Congregations and the Nomads: An Exploration of the Words, Deeds and Journeys of Football Fandom

Football support is enacted in local cultural contexts encompassed with transnational possibilities. Such support offers arenas for playing with identity and the chance to validate a host of social relations. In what follows analysis attempts to explain the journeys of two Norwegian brothers whose excursions to England to visit as many football grounds as they could required time, funding, motivation and planning. The inquisitive academics who sometimes accompanied them on such sojourns sought a rationale for such movement; what was the motivation? And what inspired the expending of such time and energies? Aware of commentators of the global game often speaking about football support as being akin to a “religion” for its devoted followers, the potential of quasi-religious analysis being applied to football support is a feasible route of inquiry. However, the two brothers that this analysis focuses on did not theorise their pursuit. They acted on their mutual enthusiasm, not without forethought and reflection, but did not feel any need to justify what they did. Their journeys carried the task of completing a collection, but one they set themselves and on a route that suited them. Such movement provoked considerations around notions of pilgrimage; but to what extent was anything sacred and to what potential revelation their journeys were carried out for was hard to realise. Essentially a study of trans-national (sporting) fascination the brothers’ journeys carried both the sense of the routine and the exceptional and were in essence a never-ending celebration of of encounters that in some ways replicated that the brothers similarly enjoyed in their domestic sphere but in some ways was very different.