Loyalty Jungle. Flexible Football Fan Identities and EURO 2012

Actively taking part in a football event such as EURO 2012 includes having a team to support; but what do you do when your own national team did not qualify or dropped out early? How can you be part of a European or even international experience when you have no team to cheer for? The crucial element here is that there is almost always a team you can identify with on some level and therefore having no team to support rarely occurs. Loyalties, in the framework of European or international sports competitions, are not necessarily limited to one’s national affiliation and are therefore negotiable, flexible, and can shift to some extent. Global companies make use of this flexible national loyalty to achieve branding goals. However, these negotiations are not detached from, but deeply entangled with socio-cultural discourses.  Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted during EURO 2012 in the Polish cities Słubice, Poznań, and Warsaw, in the German cities Frankfurt (Oder), and Berlin, and in the Austrian city Vienna, the paper shows how an international and extensively regulated event like EURO 2012 is part of a commercialized loyalty construction process. Correspondingly, the key questions addressed in the paper include how commercialisation, national affiliations, and the community experience influence loyalties throughout the event. Focusing on the extraordinary phenomenon called the Coca-Cola Fan-Transformer in the Berlin Fan Park the paper discusses how official organisers and global companies instrumentalised these very actors to enforce a community feeling for commercial motives.