I wrote most of this post a year and a half ago, during the November 2022 World Cup, so please forgive any untimely references. In light of the Euros and Copa America, I felt inspired to refine and share it.
A while ago, I saw a Tiktok. The @ESPNFC account shared a video of Spurs player Son Heungmin about to take a corner kick. He waves at the stands, and the crowd of spectators, mostly men, beam and wave back. A month later, user @khadija.riverse duetted the video, writing, “Never in my life do I want to hear another heterosexual man say a word about kpop fans. If he had turned and shot them a f*cking finger heart, they would have been CRYING.”1
That user wasn’t the first person to point out that (presumably male) sports fans idolize their favorite players — and follow, with fervor, their sport — just as much as the (presumably female) fans of a boyband, who receive far more disdain for their passion. I’ve been both. (I love having an obsessive personality.) I’ve been an on-and-off follower of soccer for several years. Fans of all genders exist in vast numbers, but men’s soccer is still a very masculine fandom. Paired with the immense global popularity of the sport, that means that you’ll see it all: from crude and dumb tweets to defenses of egregious and sometimes even criminal behavior.
Fandom is fascinating. When I first started keeping up with the sport, I discovered a whole new group of devotees to observe and take part in. One day, I logged into the site that I used to seek out when I needed to scratch the itch of an obsession, and found soccer Tumblr. At first, it seemed pretty normal — text post reactions to live games, gif sets of beautiful plays, high quality photos, players’ Instagram content. But then I stumbled upon what Tumblr is most known for: fanfiction.
I’ll start by saying that real-person fanfiction is rightfully a very contentious and awkward issue. I’m no stranger to knowledge of its existence, as a former fan of the boy band that probably has the most “rpf” about it, ever — One Direction. The ethics of writing stories (of varying levels of explicitness) about real human beings aside (okay, the ethics are dubious), I have no question in my mind about why people do it. The answer is easy. The celebrities that we idolize are essentially characters, not only in our minds, but in the public sphere — so of course people are going to want to speculate about their lives, relationships, and (b)romances, and weave fictional tales inspired by them.
I’ll admit that my first reaction to confronting the existence of football fanfiction was to cringe. It took me a moment to remind myself that it’s no shock that it exists, and that soccer is a fandom like any other.2 It felt uniquely bad because in my head, football was still a male-dominated fandom in which I was just a guest. But Tumblr was a reminder that women, non-men, and queer people (who are overwhelmingly the writers of fanfiction) were integral parts of the emotional core of the fandom, as they often are.
One day in September 2018, the sports media outlet Bleacher Report released a Youtube video. It was an animated short slightly under 4 minutes about the most elite soccer players in Europe living in a mansion and interacting as though they were on a reality TV show. The characters embodied popular stereotypes about the players, the talking head portions hawked inside jokes from the Champions League season, and the entire product felt incredibly, incredibly indulgent. It was season 1, episode 1 of “The Champions,” and it was fanfiction.
Fanfiction! I saw it for what it was immediately, and I was floored. For a moment, I felt exposed. Do they know? Does the fandom get it? Is it cringey? Is it cheesy? Sure, many people probably thought it was both, but it ultimately did not matter because tons of people enjoyed it.
But of course, it all made sense. We idolize these people, for better or for worse (usually worse), we’re charmed by the jokes they make and enraptured by the personal drama they get entangled in, and maybe above all, we wonder what their interactions with each other are like. Of course we want to make up little stories in our head about the shit they get up to. And particularly in a sport that is so often driven by raw, melodramatic narrative, it was only natural that this would exist.
I felt similarly about the TV show Ted Lasso.3 Indulgent is the very first word I would use to describe Ted Lasso, which came out in 2020. Um, of course I want to watch a TV show about a soccer team and imagine what it would be like to be behind-the-scenes, working for them or even being a player, do you even have to ask?! The level of glamour and intrigue was immense. Ted Lasso is fanfiction-adjacent. While the storylines are compelling and the characters are interesting whether or not you enjoy soccer, fans of the sport were the first ones to dive into the show, knowing for certain that they’d love at least one part of it — the fantasy. When I rewatched the first episode with a non-soccer-enjoying friend and it fell a little flat, I realized how much my excitement about it hinged on the fact that I was entering a world that I, perhaps without fully admitting, coveted in my mind.4
I’ve been a part and a witness to many fandoms. I’ve loved and cherished Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, of course, but I’ve also followed with fervent loyalty real people: most notably, the boy band One Direction in the early 2010s and kpop boy group Seventeen in my mid-20s. Like those of us who adore our bands, I have no doubt in my mind that soccer fans (maybe secretly) want to be best friends with their favorite players.
But it’s not only about the people, or even mostly about the people, and I think fans of all genders and of all fandoms know this. Lest antagonistic outsiders forget, it’s about the thing. It’s about the music that sends your heart racing and makes you scream when you hear it on the radio. It’s about the choreographies that mesmerize you and make your muscles itch to copy them. It’s about the spectacles of teamwork that feel like a dance, the passes that float past lines of defense and into perfection, the goals that remind you that you are watching the most beautiful and exhilarating sport in the world.
In the end, maybe fandom is just whatever is beautiful enough to make you cry. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It is, perhaps, of note that a Korean soccer player inspired a comparison to Korean pop music culture.
The hockey fandom is apparently notoriously replete with real person fic, as noted by this Reddit user who asked: What on earth is the deal with Men’s Hockey RPF?
I never actually watched season 3 of Ted Lasso — I’ve heard it wasn’t very good. I thought season 2 was alright, and I was utterly obsessed with season 1.
And that I remembered that, at one point, the whole concept was a viral Youtube video and an ad for NBC Sports.
Loved the article -- such a great comparison between the fandoms of SPORTS and boy bands!!