Sport studies: Where do fans fit into the academic model?
I’m thinking of putting this as the introduction for my literature review. After this section, then start actually examining what the sources elluded to here actually say. (It stills needs a huge amount of editing if I do go with this.)
The sport community is not inert. The community is constantly moving, responding to changes in the competition ladder, to player news, to championships, and to other events that take place inside the community. The composition of teams change, new athletes emerge, people become fans and then change their sporting allegiances. This can happen over the course of a day or can happen over the course of years.
The sport community exists on several level with several groups in terms the sport community‘s composition. The first group and level that receives the most attention involves the team and its athletes. A second group that sport exists is in the media. The media is a key component for sport existing outside of participation only: The media helps make sport a spectator sport. A third level that the sport community exists is with sport administration. These are the people who set the matches, who get the sponsors, who find the facilities and who work towards finding the money to help keep the team in existence or allow an athlete to compete. A fourth level of sport community exists based on sponsorship and commercial interests outside the team directly. A fifth level of the sport community involves the local community: The people who live in the surrounding area around which the team is named, where the team or athlete trains, facilities the team owns or competes in, where athletes are from. A sixth level exists in the sport community that is composed of the community of fans. Each of these groups has different concerns and their own agenda. They attract different people to analyse them. Each of these groups have different issues that are the primary concerns: Some groups are interested in making money. Others are interested in improving a team or athlete’s performance. Other groups are interested in bonding and creating a sense of group identity. Sometimes, these concerns are not exclusive to the concern or two the group. The needs and concerns of each individual group make it hard to address the sport community as one cohesive collective.
The sport community is always moving in time. What time is a major issue. The sport community does not have one timeline but many timelines that reflect the differences in the groups that make up the broader sport community. One timeline is a competition timeline: When does the athlete or team compete? Another timeline is a training timeline. Still yet, there is a media timeline for when it is best to publish a story in order to attract the widest possible audience. There is also a timeline for sport marketing that relates to selling tickets and sponsorship. A timeline exists for planning and organising a sport competition. There is a timeline that involves the available funds for being a spectator. There is a timeline for being a media consumer. There is a timeline for responding to a media crisis regarding an athlete’s non-sport related behaviour. Some of these timelines may be as short as five minutes. Other parts of these timelines may last several years. In general, these timelines are short term, middle term and long term. The timelines do not always run parallel to each other and may intersect in places that cause difficulties for other groups. One timeline may cause another timeline for another group to be started in response.
The issues of sport related communities and their subgroups, coupled with timelines that these groups are involved with, makes it a challenge in terms of finding the appropriate literature when addressing more than one at a time and using a historical, fixed in time approach to analysing actions in the sport community. This situation exists for Australia, New Zealand and other English speaking sport communities.
The relationship between the larger sport community and events in time has largely not been explored by existing sport research, especially as it pertains to fans in regards to medium term events. The lack of research in this area in Australia appears to exist for a variety of reasons. One of the most obvious of these is that, until the rise of the Internet, sport fans views and activities were mediated almost exclusively through three different groups: Sport organisers, sport sponsors and other corporate interests, and the media. This mediation was necessary for fans because their voices as a unified body could only be heard on a select basis during select events that had a direct impact on them, such as the situation where the Melbourne Football Club was part of a proposed merger with the Hawthorn Football Club in 1996. In other situations, fans as a group were subsumed by other interests to the point where their collective identity belonged to that of another group. This is the case for many AFL and NRL cheersquads. When fans as a group are not having their views mediated another group, their views are often shown as a point of conflict: Fans versus sponsors or fans versus corporate interests of a team or fans versus an athlete. Beyond the issues of the collective fan experience and views being mediated by other groups or shown only to highlight conflict is that when fans are the focus, they tend to be examined on the short term or the long term. There is an absence of examination as it pertains medium term events or the medium term and long term response to a short term event. This absence is also partly the result of other groups in the sport community and those groups own goals and timelines specifically as they pertain to sport fans or the specific lack of interests in fans as they pertain to their objectives. The fan experience being mediated and the time issues result in little research in this area.
The situation involving the lack of literature about fan responses to short term and medium term events may be symptomatic of the multiple fields and approaches to analysing the wider sport community. There are several disciplines involved in researching the wider sport community and specific groups in the sport community for certain time periods. Beyond the area of their research focus, these researchers are also writing for different audiences. There are sport marketers who often focus their research interests on fans and the community, but with a goal of helping sport organisations. There are sport historians that often focus on an athlete, a team or participation on a community level. On the whole, fans are not the primary focus of these narratives. Sport historians write for a variety of audiences, including sponsors, sport administrators, other historians and fans. There are newspapers, magazines and television programs who cover sport and sport fans. The primary objective of these publications is often to create a story to help them sell newspapers, magazines and commercials. Thus, coverage of many aspects of sport on the management level, community level, sponsorship level and fan level are dependent on sales, not the value of the topic in terms of informing the public. Sport sociology often focuses on narrative aspects of the fan experience using qualitative research. This narrative experience and qualitative research can make it difficult to identify and report on behavioural trends in the fan community over the short and long term as the research is generally not couched in this understanding. Sport sociology also suffers in that it tends to focus on identity, sometimes coupling it with actions. Popular culture studies occasionally mentions sport fans but this is often done by removing sport from the equation, or casting sport as a narrative form where on-field performance and other external factors do not play a role. This type of research also tends to focus on fan production. This makes it difficult to discuss sport fans in the short and medium term because the short term is defined as a game or single competition and the long term is defined as a season. The focus does not tend to deeper to explore group actions, but instead appears to focus on identity. Sport tourism is similar to sport marketing, and tends to have a very specific timeline. Like other areas, sport fans are looked at based on the needs of other groups. When the internet is brought into it, there are a variety of research perspectives that are extremely valuable to sport fans but, like other areas, focus on sport fan and the community as secondary to other purposes and sport related groups. This is the case for research related to reputation management, which focuses on how to respond when a crisis occurs. Another internet perspective is a usability specialist, who looks at how a website is users, where people click. This focuses on extreme short term actions based on sport fan interactions while visiting a site controlled by another group in the sport community. All of these groups of academics and researchers have issues when it comes to understanding the sport community in a wider context, understanding sport fans on a timeline and showing an understanding of how sport fans respond to events.
These issues all demonstrate problems with existing research as it pertains to the focus of the research in this dissertation. It also highlights a wider problem of understanding where understanding of sport fans fall in academic disciplines and inside the wider sport studies community.