Translocal Strategies of Football Fans Abroad - Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe Supporters in Vienna
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Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
Translocal Strategies of
Football Fans Abroad –
Galatasaray and
Fenerbahçe Supporters in
Vienna
Nina Szogs
(University of Vienna)
Kick It !
The Anthropology of European Football
FREE Conference
University of Vienna, October 2013
1Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
This paper is a work in progress.
Please do not quote without
explicit written permission of the author.
2Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
Translocal Strategies of Football Fans Abroad –
Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe Supporters in Vienna
Nina Szogs (University of Vienna)
1. Football fans abroad
An introduction to Turkish football in Vienna
Football fans often want to actively support their favourite football club, even if they
move abroad or have grown up in a country other than that of their team. Galatasaray
and Fenerbahçe fans, who are living in Vienna, can rarely attend live matches. As a
result, the internet, smartphones, and television have become essential tools in
facilitating participation in the club's fan culture. In addition to the use of technology
the importance of locations such as the living rooms, bars and restaurants has
increased. Thus, the meaning fans attribute to fandom has changed, as has its
integration into their everyday lives.
The question of migration and football is nothing new to anthropological research,
but as Victoria Schwenzer and Nicole Selmer (2010, p. 389-90) point out, in German-
speaking countries researchers usually focused on migrant football teams rather than
on migrant football fans.
Access to the field
The dissertation project Migrating Football Fan Identities is part of the FREE
project1. My research is accomplished by accompanying Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe
supporters on their paths in Vienna, Austria, between Austria and Turkey, and
sometimes in other European countries. Please also refer to the paper by John
McManus, who is doing research on Beşiktaş fans in Europe, in the “mobility” panel
of this conference.
Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray are among the most popular Turkish clubs in Vienna;
they comprise two thirds of the Istanbul big three (üç büyükler), and their
relationship is characterised as a traditional rivalry. For my fieldwork I conduct
interviews and participant observations based on the “moving targets” paradigm by
George Marcus (1995), which Gisela Welz adapted for the German speaking
Ethnology (Welz, 1998). Thereby, I understand that my data is embedded in
sociocultural contexts that are flexible and process-related which also applies for the
concept of fan identities. The attempt is to identify these contexts to see how general
preconditions affect, as Johannes Süßmann (2007, p. 26) describes it, the specific.
1 FREE – Football Research in an Enlarged Europe is funded by the European Commission.
3Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
As different as my interviewees are in many aspects, they all have certain things in
common. That is: they are associated with a Turkish diaspora in Vienna, all of them
have been living in Vienna for at least a couple of years or were born in Vienna, they
have the centre of their lives in the city, and they are either in their twenties and early
thirties or late forties and early fifties. The latter are especially interesting for the
perspective of media development and the altering fan practices that go along with it.
Lastly, all of them have rather complex and individual strategies to manage their
fandom from abroad, particularly in a city where, outside a constructed Turkish
community, Turkish football is mostly ignored.
One general question for my research is: how does football fandom from abroad
influence mobility in Europe? The term “abroad” might suggest a hierarchy of
football fandom, however I look at the fan scene in Vienna as an equal experience and
performance of love and loyalty to a football club, similar to being a football fan in
Istanbul or anywhere else in Turkey. But, it is crucial to note that the meaning people
attribute to football fandom and its integration in their everyday lives differs.
One focus lies on the (re)negotiation of fan identities in the Viennese context. I plan
to discover how social rules, conflicts and hierarchies are produced and performed
with special regard to concepts of distance and proximity. This is interesting because
fans of Turkish football in Vienna are both at the same time: proximal to the fan
scene in Vienna, but mostly distant to the pitch in Turkey.
Furthermore, I am scrutinising the supporters’ self-perception in a Viennese football
culture. How do the fans perform their fandom in the city? Do they celebrate
championships in the city centre comparable to how fans of Viennese clubs do? How
do they see their role in a Viennese football space? Using these research questions I
examine the impact that experiences of exclusion and inclusion, within and outside
the football fan cultures in Vienna, have on a fan’s everyday life. I am concentrating
on that to determine if and how recognition and failures of recognition (Honneth,
1992) are negotiated in football2.
Moreover, the research focuses on the modification of social rules, such as with whom
and where it is legitimate to watch football. In a study on Scottish Football Fans in
North America, Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson call the social
modification “pragmatic reterritorialization” (2007, p. 140). In their study they are
referring to the discontinuing of drinking alcohol while watching football because in
North America Scottish matches take place in the morning.
The field
My field consists of various groups and networks of football fans. The centres of these
networks comprise a student group, a pub and a supporters’ group.
2
Please see also Schwenzer & Selmer (2010) who are using Honneth’s theory to analyse social
problems that are triggered by migration processes with regard to football.
4Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
The first network of supporters is a group of predominantly Galatasaray and a few
Beşiktaş fans, who moved to Austria no more than ten years ago to study at one of the
Viennese Universities. All of them attended an Austrian school in Istanbul, have a
middle-class background and obtained a high educational level. In a rather artistic
framework they are politically active in Istanbul as well as in Vienna. The students
mostly are in their twenties, male and female.
The second network is based at a café and pub in a Viennese district associated with
many Turkish restaurants and shops. The location is not specifically a football pub,
however during football matches it is especially crowded. Mostly Fenerbahçe fans go
there, since the owners are dedicated Fenerbahçe fans themselves, but the pub is also
popular among Galatasaray fans. The clientele comprises a high percentage of people
in their early twenties to early thirties and includes both male and female guests.
The third and last network is an official supporters’ group of young Fenerbahçe fans.
The founders recently organised it to more or less provide a safe area for younger and
female Fenerbahçe fans in Vienna. Their dogma is to be very inclusive by allowing
everyone to join regardless of age, gender, or even club affiliation. Furthermore,
swearing is strictly prohibited.
In the next part of my paper I will introduce three themes that are central to my
research.
2. Political Views and Shifting Loyalties
Moral concepts, political views and distinction
Football and especially club affiliations are used as a vessel for attitudes, political
views and ethical questions. Concurrently, it is also the instrument to express these
attitudes, political views, and ethical questions. Cornel Sandvoss writes:
I thus argue that the bond between fan and fan object (the club) is based on a
form narcissistic self reflection […].
(Sandvoss, 2012, p. 82)
As a result, the belonging to and distinction from other constructed communities, not
exclusively football communities, are expressed and negotiated.
A Fenerbahçe fan uses the rivalry between Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe to underline
who, in his opinion, are the outsiders and insiders of a Turkish (football) community.
In an argument with a Galatasaray fan on why Fenerbahçe is the better team, he uses
a nationalist and racist line of argument to emphasise Galatasaray’s inferiority.
Galatasaray was founded by French people and is therefore not a real Turkish
club. Additionally, lots of Kurds and Jews and gypsies are fan of Galatasaray.
(Fenerbahçe fan, male, 31 [20 March 2013])
5Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
Implicitly, he shares his political views on who is legitimately a member of a
“Turkish” club. At the same time, he makes it clear that a football club from Turkey is
only a decent football club when it is entirely “Turkish”. In his definition the term
“Turkish” excludes other so called national or ethnic groups in Turkey and elsewhere.
Turkish politics have been increasingly mentioned in interviews since the protests
sparked off in late spring 2013:
At the moment I would rather support Beşiktaş. Among Fenerbahçe fans there
are a lot of Erdoğan people and in Beşiktaş there aren’t. But it’s too late to
change clubs. Once you choose one you have to stick to it.
(Fenerbahçe fan, female, 26 [03 October 2013])
The current protests in Turkey are rattling the concepts of loyalty also in Vienna. As
the political situation in Turkey becomes increasingly important the antagonist
rivalry between Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray, and Beşiktaş is often questioned. The
political situation is also present in the stadium where in every 34th3 minute
supporters start protesting or whistling respectively their opinion on Erdoğan. The
football researcher Yağmur Nuhrat says in an article in the Austrian football
magazine Ballesterer (Selmer, 2013) that it is normal that among fans, also among
Beşiktaş fans, there are people that are against the protests, after all about 50 per cent
of the votes in elections are for AKP.
A Galatasaray fan, who actively participated in the protests in Turkey and their
adaption in Vienna during the 2013 summer, uses a similar line of argument while
explaining his hatred towards Fenerbahçe, however his political views concern the
status of Turkey in Europe:
Galatasaray is the part of Turkey that is ready to become a member of the
European Union. Fenerbahçe fans are primitive; the only thing that is
important to them is money.
(Galatasaray fan, male, 34 [21 August 2012])
It is necessary to emphasise that, although Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray each have
their own club history and had their own labels – elite (Galatasaray) and bourgeois
(Fenerbahçe) – nowadays it is impossible to generalise their supporters, since they
are as diverse, left wing or right wing as the other team’s supporters. In my interviews
I have heard the exact same argument pro Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe or contra
Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe exclusively depending on the interviewee’s respective
political views.
What is home?
As I mentioned before, the biographies of my interviewees are quite different in
regards to where they grew up and also how often they travel to Istanbul to attend
3 34 is Istanbul’s city code on license plates.
6Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
matches. One aspect they do have in common, that football for them constructs a
space where it is possible to (re)tell difficult and complex concepts of home and
belonging.
A Galatasaray fan, who came to Vienna a decade ago to study at the university said
once:
Turkish football is like Turkish food – a piece of home.
(Galatasaray fan, male, 34 [21 August 2012])
Interestingly, in diaspora the Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe antagonism is also newly
negotiated for some fans, but the conditions under which one can shift ones loyalty
temporarily are very specific. The concept of shifting loyalties refers to Gerd
Baumann’s “Grammars of Identity/Alterity” (2004, p. 22-3) in which he adapts
Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Nuer to show in a football example that identities and
loyalties can shift depending on context.
A Galatasaray fan, who I met during an away trip to Salzburg in July 2013 when
Fenerbahçe tried to qualify for the Champions League, attends Fenerbahçe matches
that are located near Vienna. During a very long bus ride to Salzburg I told him that I
was confused that two Galatasaray fans (he and his friend) were riding on a
Fenerbahçe fan bus. He responded:
Because it is a Turkish club. Galatasaray is better of course and you also have
to go to a Galatasaray match, the fans are much louder. But, of course I
support Fenerbahçe, when they are playing the Champions League. Though, I
would never wear a Fenerbahçe jersey. I brought my jersey of the Turkish
national team instead.
(Galatasaray fan, male, 45 [31 July 2013])
His friend also brought a Turkish national team jersey. During a later interview, since
we were talking about me interviewing both Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe fans, the
same supporter told me it would bother him a lot if I had come to his place in a
Fenerbahçe jersey. He was referring to the Fenerbahçe shirt I was wearing during the
away trip.
“Failures of recognition”
Football is a welcome vehicle to negotiate experiences of contempt, or with the words
of the philosopher Axel Honneth (1992) failures of recognition. Honneth claims that
every individual struggles for recognition, and attempts to overcome attacks to an
individual’s love or a group’s rights and solidarity, as they are failures of recognition.
Football is a central method for attempting to overcome failures of recognition in
other parts of people’s lives. This might happen on a rather individual level, in a class
context, and also in a migratory context through emphasising the superiority of her or
his club or of the country’s football. This works especially well for football in Austria,
7Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
as Austrian football has been and seems to be remaining unsuccessful. They have just
recently failed to qualify for the FIFA world cup 2014, and Austrian club participation
in the Champions League and Europa League is mostly limited to the group stage.
Compared to Austrian football, Turkish football, especially club football, is more
successful. This does not necessarily have to lead to a serious way of distinction, but
can also be a playful performance:
N: You are a Galatasaray fan. How come you went to the Europa League match
Salzburg vs. Fenerbahçe?
I: Because it is still a Turkish team and I can tease my colleagues at work the
next day (laughs).
(Galatasaray fan, male, 45 [09 October 2013])
Not only are hard figures part of the expression of superiority, but also soft skills. For
example: being a more dedicated fan in the sense of singing louder or being better
informed, are part of it. Many interviewees say that Austrian football is boring, as are
its fans. On the before mentioned away trip to Salzburg, a fan pointed at the mostly
sitting Salzburg fans and then at the always chanting and jumping Fenerbahçe fans
and said:
Look, these are real fans.
(Galatasaray fan, male, 42 [31 July 2013])
3. Gender roles in my fieldwork
As a female researcher my access to football locations in Vienna is in some ways
limited or sometimes difficult, as it is for many female football fans and likewise for
female football reseachers as also Almut Sülzle (2011, p. 72) describes it in her book
on fans of the German football club Kickers Offenbach. In my field, there are cafés
and pubs that are not explicitly for men, but when asking female and male supporters
I often get the response that women do not go there, because the men swear and then
both parties might feel awkward.
Men feel awkward, because they will have to stop swearing in a female
presence and therefore cannot behave as they would like to. Women feel
awkward, if someone swore anyway.
(Fenerbahҫe fan, female, 26 [03 October 2013])
Swearing is used to draw a line between genders in Viennese cafés. In the group of
young Fenerbahçe fans it is explicitly forbidden to swear.
I: Women don’t like to watch men swear, because they feel awkward.
N: Why do they feel awkward? Don’t they swear?
I: No, women don’t feel good, when there is swearing.
(Organiser of young Fenerbahçe fans [03 June 2013])
8Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
The organisers of the young supporters group say they respect women and this is why
it is prohibited to swear in their group. It is a group where women are welcome, but
where men see their own role as the guardian of women and children. On the other
hand, women are very active and loud in the group.
In the pub, that I mentioned earlier, there are many women, and it is no problem to
go there in a football jersey, very stylish, or more traditionally dressed. The pub is
described by a young woman as a place where there are no hooligans, where women
and men go, and where she can comfortably take her brother. She was afraid her
brother would turn into a hooligan, because he started frequenting some Turkish
coffee places in Vienna and begun talking like a hooligan. He was swearing and
became passionate concerning the rivalry to Galatasaray.
To sum it up, in many places, also in pubs, men determine the space and make the
rules. At the same time, some football hangouts in Vienna offer a platform to
renegotiate gender roles, but only in locations that were previously defined by men as
open places for women.
4. (Trans)Local strategies and polymedia
Despite all the different constellations, the issues of what one might call translocal
digital and analogue mobilities are handled quite similarly. I include the role of media
in my research, because, as Trevor Pinch, referring to ANT, puts it:
If the nonhumans are relevant to social groups, then they are relevant to the
analysis.
(Pinch, 2009, p. 53)
In the following, I will use the term polymedia how Madianou and Miller define it:
[…] drawing from the Greek word poly meaning many or several, seemed
entirely appropriate to emphasise the proliferating nature of new media as part
of an integrated environment.
(Madianou and Miller, 2012, p. 411)
There are three aspects of my research where polymedia has a crucial influence on
the performance of fan identities and at the same time is embedded in the social
construction of fandom. These aspects include: an historical perspective, how fans
handle distance and proximity, and translocal practices and rituals.
The historical perspective
In interviews with football fans that migrated in the 1970s or 1980s to Vienna, the
supporters often talk about the problems they experienced in performing their
fandom. One could not watch matches, and could only find out the results in
newspapers that often arrived days after the match. They say, it was almost the only
9Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
way to find out the results. Another possibility was to call fellow football fans in
Turkey, but, as they add, they would not do it often because it was expensive. As a
result, the love for the club did not diminish, but the involvement of football in their
everyday lives decreased immensely. Some of them started going to the Austrian
league matches in order to keep the football feeling alive.
With technology enhancing, the situation changed and my interviewees say that they
resumed following Turkish football on a regular basis. The Süper Lig fan culture in
Vienna, as it can be observed today, is still quite new due to technical issues in the
past. Most of the Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray fan clubs and fan pubs are no older
than ten years.
In the past, due to the lack of information, watching football in a bar and
spontaneously going to public places to celebrate the victory of an important match
was simply not possible. As a result, Turkish football fan culture was less visible in
the city.
The use of polymedia changes the perception and more importantly also the
performance of football fandom abroad. It enables a fan to integrate the performance
of love and loyalty to a football club in their everyday lives, simultaneously to the
events in Turkey.
Distance and proximity
With the advancement of polymedia, proximity can be created. However, the
proximity has limitations. In 2012, there was a fight in Istanbul after Galatasaray won
the championship in the Fenerbahçe stadium. Despite the fact that he considered it to
be one of the most important matches in football history, one of the interviewees
from Istanbul, who studies in Vienna, could neither attend the match nor be in his
home town Istanbul for the time of the match. Before moving to Vienna he used to
attend matches in the stadium on a regular basis. Since that was no longer an option
his solution was to follow everything in detail on the internet and afterwards on
YouTube. During our second interview he showed me dozens of videos where, in his
opinion, especially Fenerbahçe fans were demolishing the city.
For him the rivalry between the two clubs is of great importance. He uses it not only
to express his political views but also to underline his moral concepts. He does so by
attributing to the club Fenerbahçe, and to its fans, all the categories he considers to
be negative: capitalist, violent, and primitive manners. For him YouTube was and is a
desirable instrument to first create proximity to the events he is otherwise distant
from, and it is at the same time a relevant source that allows him to other himself as a
Galatasaray fan from the Fenerbahçe fans.
Community issues
Along with migration often come community issues. The lack of friends and family
exists especially for those that have recently migrated. Watching Turkish football on
10Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
the internet or in a pub is not a major problem anymore, but as Hognestad says:
“football is a community business” (2012).
Watching a match alone or with strangers is not fully satisfying. This is the moment
when transnational internet chat rooms become important to discuss and comment
on recent events in football with like-minded people. Two fans that I interviewed met
on the internet in a transnational Turkish football chat room. Today they describe it
as “we have met through online dating” – consequently polymedia does not only
generate transnational connections, but also local interactions among football fans
abroad.
But still it does not necessarily help to close the gap of fellow football friends. As a
result, social rules with whom and where one watches football change. In interviews
with Galatasaray supporters, who had only moved to Vienna in the last three to ten
years, they often mentioned that in Vienna they watch with people and in places they
would never have watched football in Istanbul; many places in Vienna are considered
to be too old-fashioned. For the most part they already knew each other in Istanbul,
but were not close.
Translocal practices
The integration of polymedia in everyday fan practices is crucial to my interviewees.
While sitting in a pub in Vienna, fans call friends and especially family in Turkey
when the team scores or wins an important match. Likewise, pictures are posted on
Facebook simultaneously to the event. In one Galatasaray fan group there is a little
ritual, where one of the supporters calls his mother every time Galatasaray scores
humming the first lines of “I will survive”, which is a popular fan song among
Galatasaray supporters.
Polymedia is omnipresent in Turkish football fan culture in Vienna. Additionally, it
enables the creation of proximity to the football league in Turkey. Nonetheless,
football, for most fans, is a community business and while polymedia can facilitate
contacts that is not the only aspect that is important when watching the match. As my
interviewees describe it, meeting in person must be part of practice.
5. Football fans abroad or football fans from abroad?
Football fans living in a different country or far from the stadium of their favourite
football club is nothing new to the world of football. As Cornel Sandvoss talks about
“mediated encounters” (2012, p. 89-91) he makes clear that new broadcasting rights
and habits facilitate the identification of fans with teams abroad. Having access to
matches of any league, no matter where the fan is, produces transnational fan
identities and communities. Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, amongst others, have a
global fan base and sell their merchandise around the world. What exactly is the
difference to Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe fans in Vienna? When simply looking at
11Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
being a fan abroad, the advancement of polymedia changed and continues to change
the chances of participation as they do for any other fan who follows a football team
from abroad.
On the other hand, being a fan abroad and at the same time being part of one of the
biggest migrant groups in Vienna, changes the perspective on being a fan. In Austria,
Turkish football is frequently ignored in German speaking media, with the exceptions
of when a Turkish team plays an Austrian team, high level Champions League
matches, or pitch invasions.4 Consequently, the fan identity becomes a sensitive
topic, due to family links, complex concepts of home, and possible failures of
recognitions as a migrant being directly connected to it.
4 There are exceptions like the Austrian football magazine Ballesterer.
12Working paper for the conference “Kick it! The Anthropology of European Football”
Not to be cited without the author’s consent.
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