The changing carnival: reimagining and recreating the match-day experience in multi-purpose stadiums

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sports stadiums are notable city architecture, culturally significant and potentially transformative spaces. They are also a place where sports teams remain as significant social and spatial anchors, which become particularly important for cities undergoing urban change. For this study, we seek to build on a growing body of scholarship exploring how spaces inside and surrounding sports stadiums form an integral component of the experience of fans on match-day. Theoretically anchored in social-spatial theory, this paper explores how sports fans interact with new spaces that are not necessarily customary to traditional match-day experiences. Using a case study method via in-depth interviews and participant observation of an Australian rugby league team, we explore how sports fans have created new layers of meaning with old, especially for two key sites based around the ‘fan zone’ of a new multi-purpose stadium. Our research reveals how these spaces actively produced social norms and expectations about fan behaviour. We discuss how the stadium has been reimagined to accommodate the contemporary sports fan experience and where the spaces and locations that they interact with on match-day do not just exist, but rather, are actively produced by, and through, fan interaction and engagement.