Can Supporters Make a Difference? the Role of Fans in European Football's Governance

The governance of sport is one of the main elements of the emerging EU sport policy, developed under the Article 165 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The EU has developed a clear policy discourse in favour of engaging football supporters as a legitimate stakeholder in policy-making. However, there is not much evidence as to how the football supporters would like to get involved, if at all. In order to fill that gap, this paper asks why and how football supporters get involved with football governance structures, if at all. The paper has designed an innovative methodology. A group of 70 football fans in 5 countries (UK, Austria, Spain, Poland and Turkey), were asked to produce audio-visual (i.e. pictures and recordings) diaries of their football experiences over 8 weeks. This exercise of auto-visual ethnography was then followed up with a personal interview to elicit the meaning of the pictures and recordings submitted by the participants. The results of the research suggest that supporters have a critical awareness of the current management and governance problems of European football. They are also aware of the policy-initiatives by the EU and national governments in this area. However, they are not excessively eager to get involved, unless structures are more flexible than the current ones. The results also suggest that fan involvement is extremely context specific and will depend on the situation of the local club they support.