fandom

In February 2024, the New York Times published a two-part series on the results of a survey of men who are fans of women’s soccer. The survey addressed how and why men became fans of women’s soccer, the relationship between their fandom of men and women’s sport, and how they perceived and participated in fan communities. The survey was motivated by the sense that men’s fandom had been overlooked and underestimated, in part due to the predominant narrative of female professional athletes as empowering for girls and women.

Are there more men who profess fandom of women’s sport now than in the past? The truth is hard, if not impossible, to ascertain, as women’s sport leagues don’t regularly publish data on the composition of their audiences. However, there are hints from polls and academic studies that men’s interest in or consumption of women’s sport may be growing and is sometimes higher than that of women.

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Our lives are socially structured in many ways. This means that we are frequently directed to behave in a certain manner, embrace particular values, and think about ourselves in socially patterned ways. Gender and sexuality are especially influential aspects of social structure that affect our aspirations, interactions, and identities.

As sociologists who study such influences, we recently investigated the relationship between gender, sexuality, and sports fandom among U.S. adults in a study published in Sociology of Sport Journal. Prior research indicates that most Americans are sports fans. Yet, historically, sports cultures have often been organized by and for heterosexual men as spaces for them to have fun and connect with one another as they watch and talk about sports. Sports have also been used as sites where men could successfully “prove” themselves to be heterosexual and masculine. In contrast, sports cultures have often been unwelcoming spaces for women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) adults. This has been less true within women’s sports fan communities, although women’s sports are also characterized by a long legacy of homophobia. Still, many people across all gender and sexual identities love to watch and follow sports.

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As part of research I did several years ago on U.S. women’s professional soccer, I went to a lot of games. I still do. Since 2011, I’ve attended games in Chicago, Atlanta, Portland, New Orleans, and Birmingham.

In all of these locations, one thing has always stood out to me—how different the crowd is from that of many men’s sporting events. At professional women’s soccer games, girls fill the stands, accompanied by their parents. But not just any families are there—white girls and their parents predominate.

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In North American professional sports culture, parades are typically organized by cities and organizations after a major team accomplishment, such as winning a league championship. On Saturday, January 6, 2018, however, thousands of Cleveland Browns fans, in response to their team’s failure to register a win during the National Football League’s (NFL) 2017 regular season, congregated near FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio to “celebrate” the Browns’ “perfect season” record of 0-16. The fans braved frigid January temperatures, creating satirical floats, signs, and costumes to publicly mock team owner Jimmy Haslam—CEO of the Pilot Flying J truck stop chain, a company embroiled in an FBI investigation concerning rebate fraud—and the team’s consistent lack of success in the NFL. Parade organizer Chris McNeill described the event as a protest expressed through “macabre-humor”: “I think we have every right,” McNeill said, “after this organization has given us nothing now for how many years.” The parade, thankfully, benefitted the local community in ways other than creative celebration, as event promoters raised over $17,000 and collected perishable food donations, all of which were subsequently donated to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

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