EXPLORING SUPPORTERS’ IMAGES OF FOOTBALL: AN ANALYSIS OF FIVE ITALIAN INTERNET FORUMS

This work presents the methodology and the main findings of a research aimed at analysing the discursive exchange unfolding within five Italian football supporters forums. The research refers to a period characterized by a vast judicial proceeding regarding the transactions (sales and purchasing) of a few football players and the irregular arbitrage of several football matches. Findings highlight what kinds of premises are assumed and performed through the supporters discursive acts and which are the representational contents used to state what the football, the football players and the supporters should/have to be. We submitted the transcripts to a statistical multidimensional technique of analysis (Factorial Analysis of Lexical Correspondences, FALC; Lancia, 2004). Broadly speaking, FALC is aimed at singling out (dis)similarities in the subject’s way of using meaning in order to connote relevant objects of experience. According to our joint psychodynamic and socio-constructivist standpoint, we interpret out (dis)similarities, as the markers of generalized classes of symbolic significance (Salvatore, Tebaldi, Potì, 2006). From this point of view, the two factorial dimensions extracted by the FALC can be understood as the symbolic premises according to which supporters face the essential issues raised by any experience of a context, that is by any encounter with a strangeness: defining who we are and who the other is The analysis depicts a symbolic field that is strongly characterized by the pregnancy of the judicial events in the defining of the identity of a squad and its supporters.