An Empirical Conflict Related Classification of Football Fans in Germany

What is it about?

In the last 20 years football fandom in Germany has undergone a meaningful change. The purpose of the paper at hand is to address this change and to develop an advanced and revised typology of football fans focusing on potential conflicts. The study is based on an extensive quantitative online survey of German football fans (n = 6,327) of more than 50 professional football clubs in Germany. A revised typology of football fans was identified empirically by latent class analysis (LCA). Our findings suggest that fans can be categorized in five different groups with regard to their ideal stadium experience and their attitudes towards potential conflicts during a match day at their home stadium. The results help to understand recent developments in fan culture and society and allow describing the diversity of spectators within the stadium in a detailed way.

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