Sport across communal universes

The concept of community is routinely used in the domains of sport in general and of football in particular. However, the notion of community, as sociologists have long argued, is deceptively elusive and complex, and often conceals as much as it reveals about the dynamics of sporting sociality. Communities in football take many forms and operate in a multitude of spaces, ranging from neighbourhoodbased groups who physically interact to highly dispersed assemblages of people who may only be connected through common use of media and electronic communication. Sport communities also operate as mechanisms of both inclusion and exclusion, and of empowerment and disempowerment. It is important to take a sceptical analytical approach to football’s communities of participation and spectatorship, including with regard to the frequent claims by peak sport organizations to be somehow above or outside the world of politics. Football communities are inevitably implicated in socio-political matters that revolve around, for example, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ‘race’, nation and social class. At the same time, it is necessary not to lose sight of the pleasure-based nature of the sporting world, without which there would be no football communities in the first place. These communities take form in a variety of often conflicting and dynamic ways. Instead of reifying them, as is common in everyday discourse, it is necessary both to understand their positive and negative orientations to power relations, and to grasp the socio-historical processes that subject them to constant change within and across communal universes.