Rivalries, gift and consumption: points towards an economy of contemporary fan agonistic emotions

Abstract

In soccer culture, playing and cheering are intertwined, producing dialectical tensions in the way work, wealth, consumption, and entertainment circulate on the one hand, and emotions, ritualizations, political affiliations, and sociability on the other. I call this tangle the economy of agonistic emotions. A multifaceted theme and sheltered in a politically controversial common sense, fan associations are considered subsidiary or tied to political and economic relations with the domain of playing. Playing and cheering, vocations that take place in a set of practices that are more than just divided into amateur and professional, playful and militant, define a kind of sensitive atom that builds the culture of soccer, which, taken in its most professionalized form, houses instrumental and pragmatic actions that meet the dynamics and consumerist demands of the sports market. This article is dedicated to bridging the gap between cheering (emphasizing agonistic cheering practices) and playing (alluding to the sportified condition) based on the expansions of the notion of gift. In principle, in the division between playing and cheering, the native category of gift stands out as a psycho-physio-symbolic reserve of playing. Dom is a motivating convention that celebrates the sociological distancing and political and epistemic repositioning of playing in relation to cheering. Nevertheless, gift will be associated with the connective key of the gaze, a common sensitive instance that binds those who play and those who watch or cheer. The gaze unfolds in many capacities for gauging the gift, whether subjective or objective, and guides the bodily practices of both those who play and those who cheer. Looking allows the gift to advance in its Maussian dimension as a total performance, suggesting that playing and cheering are inextricably co-implicated experiences.