Performing Fan Identities: the Role of Politics in the Antagonistic Communication of Football Fans in Cyprus

Abstract

Fan identities in sports are often constructed based on divides related to locality, social class, ethnicity, nationality, or politics. At first glance, Cyprus football is a case where party affiliation and political ideology seem to play a key role in the maintenance of an intensely antagonistic fan culture. The performance of fan identity through oppositional communicative practices seems to be guided by politics, in the narrow sense, often conceptualized in the binary "left vs. right". This tendency, which is, at least in part, justified by the notable fact that certain football teams are historically associated with the Right or the Left, is expressed predominantly in communicative actions (chanting, shouting, banner displays, etc.) of often excessively provocative political content during football games. Our paper reports on the use of political symbols (text, images, etc.) by football fans as a practice that creates, sustains and reproduces binary oppositions that are elementary to the fan identity. We use data from field observations of first division football games and from in-depth interviews with football fans to address the following questions: (1) to what extent is team selection and the observed intensely politicized antagonistic communication guided by political identification and party affiliation, (2) to what extent is this fan identity performance a case of persistence of an outdated rhetoric and old-fashioned aesthetics, and (3) to what extent are these communicative elements a convenient or even playful means of exercising exclusion-inclusion practices that satisfy the fans’ need for group belonging and differentiation.