Cosmopolitan Fandom: A Critical Postcolonial Analysis of Liverpool FC’s Supporters Discourses in Brazil and Switzerland

Abstract

It is argued by different social researchers that the Western contemporaneous world is living under a different set of conditions than in the one that classical sociologist’s theorised. Taking a reflexive modern perspective through a cosmopolitan sociological imagination this thesis discussed how a particular socio-cultural manifestation was used discursively by individuals to understand their being and becoming in a globalised world. As argued in this thesis, football’s transnationalism provided supporters a locus for creating and expressing cosmopolitan identities that challenge the modern sociological imagination, particularly the one centred in the nation-state. My understanding of the modern sociological imagination impact on football fandom theorisations emerges from a critical analysis of the academic discourse on authentic supporters. As demonstrated in the thesis, the authentic supporter under a modern sociology is imagined as homogeneously male, white, working class, and especially local. Thus, based on an 18-month ethnographic inspired research on Liverpool FC’s supporters in Brazil and Switzerland the argument that emerges from this empirical research is fourfold: the cosmopolitan football flâneur should be conceptualised ambivalently governed by individualisation; instead of a Bastelbiographie, individualisation should be understood as a Dasein-für-Gewälthe-Andere, where those others are the re-modernised structures of modernity; cosmopolitanism does not render the nation-state obsolete as a Zombie-category, whereas it should be imagined as Frankensteins-monster; and Ulrich Beck’s notions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism should be understood as more real than real simulacras.