IAMCR 2024

Political Debates in Third Spaces? Football Fan Communities and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar

Axel Bruns, Laura Vodden, Tariq Choucair, Sebastian Svegaard, and Kate O’Connor Farfan

• 3 July 2024 – Paper presented at the IAMCR 2024 conference, Christchurch

Presentation Slides

Abstract

Scholarship has long pointed to the importance of nominally apolitical ‘third places’ (Oldenburg & Brissett, 1982) for everyday political talk. Here, communities come together primarily around shared non-political interests (culture, religion, sports, …), and such places are valued so much for this communal function that, when political debate inevitably intrudes at times, community members actively attempt to defuse any controversies that may threaten this sense of collective belonging.

Initially understood by Oldenburg & Brissett as cafés, pubs, bars, clubs, and other physical locations, Wright (2012) identified apolitical online discussion spaces as serving similar functions in the digital realm, describing them as ‘third spaces’. Although lacking some of the interpersonal cues available in face-to-face communication, apolitical online spaces – such as interest groups and fandom communities – substitute various other paratextual cues, and their members similarly work to maintain community cohesion when confronted with political disagreements.

Such community maintenance interventions, and their levels of success, remain insufficiently understood, however; in particular, we are lacking a greater comprehensive perspective beyond isolated case studies that may have been selected specifically because of their success, and across cultural boundaries. This paper addresses this gap in our understanding through a large-scale study of a particularly productive case study: the discussion of political controversies associated with the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar by football fan communities on Facebook that usually follow domestic leagues and teams in England, Germany, Spain, Brazil, and Denmark.

For this study we systematically selected the 20 most active public Facebook groups discussing the respective domestic leagues (Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Brasileirão, Superligaen) in the language of their country; almost all of these were groups following specific major teams (Liverpool FC, Borussia Dortmund, etc.). With domestic competitions paused during the World Cup, such groups tend to follow their teams’ players who were selected for various national teams, as well as overall competition; however, given the substantial and long-term controversies about corruption in awarding the World Cup to Qatar, about migrant workers’ deaths in the construction of World Cup venues, about the Qatari regime’s resistance to calls for equal human rights for women, ethnic groups, and LGBTIQ+ people, and about the overall use of the World Cup for ‘sportswashing’ the country’s image, political issues were also introduced into the discussion at various points.

We gathered Facebook posts and comments from these groups for the period of 13 November to 25 December 2022 (from one week before the start to one week after the end of the World Cup), and in this paper analyse the extent to which the groups thematise these issues, what topics generate the greatest resonance, and how they address political controversies that arise. Such approaches range from actively and deliberately seeking debate to explicitly disallowing and banning it; obvious distinctions between different fan communities (e.g. supporters of clubs with traditionally conservative or progressive fanbases) as well as between national political debate cultures also emerge. Overall, our study supports but also serves as a valuable reality check on the concept of third places or spaces and their potential for enabling meaningful debate across political perspectives.