AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The project is titled The Sense of belonging among active football fans and is a case study of Brøndby IF, written by Sofie Westphal Pedersen and Amalie Thune Andersen at Roskilde University in 2014. The aim of the research is to add complexity to the common understanding of active football fans. The research will do that by investigating how the community among active fans contribute to the individual fan’s identity and sense of belonging. And how the media’s negative portrayal of the active fan community affect this. We find it important to understand the point of view of the active football fans and thus the answers are mainly based on our own empirical data collected through interviews with four active Brøndby fans, through participant observation and through questionnaires. Further the research is based on secondary literature mainly from the three Danish researcher Joern, Havelund and Rasmussen. The main concepts of the research is community, sense of belonging and identity and these concepts help add complexity to the understanding of active football fans. Active fans is another concept of the research, as it helps us show the many different attitudes towards being an an active fan. The research concludes that there exists a community among the active Brøndy fans. The community is constituted through common norms, morals, values and goals. Besides the overall community smaller communities exists in form of unofficial fan groups. The community contributes to the identity of the individual fan and contributes a sense of belonging for the individual fan. These contributions are stronger in the unofficial fan groups than in the overall community. Furthermore we conclude that the media’s negative portrayal does not affect the active fans’ desire to support Brøndby, but it has exaggerated the problem of active football fans and has thus led to restrictions out of proportion with the actual problem. The project does not claim to understand every aspect of the community of active football fans, but through our concepts we have managed to add complexity to a phenomenon, and the project has given voice to people, whose side of the story is rarely heard.