray 29). Gray’s point can specifically be applied to Saka, Rashford, and Sancho, although not females, they were coincidentally the only three that had missed their penalty shots. In a predominately white society, the players of color and their race, were simply to blame and defaulted as the ‘bad objects’. With white supremacy and racism being the main issue for this incident, it is easy to state that hegemonic values are maintained through this united dislike of the three players. Going further, Scott (2019) mentions “Kendall's digital ethnography of the online forum BlueSky continues to resonate, both as an early study of the performance of nerd masculinities in digital spaces, and the ways in which the "gendered social context" of these spaces more often than not "casts women as outsiders unless and until they prove themselves able to perform masculinities according to the social norms of the group." Scott explains the concept of “toxic geek masculinity” and how women are expected to prove themselves and their worth in those spaces. Despite the fact that these three players were young and very talented, an area of English fans approached this situation in the same way and revealed that they did not think the players proved themselves able to perform with their other white masculine athletes. Similar to how women were subject to prove their “worth” in nerdy fandoms, these young players of color were being pressured to prove their worth based on their race in this situation. The hatred towards players and blaming missed shots on race, demonstrates that English football was incredibly toxic during the 2020 Euro Cup.

The 2020 Euro Cup final also demonstrated Gray’s notion of Competitive Fandoms which also proved to be destructive after a series of violent acts against Italian fans. Prior to the game, the coach of the English team made an announcement to be respectful to Italian fans, players, and coaching staff after an incident in the semi-final game where Sweden’s Anthem was booed by fans. Rather than going home after the game disappointed in the loss of England, English fans caused massive chaos and began to act upon their rage through violence. Gray (2019) utilizes sports teams to explain competitive fandoms. He notes that analysts could ask, in particular, about the choice of rival, what this says about the beloved object that is being “defended’ and what perceived threat exists to the beloved object to understand competitive fandoms. To understand the reasoning as to why competitive fandoms occur, Gray (2019) points out that one simple explanation to key rivalries development is when teams must commonly defeat each other to advance. The acts of violence against Italian fans after England lost, can be applied to Gray’s simple explanation about defeat. Italy and England were the last two countries standing to win the championship that is such an intricate part of European culture. English fans were deeply entrenched in their passion about winning, they were not only routing for their team, but sternly routing against Italy and their fanbase. In the 2020 Euro cup, a key rivalry was formed between the two but led to incredibly violent acts that were ignited by love for English football and anger towards those whose team stripped a title from them. Unfortunately, this intense love for English football led some fans to believe they needed to be angry at the other side and started violence. Going further, Jane (2014) mentions that anti-fans are powerful media producers, and their targets can include human subjects who may suffer real-life pain. Jane’s study about hate towards competitive cheerleaders and taking physical injuries as a joke in competitions applies to English fans acting violently to physically hurt Italian fans because there is a clear correlation between the lack of ethics amongst anti-fans. English fans engaged in hateful tweets towards Italian fan and showed their lack of ethics by being terrible sports and engaging in physical brawls.

Despite the fact that social media was not a reason these competitive and bad object anti-fandoms were formed, Andrews (2020) describes social media as an intensifier and goes on to say “fans are the people you hear most often and associate most with a cultural or political property in the digital dissensus. The most hardcore fans and anti-fans share receipts (screenshots of evidence, such as private messages or previous social media posts) in order to defend or discredit big names in their field and will cause social media “pile-ons” or even organised (via private group chats) “brigading” of individuals that are experienced as high-volume attacks”. Andrews makes the point that social media plays a large role in intensifying a situation and also allows anti-fans opportunities to bring upon hate to a specific object they don’t like. The Euro 2020 final between Italy and England can be argued to align with Andrews argument because although there were incidents of fans getting into physical brawls with Italian fans outside, hurtful comments flooded media platforms such as twitter and Instagram to the players directly after the game. Players were called racial slurs and received comments with banana emoji’s degrading colored players to be seen as “monkey’s”, which ultimately dehumanized them because of the color of their skin. Social media platforms provided a space for people to troll and hate towards Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho. William and Bennett (2021) bring to light that anti-fandoms have become increasingly intertwined with factors such as gender and race and had demonstrable impacts on democracy and political participation…”. Although we see that social media intensified the situation it can also be understood that individuals, including policy makers, began to call out trolls for their heinous comments. The act of calling out trolls can be argued as political and social participation because either fans or not even those in the fanbase, began to call out English fans contributing to the racist comments. Even social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter participated by taking down all, if not the majority, of racist comments and tweets. Overall, the English football fan base has proven itself to be a toxic fandom because the negatives and dark side revolving around racism and violence seems to outweigh the happy traditions of singing chants and creating tradition with family. Research on more problematic European football fan behavior would be interesting to further explore and evaluate to build upon this argument that demonstrates English football fan bases are toxic.

Academic References

(note: that all non-academic sources are linked in-text)

• Jane EA. Beyond antifandom: Cheerleading, textual hate and new media ethics. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 2014;17(2):175-190. doi:10.1177/1367877913514330

• Jonathan Gray. (2019). “How Do I Dislike Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.” In M.A. Click (ed.), Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, pp. 25-41. New York: NYU Press.

• Penny Andrews (2020) Receipts, radicalisation, reactionaries, and repentance: the digital dissensus, fandom, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Feminist Media Studies, 20:6, 902-907, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2020.1796214

• Suzanne Scott. (2019). Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry. New York NYU Press. [Chapter 3: Interrogating the Fake Geek Girl: The Spreadable Misogyny of Contemporary Fan Culture, pp. 76-108].

• Williams Rebecca, & Bennett Lucy. (2021). Editorial: Fandom and Controversy. The American Behavioral Scientist (Beverly Hills), 276422110422–. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042290