Cultures of complaint : online fan message boards and networked digital media sport communities

Association football fans in the UK often blame the media for ruining the game as an organic community experience. Certainly, this proposition is supported by the substantial levels of complaint that can be found across thousands of online fan message boards. We argue that these complaints embrace online comment and activism as a continuation of football’s traditional culture of communicative exchange between supporters. Yet, online football fan discussion also presents a contradiction, relying upon the same media networks against which fans rail for commodifying ‘the people’s game’. Using cultivation analysis, the case presented is based upon a study of ‘FreeMyFC’ (FMFC), a website ostensibly started to expose the failures of ‘MyFootballClub’ (MFC), the world’s first attempt to manage a football club through a supporter funded and managed website.