Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues

Book excerpt: Soccer fandom has traditionally been seen as an important part of adolescent, generally male, identity making. In Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues , Steve Redhead shows how this tradition of youth culture of fandom has been eroded in the last years of the twentieth century by the more fleeting, style conscious allegiances inspired by television, films and music. The clubs that young people follow are determined by advertising and popular music; the games that they watch are brought to them by the globalized culture of television, as in the world cup staged in America; even their fears of so-called soccer hooliganism are determined by media-engendered moral panics at a time when the phenomenon itself seems to be dying away.