Fan culture and Identity

Fan culture of any kind of sports club is always related to the right type of branding. People want to be associated with a club because of its image. In England, there is a well-know division between the north and south. In the north people consider the southerners as being posh and arrogant, whereas the southerners see the northerners as dumb people. In football, this can be seen as well with the local and national rivalry between certain clubs. What’s interesting is the amount of fans that have created their own culture without the majority of them not having set foot in Manchester in the first place. Like mentioned before, the biggest group of fans can be found in Asia. Through branding, Manchester United has reached them too and they seem to relate to whatever message MU wants to send out. A good example of fan culture and branding that had a commercial reason behind it al was the signing of Chinese striker Dong Fangzhou[1] which I already mentioned briefly. The new signing was published as big news on the website, Chinese fans went mad and the 10 Man Utd stores in China increased sales immediately.

            On the website, this fan culture takes in prominent place throughout the different sections. With this type of broad participation, the possible motivations for fans may vary (see functions) Most important is the sense of belonging. Fans create their own culture by commenting on the games their team plays, their wish list for future players, reacting in forums and so on. This culture also captures the feelings of having some kind of influence. An interesting section of the site is called ‘The Boss, The Player, The Fan’ where (obviously) Alex Ferguson the coach, any player or ANY fan gets to have his or her say on different topics. The fact the all the millions of fans are all meant with ‘The Fan’ indicates not only the importance of the fans by MU, but also the sense of being and belonging to MU. Let us not forget the immense debt the club owes the fans. Old Trafford is filled with 67,000 fans every match, but there are 50 million more fans worldwide that want to ‘be’ there to. This has enabled Manchester United to create an interactive, on-line football community that will become the ultimate match and club experience for all its fans, on match days, during the build up and then the after-match analyses.  Maintaining their position could not have been done without the fans worldwide that have turned into United-consumers in the meantime.

To come back to the identity issue and its relationship with sport I would like take a take a closer look at Power Play where Boyle and Haynes establish a relationship between sport and identity, with an important role for the media. They say that ‘the media is important, in the sense that that they help to foster a wider feeling of collective identification among members in the social group, and may even put different members in touch with each other. In turn, support of clubs connect personal identity to collective identity, larger groups which enjoy a shard passion and sense of loyalty to a team or club, a city or even to a larger political or cultural entity such as Scotland or England’[2] In their explanation they use the word media in the ‘old’ sense (i.e tv, radio, papers). Interestingly, what they say about the media reaching a wider audience that shares the same identity can be seen as the predecessor of the state the media is in now. With the coming of the ‘new’ media (the internet), the sense of identity has been lifted to a higher level. A quick look at the football and Manchester United madness in China or Japan explains it all. Without the internet, the traditional English club with its cross-over traditional-modern image would never have reached Asia as easy. Football fans there now have Man Utd as part of their identity, as part of their belonging.