"Truly a fan experience"? the cultural politics of the live site

This chapter, then, explores twenty-first century mediated sport fandom, and more specifically the fan’s experience of a mega-event, through an observational study of the FIFA International Fan Fest site in Sydney, Australia, during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa (the other designated International Fan Fest sites were Paris, Berlin, Rome, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, with London dropping out because of financial and logistical obstacles). There were many other live sites around the world not sanctioned by FIFA, but we are especially interested here in the organisation’s coordination of global sport spectatorship through this initiative. FIFA described their licensed live sites in a press release as being “about more than football watching, they are truly a fan experience” (FIFA 2010a). The “fan experience” described here by FIFA rests on the capacity of the live site to engage spectators in a crowd-oriented dynamic that resembles the physical presence offered by the match itself. The broadcast media are central to these arrangements, but they do more than just provide sounds and images of events given the operational contexts of transnational (sometimes commercialised) spaces that, through the dialectical interplay of the local and the global, foster the development of new types of socio-cultural context for experiencing sports such as football.