Home Team Away

Home Team Away calls for a rethinking of sport fandom that is divorced from an attachment to location. As the first comprehensive account of the European football fandom in China, this book explores how the Chinese middle-class subjectivity is formed through the cross-cultural, digital consumption of the Big-Five leagues. Yuan Gong captures the embodied experiences of fans and fan clubs, fan discourses and activities unfolding on digital platforms on Weibo, Weixin, and Hupu, combining fieldwork in Shanghai and virtual ethnography. Delving into participants’ various forms of fan engagement as readers, activists, producers, consumers, and digital citizens, Gong argues that Chinese fans’ decisions to follow and engage with European football result from their material conditions, ideological contestation, and technology appropriation as a new demographic bloc arising during China’s transition to authoritarian digital capitalism. By engaging with their home teams away, the Chinese middle-class fans perform as citizens with a global vision despite the resurgence of the nationalist and anti-Western sentiments.