ECMI Minorities Blog. National and Linguistic Minorities in the Context of Professional Football across Europe: Five Examples from Non-kin State Situations.

Football clubs are often analysed by scholars as ‘imagined communities’, for no fan of any team will ever meet, or even be aware of most of their fellow supporters on an individual level. They are also simultaneously one of the most tribal phenomena of the twenty-first century, comparable to religion in terms of the complexity of rituals, their rhythm and overall organizational intricacies, yet equally inseparable from economics and politics. Whilst, superficially, the events of sporting fixtures carry little political significance, for many of Europe’s national and linguistic minorities football fandom takes on an extra dimension of identity – on an individual and collective scale, acting as a defining differentiation from the majority society. This blogpost analyses five clubs from non-kin state settings, with the intention to assess how different aspects of minority identities affect their fan bases, communication policies and other practices.