#Sportsball anti-fandom as identity performance on X: The case of Australian Football League Women's (AFLW)

Abstract

This article identifies a novel form of sports anti-fan identity present amongst X (formerly Twitter) followers of The Australian Football League Women's (AFLW) competition – #sportsball fans – whose nascent attachment to women's Australian Rules football is publicly performed as an ironically detached becoming-a-fan-ness, often rooted in a self-identified, pre-existing aversion to both sport and sports fandom. The term #sportsball serves as a shorthand for these types of new fan identities, for whom ironic distancing and expressions of surprise at their sudden affective attachment to football serve as a bridging device for traversing different textualities, for protecting the curated online self, and for managing expectations within pre-existing online communities. Identified via a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) analysis of 71,332 posts drawn from official match day hashtags for the AFLW's inaugural 2017 season, #sportsball fans represent a significant contribution to our understanding of mediated fan practices and online identity construction.

Introduction

Across sport and fan studies of media cultures, anti-fandom remains an under-examined phenomenon (Click, 2019) but one that is potentially crucial to understanding identity formation in contemporary digital media environments (Gray, 2019; Phillips, 2015). This article expands the established understandings of online sports fan identities and typologies by theorising a novel anti-fan subjectivity present among X (name changed from Twitter in 2023) followers of The Australian Football League Women's (AFLW) competition. It does so within the context of longstanding gendered barriers for women fans of Australian Rules football, as well as the marginalisation of women's sports and women's sport fans more generally. The symbolic promise of the AFLW in terms of progress towards gender equality is an important factor in understanding emerging formations of sport fandom at the nexus of anti-fandom and fandom. Whereas sports anti-fandom has generally been conceptualised in terms of antipathy towards opposition teams or players (Theodoropoulou, 2007), there has to date been little attention paid to forms of anti-fandom that are rooted in a pre-existing aversion to the sport itself, but which might also serve as a negotiated bridge to fandom. We employ the term #sportsball as a shorthand for this particular subject position, an ironic online neologism that seeks to create space for a performative, ironically detached ‘becoming-a-fan-ness’ (Hills, 2014), rooted in a pre-existing sports anti-fandom and in response to the transforming gender landscape of professional Australian rules football.

Although found in a small subset of captured ‘tweets’ or posts, we argue that #sportsball nonetheless serves as a useful catch-all for X (formerly Twitter) users who are expressing a prior and, in some cases, still active anti-fandom towards both football and sport in general, but who are using a form of ironic detachment as a bridging device between different textualities. Media scholar Matt Hills’ (2014, 2019) writings on anti-fandom, in particular his concepts of ante-fandom, intertextual fluidity and cyclical fandom, are taken up to theorise how #sportsball fans construct their identity across different ‘affinity groups’ on X, a microblogging social media platform where, arguably more than any other, the moulding of user identity and community is a collaborative process (Marwick and Boyd, 2011). Developing Hills’ thesis, we argue that #sportsball as a becoming-a-fan identity allows fans who are new to the AFLW, as well as sports fandom more generally, to manage the perceived expectations of their existing X networks and communities, and through a performed rhetorical position, reflexively protect themselves from criticism or negative reaction to their new object of interest from other anti-sport fans within their online networks.

Launched in 2017, the AFLW is the first professional women's league for Australian rules football. Established under the administration of the national men's competition the AFL, considered the country's dominant sporting code (Otto, 2023), the AFLW was the fourth most posted about sport in Australia in its inaugural year (TwitterSportsAU, 2017). The analysis of a new sporting competition born during the Web 2.0 era of participatory digital media has relevance for illuminating novel fan publics and subjectivities which can add to our understanding of women's sport fans and sport fandom in general, beyond the typologies established in the sport studies literature. The eight-team AFLW competition, which made its debut on 23 February 2017 in front of a lockout crowd of 24,568 spectators, represented the culmination of over 35 years of ‘embryonic and evolving women's and girls’ [football] competitions’ (Alomes, 2019: 10). Despite this, women continue to be marginalised within the sport, particularly in terms of positions of power within management and administration at both club and league level, and the beginning of the AFLW competition should not obscure the fact that women remain secondary subjects in the modern AFL (Pavlidis et al., 2022). The intensity of response to the birth of the AFLW reflects not only the game's powerful sociocultural role in Australian society, but also the frustrations and hopes of women who have been denied opportunities and recognition within the game as players and fans over many years (Alomes, 2019). Mapping new forms of engagement in women's sport has prompted our investigation of online mediated identities emerging around AFLW hashtag communities. Here we extend current analyses of X as a key infrastructure for amplifying women's sport (Sherwood et al., 2019; Vann, 2014) and securing established sport fan identities and attachments (Smith and Smith, 2012) by investigating a new fan formation emerging at the confluence of multiple sport and non-sport online publics.

Online sport fandom and anti-fandom

In sports studies, the concept of anti-fandom remains broadly tied to a binary understanding of sports fandom, wherein ‘normal’ fans are affectively attached to a particular team or player in order to experience feelings of joy and/or collective identification (Elias and Dunning, 2008) with their anti-fandom manifesting as either negative feeling towards the opposition (Theodoropoulou, 2007, 2018) or towards certain teams deemed general ‘hate objects’ by fans across particular sporting cultures, often due to their outsized competitive or financial success (Senkbeil, 2016). Departing from Fiske's (1992) cultural economy of fandom as being purposeful and functional – that is, for something – hater fandom instead defines itself as a fandom of against, either as a way of performing an anti-consumerist class politics in opposition to the corporatised elements of mainstream sports culture, or as a ‘mock bourgeois’ traditionalism opposed to nouveau riche oligarchic club ownership (particularly in European football). #Sportsball fans seemingly occupy a space outside of these categories, in that they are starting from a position of self-professed antipathy towards sport (Australian rules football in particular) whilst rhetorically and affectively attempting to negotiate a path towards genuine fandom, both within their online publics and themselves. These subjects offer new insights into sport fan self-construction in the social media age, as they depart markedly from normative understandings of both fandom and anti-fandom, appearing to bridge the two in a way that broadens our understanding of how these attachments form and are negotiated in an era of collapsing distinctions between sport and other cultural fandoms.

It has long been established that ideas of authentic sports fandom are tied to masculinist forms of consumption (Crawford, 2004) geared around defining traits such as loyalty to a particular team and the wearing of team merchandise, demonstrations of sport knowledge, and particular types of emotional and physical expression, such as chanting and hooliganism. These norms of sports fandom have been found to inform online performances of fan authenticity (Clavio and Walsh, 2014) as well as perpetuate racism (Kilvington and Price, 2019) and homophobia (Nabono Martins, 2023). Others note that X facilitates expressions of sport fandom through information sharing about teams/players, communal discussion around sport events, shows of support for one's team and discrediting other teams and their fans (Smith and Smith, 2012). In terms of women fans of traditionally male sports, it is often the case that they can feel both marginalised by, and pressured to conform to, these types of behaviours to assimilate as authentic supporters in online and offline settings (Pope, 2014).

Despite recent watershed moments of progress such as the birth of the AFLW, sport remains a hypermasculine domain, with men and women largely segregated not only in terms of on-field competition, but also as fans. The impacts of women's structural and symbolic exclusion from sport have been well documented in studies of women fans’ experiences, with feminist interventions identifying their marginalisation through sexist language, threats and abuse at matches which function to sustain men's privilege and unequal relations of power (Erhart, 2013). The political economy of sports media further serves to reinforce masculine hegemony through processes of marginalisation, trivialisation and omission (Tuchman, 2000), with longitudinal studies also demonstrating the enduring gulf in media coverage between men's and women's sport (Cooky et al., 2013). Such perceptions extend to women sport fans, who have been characterised as outsiders (Sveinson and Hoeber, 2016) and as inauthentic when measured against masculinist characteristics of traditional fandom (Gosling, 2007). Sports media's ‘commodity narratives’ have historically represented women as ‘babes or bitches’, either serving as male fantasy objects and props for banter, or as civilising handbrakes disrupting what Donald Trump infamously referred to as ‘locker room talk’ (Wenner, 2013: 84–86). As Pope and Williams (2011) note, much of the prior work on women sports fans has generally tended to characterise them as, variously, groupie predators (Crawford and Gosling, 2004), as women trying to negotiate space within sites of hegemonic male dominance (Jones, 2008), as ‘passive sidekicks to hyper-committed male terrace actors, … [or] valiant, “neofeminist” resisters’ (Pope and Williams, 2011: 295). All of this is crucial context in understanding how and why #sportsball fans responded to the AFLW and its potential to provide an environment free of the oppressions and exclusions that have been experienced by women sport fans for so long. At the same time, the idea of being drawn to a particular sport for its inherent symbolic value from a prior position of anti-fandom, as is seemingly the case with the AFLW, is still a novel one, and serves to illustrate why online spaces are increasingly being utilised for alternative discourses about women's sport.

The rise of social media and its impact on sports fan communications and cultures has provided women fans with opportunities to redress their marginalisation, with scholars identifying women fans’ curation of social media ‘micro-communities’, within which they can enact different types of fandom outside of prevailing masculinist or exclusionary norms (Toffoletti et al., 2021). However, the types of fan expressions and identities found within these new and evolving communities are generally still predicated on a pre-existing affinity and interest in the sport in question. To date, little attention has been paid to the anti-fan dimension within women's sport and, indeed, how online expressions of negative feeling or dislike of the text – in this case, the AFLW – can expand understandings of sport fandom to include those who have felt alienated by traditional sport cultures (Pavlidis et al., 2022) and who may be seeking to develop counter fan cultures aligned with values such as gender equality (Allison and Pope, 2022; Symons, 2022). Whereas existing studies of women's sport fandom presuppose those engaged in these practices identify as sport fans, our formulation of #sportsball anti-fandom broadens the lens of investigation to develop new theoretical understandings of the relationship between anti-fandom and sport using AFLW as a case study.

In surveying the existing literature on sports anti-fandom in online environments, the notion of fantipathy, or the practice within sports fan communities of being highly critical of one's own team, often to the point of seemingly rejecting or disowning it, is another aspect of sports anti-fandom where seemingly negative emotions can have deceptively positive, even cathartic rhetorical functions, such as ‘negotiating moments of crisis, facilitating social bonds with other fans, and performing (sub)cultural capital’ (McCulloch, 2019: 229). Recent work in a US context, for example, has examined the link between sports anti-fandom and far-right cultural identity formation and community bonding, in terms of social media reaction to NFL player Colin Kaepernick's protest against police brutality and mass incarceration (Duvall, 2020).

As Jonathan Gray notes in his study of television anti-fandom, ‘Behind dislike … there are always expectations [of] what a text should be like’ (Gray, 2003: 72). So, it is no great leap from the orthodox idea of fan communities as sites of hegemonic struggle over how particular texts and objects should be interpreted and evaluated (Johnson, 2017) to the concept of ‘fantipathy’ articulated by McCulloch (2019), a phenomenon which will be keenly familiar to most fans of team sports, whether overheard in the stands or witnessed online:

Resembling anti-fandom, but performed by an otherwise unwavering fan, it may take the form of expressions of personal dissatisfaction (‘[I’m] really pissed off with some of the gutless performances this season’; #S329) or evaluative utterances that pronounce the object to be defective or lacking in ‘quality’ (‘Utterly woeful by all parties concerned’: #S343) (McCulloch, 2019: 231).

Unlike #sportsball subjects, however, this type of expression is still fundamentally based on a strong affective connection to the fan object (team), however much it is framed as being defective or in need of rehabilitation. Other forms of anti-fan expression can be located somewhere in the blurry realm between online trolling – deliberate antagonism for the sake of amusement (Phillips, 2015) – and the so-called hatewatching, or the consumption of a cultural product, despite actively disliking it, to point out its flaws (Gilbert, 2019; Gray, 2019). Both of these fan phenomena appear in social media forums devoted to the AFLW (Pavlidis et al., 2022), yet by contrast #sportsball anti-fandom manifests as a rhetorically negotiated entry into a positive engagement with the sport through an active interest in a women's competition.

X and reflexive self-monitoring

X's platform architecture, essentially unchanged from when this data was collected in 2017, plays an important role in the emergence of #sportsball identity. Papacharissi (2014: 126) emphasises the importance of the retweet/repost sharing function for facilitating networked affective publics, arguing that it represents ‘the form of mediality that supports and invites a particular tonality of expression’. This tonality, in terms of X, is often characterised as agonistic (Salter, 2022), fundamentally because of its architecture as a platform defined not by personal networks of ‘friends’ (as in Facebook's linguistically engineered universe), but by particular publics of followers and followees (Marwick and Boyd, 2011).

Others argue that the hashtag, as an organically generated X affordance, frequently causes users to project a different type of online persona, one that moves them beyond the mode they would adopt when addressing their usual imagined communities (Bruns, 2023; Highfield et al., 2013). Within the area of hashtag studies, we are thus dealing with a different notion of ‘publicness’ and subjectivity, as facilitated and encouraged by the affordances of the platform and its architecture. As Matheson (2018) describes it, this performative form of publicness geared towards an individual's sense of what is relevant or of interest to a wider group beyond the individual's personal networks should be seen as an engagement with a ‘collective imaginary’. The notion of intensely postmodern, technologically mediated ‘reflexive self-monitoring’ (Giddens, 1984: 80), in the context of an ever-present online imagined community, is the crucible from which #sportsball fans spring, and is linguistically reflected in their efforts to engage with a new, transformative fan object – football – whilst protecting both their curated online selves, and their accrued (sub)cultural capital.

Method

This article employs a critical discourse studies (CDS) methodology, an umbrella term for a suite of approaches related to discourse analysis (DA), or the study of how particular texts – linguistic, visual and verbal – help to construct and reinforce the discourses which scaffold our understanding of reality and society. Following Fairclough, we understand discourse as ‘semiotic ways of construing aspects of the world (physical, social or mental) that can generally be identified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of social actors’ (Fairclough, 2012: 11). A CDS framing provides scope for the researcher to embrace a variety of theories, methods, and analyses without being tied to any singular theoretical or methodological approach (van Dijk, 2013), something which is salient to a research focus on new and potentially more fluid forms of fan identity emergent on social media.

Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS)

Within a CDS framework, this article draws on a CADS approach, which involves the computational analysis of a corpus of text (in this case, a dataset of posts collected via hashtags) to determine sites for qualitative discourse analysis. The principal mission of CADS has been described by Partington (2008) as the combination of a quantitative, statistical approach to large bodies of textual material with a qualitative discourse analysis approach of close, detailed reading, to uncover ‘non-obvious meaning’, or that which ‘might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal’ (Partington, 2008: 96–97).

This research takes a corpus-based approach, where the corpus is the driver of the analysis, and the research focus is determined by points of salience arising quantitatively from the corpus (Nartey and Mwinlaaru, 2019). This process involved transforming text into data by abstracting its fundamental essence – that is, as individual or collective acts of communication – into a data-field form to be processed and analysed quantitatively. It involved three basic steps: generating a corpus of raw text, in accordance with the research question (in this case, whether new types of fan formations are detectable in AFLW hashtag communities); processing this data to be examined quantitatively; and then performing quantitative analysis using statistical tools (Nartey and Mwinlaaru, 2019). Posts were put through data pre-processing and information extraction, which involved the following steps: data collection around a series of training terms (AFLW hashtags); tokenisation, that is, dividing the text into individual linguistic tokens (in this case words); normalisation, or the removal of unwanted noise from this list of tokens, such as unimportant stop words (e.g. conjunctions, definite articles etc.) or abbreviations; part-of-speech (POS) tagging, which identifies and counts the grammatical nature of the tokens, for example, type and number of adjectives, adverbs, nouns; syntactic processing, that is, looking at surrounding information, often in the form of syntax, collocations, and concordances to get a better understanding of the context in which the particular search term is being used, and its register (formal/informal, cultural/political etc.).

Once the most frequently occurring words or tokens in the X dataset were identified, collocations – the frequency in which two (or more) words co-occur – were utilised to help reveal ‘common formulaic metaphors, topics that tend to cluster together, or positive or negative trends in lexical environments’, otherwise known as ‘semantic prosody’ (Beach, 2019: 3). A collocation analysis revealed particular groups of terms as ‘carriers of cultural meanings or domain-specific meanings’ in a way that would not necessarily be detectable from raw quantitative measures such as word frequency lists, or from manual qualitative analysis of large bodies of text (Pollach, 2012: 270).

Design and procedure

Official match-specific hashtags were used as the organising principle for identifying the dataset, as well as the generic #AFLW and #AFLwomens, to pick up a broader scope of the conversation. We recognise there will be users posting about the event who are unaware of the hashtag, or deliberately choosing not to use it, hence a complete dataset of all users engaging in the discussion is not possible to obtain by solely monitoring hashtagged posts. In terms of posting around live mediated events, there are some obvious structural differences, the most crucial being that whereas the visibility of a user's post would normally be limited by the size of their personal follower network, using a hashtag to post about a particular event gives the user the ability to address not just their own followers, but also an entirely different community that is tracking the hashtagged discussion (Highfield et al., 2013).

Data collection spanned the AFLW's inaugural season, which ran from 3 February to 25 March 2017. An initial scraped dataset of 71,332 posts was collected and then cleaned to filter out irrelevant material deemed to be ‘non-fan’, such as posts from official club accounts, media organisations, advertisers and other commercial interests, as well as ‘stop words’, or words that are frequently occurring but deemed to provide little information. This resulted in a final dataset of 55,956 posts. X data was collected using a bespoke scraping tool commissioned from a freelance programmer and cleaned using the R statistical software package. The scraping tool utilised X's Search Application Programming Interface (API) to harvest the original posts using the list of official hashtags, as well as the primary replies to those posts, samples of which have been anonymised for inclusion in this article. It was beyond the technical scope of the scraping tool to capture biographical information relating to each X account, so whilst there was clearly a gendered dimension to the data, which is noted in the analysis, it wasn’t possible to quantify the captured posts in terms of gender or limit the findings exclusively to women fans. Indeed, the manual analysis revealed that some of the sample posts cited below were from male fans, however, there is no suggestion that these made up a majority or even a significant minority of captured responses.

An initial sampled reading of the dataset was undertaken with a preliminary deductive framework in mind, based on key theoretical concepts outlined in the existing literature. Particular framings were noted that might become useful to structure further investigation around, including particular words or phrases that could provide insight into a particular user's thoughts, worldview or social networks. Seven coding categories were developed from the content of posts detected in the initial manual sampling process, as well as the project's research aim of uncovering new fan subjectivities and publics: On-field, AFLW product, Media, Cultural, New fan, Appearance and Fan culture. The dataset was then sifted for posts that corresponded linguistically to each of these general subject groups, using machine learning. Collocates and concordance lines for the selected posts were then generated, from which manual qualitative analysis could be performed. The term sportsball appeared as a collocate across all the coding categories.

Findings and analysis

#Sportsball as ante- and anti-fandom

Our analysis is centred around #sportsball as a distinctly novel form of anti-fan identity detected in a small subset of captured posts. The term serves as a useful catch-all for a broader subset of X users who expressed a prior and, in some cases, still active anti-fandom towards both football and sport in general, but who chose to employ a form of ironic detachment as a bridging device between the two different textual fields. Although the word sportsball only appears in this project's corpus 21 times as an individual term, its usage offers a classifying hook for a type of nascent fandom and fan expression that is seemingly unrepresented in the literature to date, particularly amongst work on sport and online publics. Whilst there are qualitative points of difference in the examples below, their point of commonality is the use of the online colloquialism ‘sportsball’, defined as ‘A mildly critical or humorous term used by people who admit they don’t know or care about sports. Sports fans sometimes use it, too, as a playful way to refer to sports they like’ (dictionary.com, n.d.).

However, not only is it being used as an identity marker in terms of this accepted notion of a general sports anti-fandom, but also as a performance of a simultaneous, potential becoming-a-fan-ness:

The brilliance of the #aflw is almost enough to turn me into a footy fan! Awesome stuff. #sportsball

I’m the least sportsball-y person one could find, but the inundation of my feed about the amazing #aflw is really something wonderful

I’m sportsball agnostic but this is mad frucken good footy. #AFLWBluesPies

My feed is full of women's sportsball and I WELCOME IT BRING IT TO ME. #AFLW

In the growing body of literature around the AFLW, recent work has examined online fan engagement with the league through the prism of affect theory, in particular, how ‘unanticipated flows of affect’ circulating on social media have intersected with the AFLW's historical significance to construct new forms of gendered knowledge in women's sport fandom (Pavlidis et al., 2022: 112). However, this work has largely presupposed an existing, orthodox fan connection to the game. By contrast, in the sample posts above, affective terms like ‘brilliance’ and ‘wonderful’ – and particularly the more colourful ‘mad frucken good’, in conjunction with the claim that the user is, however, a ‘sportsball agnostic’ – present us with an interesting representation of a liminal state of fandom and its attendant motivations, facilitated by the growth of professional women's sports leagues in the era of participatory digital media, and the potentialities now afforded those who might previously have perceived, or had direct experience of, sport fandoms as gender-exclusionary spaces.

Within fan studies of cultural and media forms, Hills (2019) develops the concept of ‘ante-fandom’ – a time prior to the subject's entry into these discursive communities. Whereas football anti-fandom is generally conceptualised as the manifestation of a pre-existing fandom (e.g. negative feelings for rival teams, see Senkbeil, 2016; Theodoropoulou, 2007), Hills proposes a more diachronic, self-evolutionary approach to ante-fandom as a kind of naïve state. Here, the fan is able to enjoy a relationship with the object ‘fandom free’, and in a state of blissful, ‘genuine love’ for whichever aspect of it they personally like, without the weight of any perceived norms and expectations about (il)legitimate interpretations, or fan cultural capital. For the #sportsball fan, the norms and expectations at play in their affective networks depart from the blissful, ‘free’ state of object relations proposed by Hills, in that the ‘naïve state’ they are marking out for themselves is self-identified and performed ironically, in order to transition out of a pre-existing, declarative anti-fandom for sport – a cultural genre they are now expressing a nascent connection to through AFLW's X discourse, and its perceived affordance of an approachable, non-masculinist fan space, as well as its inherent challenge to male sporting hegemony. Different from Hills’ understanding of ‘ante’ fandom, which represents a prior state of fandom within an existing field, here it refers to a state of being prior to entering a particular field of fandom. Users being at pains to articulate a pre-existing sport and football anti-fandom in these posts can be seen as both a rhetorical mechanism for switching between different fan universes or paradigms, but also as gesturing towards the possibility of being part of sport fandom in a new way (Toffoletti, 2017). This is distinct from, for instance, expressing distaste for one season or ‘era’ of a television show relative to others, as in Hills’ (2019: 106) conception of ante-fandom as a means of keeping ‘warring factions’ within a particular fandom under control. Hills’ concept of ante-fandom, as applied to AFLW X publics, thus allows for a broadening of our understanding of what women's sport fandom can be (both anti-sport and pro-women's football), particularly in light of the increasingly porous boundary between sport fandom and other forms of media and cultural fan practices (Allison and Pope, 2022; Pope, 2014; Symons, 2022).

#Sportsball fandom can therefore be viewed as a performance of multiple identities – simultaneously anti-fan and fan – in the context of a social media platform whose sociotechnical affordances facilitate and encourage the presentation of a networked self, one which is ‘socially saturated’ by the ‘multiple, disparate, and even competing potentials for being’ afforded by X (Papacharissi, 2012: 1992), and the blurring of actual and imagined audiences into an ‘ever-presence’ for the user's performance of self. In turn, this same performance of the networked self runs parallel to many of the performative dimensions of anti-fandom, which are likewise directed at the nebulous space between actual and imagined community. As Gray (2019) argues, the study of anti-fandom illuminates the multi-dimensionality of both the text and its reception, and #sportsball fans offer the same window into the increasing complexity of sport's textuality in the era of Web 2.0, particularly in terms of how anti-fandom can function within women's sport as a bridging device for those previously alienated from both sport and football as cultural forms due to exclusionary masculinist practices. These twin ideas of performance for an imagined audience and the text as a ‘moral unit’ have commonality with #sportsball fans in the way that these posts implicitly link the idea of sports consumption to an anticipated moralising response, each user straining to convey a sense that this activity is somehow out of character for them, yet supporting women's sport, and apprehending an absence of marginalisation and exclusion, provides a motivation to engage:

When in #Perth, go watch women do the sportsball. My first #AFL game ever. #aflw @ Fremantle Oval

#MelbDerby is on at the same time as #AFLWDogsFreo I rarely go to sports ball events What are the odds?!

Who's coming to #AFLWBluesGiants with me tomorrow afternoon? @silencewedge @SpottWatkins @kemal_atlay SOMEBODY WATCH SPORTSBALL WITH ME

Breaking with tradition and wandering down to the first #aflw match. Sports ball!

I’ve never been to an @AFL game before in my life, but I’m at the #aflw game and it's VERY FUCKING EXCITING @aflwomens

In their study of Twilight fans, Sheffield and Merlo found that some fans would ‘negotiate positions within and between fandom and anti-fandom, rhetorically distancing themselves from the more extreme behaviours exhibited by members of both’ (Sheffield and Merlo, 2010: 210). #Sportsball fans are also involved in a rhetorical negotiation of identity, made possible by the presence of a women's sport league, which allows them to ironically distance themselves from received notions of what sports fandom means, to a particular audience, and troubling traditional sport fan identities (Symons, 2022). Thus, building on research that shows women actively negotiate their structural and symbolic marginalisation as sport fans (Sveinson and Hoeber, 2016) these findings suggest that it is the AFLW's feminist significance as a professional women's league in the country's dominant sporting code that is creating the necessary conditions for these negotiations with identity.

‘Fluid’ intertextual fandoms

Another key aspect of theorising the #sportsball fan is engaging with the concept of intertextual fluidity between sport and other types of cultural fandoms. Hills (2014, 2019) has argued against the academic tendency to reify fans into ‘rigid communities and object-based categories’, in order to better conceptualise how fans and their identities are able to not only split themselves between multiple texts, but also move ‘through and between different fandoms over time’, potentially as ‘a continuation of previous commitments to popular culture and “narratives of self” … [where] knowledges, practices and discourses of fandom can be extended intertextually towards new fan objects’ (Hills, 2014: 23). Drawing on Sandvoss’ (2005) conception of fandom as an extension of self, Hills offers an interpretation of becoming-a-fan-ness not as a ‘life-changing, pivotal moment of self-transformation’ (Hills, 2014: 10), but as an established method of interacting with pop culture, extending towards another object or text within that continuum. In terms of the #sportsball fan idiom however, this idea is approached from a position of anti-fandom, rather than any sort of positively charged intertextual kinship, given the established disjuncture (both academically and subculturally) between sports and pop cultural fandoms (Pope, 2014; Schimmel et al., 2007). We suggest that Hills’ more orthodox conception of the transfer of fan affect to related cultural products is arguably different in the case of #sportsball fans of women's sport, as the performance of ironic detachment in regards to their new object – inherent in the term ‘sportsball’ itself – encapsulates a seemingly jarring break from the idea of an established intertextual sequence of fandoms (Hills, 2014: 16):

As a nerd I’m used to enjoying things live in the company of maybe a dozen people. Loving something with thousands is amazing! #AFLW

Just having a little cry at the sport. Regular snark and nerdy enthusiasm will resume shortly. #AFLWGF

racking my brain to think if I have ever voluntarily attended sport before in my life but I’m loving it so far…

I still don’t have a clue about the rules of AFL, and someone needs to give me a team to cheer for, but I’m watching AFLW again [Uncaptured reply to same post from original user: I’m only going to say this once (today): #AFLW themed f/f upper-YA romance. I want it. Someone write it for me.]

The object here – sport, and more specifically women's football – is both novel and ‘prefigured and pretextually consciously mediated’ (Hills, 2014: 17) by overcoming a deep dislike of masculinist sport cultures in active support of a fledgling women's competition. In the same way, described by Egan (2011) in the prehistory of her encounter with the horror movie The Evil Dead, this involves overcoming a deep fear of the film in order to watch it, having always been aware of and ‘secretly intrigued by’ it within the topography of the video store (Egan, 2011: 6–7). For #sportsball fans, there are no obvious intertextual ‘access points’ (Hills, 2014: 17), aside from the affective charge of the AFLW's socio-cultural significance, and an intuition of the same feelings of community and inclusion experienced by returning fans previously alienated by masculinist ‘dickhead culture’ (Symons, 2022).

As a point of comparison, some posts expressed an orthodox idea of anti-fandom:

Why does AFLW terrify me? Because it may mean that the football and football gossip component of what passes as news reporting will double.

Me: The first ever #AFLW match! Historic! Inspiring! Also me: Time to do absolutely anything other than watch football

Glad we have #AFLW now so I can ignore it just as hard as the blokes’ one. I like my complete disinterest in sport to be equal opportunity

However others of the #sportsball variety clearly showed a lack of pre-textual affinity:

Actually watching sports :O second match of brand new #AFLW (AFL Women) COME ON MELBOURNE

Even I’m over the moon about the women's AFL and I’m one of those wankers who doesn’t watch sport #AFLW #AFLWBluesPies

I never thought I could be so excited about football, but my team is winning! I have a team! The atmosphere is electric! #AFLW

Again, the affective terms (and symbols) used in these posts – ‘excited’, ‘over the moon’ and ‘inspiring’ – a gesture towards the felt significance of the league in terms of the intersection between gender and Australian rules football's cultural preeminence (Alomes, 2019), but from a position of anti or pre-fandom (‘I’m one of those wankers who doesn’t watch sport’), as opposed to a post-alienated return (Symons, 2022). However, these posts also contain a separate affective theme: that of surprise (‘I never thought…’ ‘Even I’m…’). Hills builds from work on the idea of ‘conversion’ in emergent music fandoms to argue that, rather than representing a kind of religious or ideological ‘capture’ of the subject, the process of nascent fandom might best be viewed through the prism of object-relations psychoanalysis, in particular Christopher Bollas’ (1992) writing on the power of the transformational object: one which meets its subject at just the right aleatory moment to create a powerful aesthetic charge, or ‘a punctuating “caesura” in the ongoing grammar of self-identity’ (Hills, 2014: 27). The notion of aleatory surprise, as opposed to active or conscious desire, is key here – what Bollas describes as ‘the inspiring arrival of the unselected’ to create an ‘uncanny wedding’ of personal idiom and object (Bollas, 1992 in Hills, 2014: 13–14) – and this notion of surprise object attachment is a feature of a number of posts grouped under the sportsball rubric:

Who knew I would love @aflwomens footy??? Loved it! @freodockers #AFLW #foreverfreo

Didnt realise I’d be so excited (and actually be a little emotional) about the start of @aflwomens! So good to see huge crowd #AFLWBluesPies

Bollas’ work provides a way of looking at fandom's capacity to ‘affectively and psychically emerge, unexpectedly and without desire's ministrations’ (Hills, 2014: 15). However, what seemingly is not captured in either of these notions of emergent fandom and its transformative objects is a pre-existing anti-fandom of a whole genre or cultural paradigm, which is a key characteristic of #sportsball. This element of aleatory surprise (and disorientation) is explicitly linguistically performed or inferred in #sportsball posts in relation to the AFLW, football, and often sport generally:

Weirdly, I’m so excited by the start of the @aflwomens league tonight. (Couldn’t care less about the men's league though!!) Go #Carlton!

Have never been interested in the sport before but I’m looking up when I can see an #AFLW match and I’m excited

I don’t watch sport on tv and I don’t watch channel 7 but right right now I’m doing both. ??#AFLWGF

Great seeing the @BulldogsW giving it their all in #AFLWDogsFreo. 28 years and I’d never watched a single game – now two in two days!

This game is so emotional and I don’t even know which team I’m going for #AFLW

Cyclical fandom

Hills’ (2005) conception of fandom as potentially cyclical and iterative is also useful for understanding the workings of affect and ironic detachment in the #sportsball anti-fan transitional state. Hills theorises the concept of cyclical fandom as a type of fan experience that combines ‘a self-reported level of affective “intensity” and activity with cyclical shifts away from discarded fan objects and toward newly compelling objects … open to multiple revision and rewriting without prior fan objects necessarily being viewed as embarrassing, inauthentic, or deficient’ (Hills, 2005: 804). Hills arrives at this idea of cyclical as opposed to linear fandom as a way of considering the question of temporality, or how fans might move from object to object, rather than necessarily define their fandom through a singular object or fan culture. In terms of the subject's ability to inhabit multiple networked publics on X, it seems less a movement between fan objects than a process of navigating the performance of identity to multiple fans cultures simultaneously via the use of X platform affordances such as hashtags (Highfield et al., 2013).

Hills builds theoretically on notions of the discursively constituted ‘narratable self’ and culturally constructed ‘distinctive individuality’, or the assertion of the subject's ‘nonreducibility to subcultural affiliations or other axes of cultural identity’ (Hills, 2005: 804), in fan accounts of their media attachments. In this conception of fandom as potentially cyclical and iterative, having the ability to move between fan objects sits on par with narratives of becoming-a-fan in terms of the affective charge that is described in accounts of the ‘buzz’ derived from alighting on new objects to affectively invest in, as opposed to remaining anchored to familiar texts or genres:

I’m sorry everyone, from next year i’m gonna be a feetball supporter, since the #aflw kicks off. first time for everything!

I just cried watching the AFLW Grand Final. I don’t know who I am anymore. What a game! That was spectacular! #AFLWGF Uncaptured reply confirmed new fan: ‘I love reading the comments on @aflwomens and trying not to cry out of pure frustration. I love the AFLW, I never had any interest in sport until it kicked off last year’. [March 2 2018]

Things I never in my life thought I would do – live stream a football game on my phone while at the shops – that's @aflwomens for you

Tonight I go to my second ever AFL game to support the start of #AFLW! I don’t know the rules … but how hard can it be for a game designer?

This idea of pushing back against being typecast or having one's narratable self-constrained from moving across cultural borders by current or previous subcultural ties would appear to be key to theorising #sportsball fans, particularly in the context of X and its sea of curated selves, pieced together from digital signs and signifiers, likes and reposts. The performed identity confusion (‘I don’t know who I am anymore…’, ‘Anyone who knows me…’ and ‘Things I never in my life thought I would do’) and the protective, precautionary performance of established identity (‘How hard can it be for a game designer?’ and ‘Regular snark and nerdy enthusiasm will resume shortly’) are both key aspects of this anti-fan #sportsball identity, functioning together as a kind of semantic ‘life jacket’ for nascent fans of the AFLW attempting to negotiate the space between anti-fandom and fandom, and positioning the online self for multiple audiences.

In Hills’ conception, the cyclical fan seeks to avoid a loss of individuality, whether by becoming engaged in any singular, ‘hardcore’ fandom, or being submerged in the group identification typical of popular practices like following mainstream (men's) sport (Crawford, 2004). In the case of #sportsball fans, there is a similar process occurring in terms of the construction of self-identity: a similar ‘valorized openness’ to discovering new, aleatory objects is present, as is the construction of ‘a self-identity that is neither closed off by prior fan commitment nor by a prior social commitment to “following fashion”’ (Hills, 2005: 813). Yet what is different in this instance is that #sportsball fans are attempting to reconstruct their self-identity by engaging with an object realm (football) which they never felt was ‘for them’ and which they have actively rejected previously:

Anyone who knows me will be aware that I give literally zero about AFL (or sport in general). This however, is an exception. #aflwomens

Never liked Footy. First time ever I care! FINALLY A WOMEN'S GRAND FINAL! YOU ALL ROCK! #AFLWGF #proud #aussie

This is all so new to me, I can’t even spell ‘professional’ footy team correctly. #aflw #aflwgf https://t.co/z2N4uw9gRv [Uncaptured reply to original post: @**** Still shocked. I’ve decided to miss a trip to a museum. Will see my first profession footy game with @lionsaflw & @Adelaide_FC instead. #AFLW]

Been tracking the @aflwomens in my appointment diary, like it's my job. Never cared about footy before this

Should be reading #Habermas but watching @aflwomens #AFLWFreoPies instead

Again, some of these posts express an affective engagement with the AFLW that is clearly linked to gender, with language around states of uniqueness and exceptionalism pointing to the new league's historical significance for women's sport, and by extension Australian cultural life. However cyclical fandom is also, Hills argues, partly a strategy of self-protection against the self being totally consumed by any one type of fandom or object relation. Building on this observation, #sportsball fans can be seen as engaging in a similar type of self-protection, but fundamentally differently in that they are concerned with protecting a particular anti-sport online identity from contamination with the taint of ‘sportsness’, and all that might entail. As a women's competition challenging sport's masculine hegemony, for many anti-fans, the AFLW symbolically represents a ‘safe’ space to essay alternative forms of fandom unreliant on the masculinist behaviours that sustain gender inequality and women's marginalisation. #Sportsball fans of AFLW resist the identity constraints of these dominant practices, leaning instead into the affective intensities generated by the formation of a women's league as a bridge to an object – sport fandom – once seen as alienating.

Conclusion

This article has identified and investigated a particular expression of anti-fan sentiment – #sportsball fandom – detectable within an X hashtag dataset relating to the AFLW competition's inaugural 2017 season. Anti-fandom remains an under-studied phenomenon across both sport and media cultures (Click, 2019), with little attention having been paid to potential linkages between cultural and sporting anti-fandoms, these fields having largely been sequestered from each other in the literature (Schimmel et al., 2007). The professionalisation of women's sport leagues in the era of participatory digital media provides an important context to understand how anti-fandom might function as a bridging device to engagement for those previously alienated from sport and football as perceived masculinist, exclusionary spaces.

We have drawn from Hill's concepts of the ante-fan, intertextual fluidity and cyclical fandom, to argue for a reconsideration of types of anti-fandom in mediated sport publics. In its current formulation, anti-fan sport expression derives from established bonds to a sport/team/player (Duvall, 2020; McCulloch, 2019; Senkbeil, 2016), therefore forecloses a more expansive consideration of anti-fan sentiment rooted in antipathy towards masculinist sport cultures and/or football itself. Related to this, we locate #sportsball fandom within the identity-curating affordances of X, and the reflexive self-monitoring that accompanies being part of that platform's ever-present, imagined digital community, its multiple publics, and its individually-curated digital selves. Extending the existing research into online sport fan practices, which focuses on fans’ mobilisation of X's affordances to secure existing sport fan identities and attachments (Smith and Smith, 2012), women's use of social media to contest masculinist norms of sport fan behaviour (Symons, 2022) and examinations of digitally mediated anti-fan sentiment (Gray, 2019), we propose ironic detachment as a mechanism that enables media and pop cultural fans to establish or transition to a sports fan identity without prior reference to, or affinity with, sports culture. The subset of posts analysed in this study demonstrates that ironic distancing and expressions of surprise at a sudden affective attachment to football serve as a bridging device for traversing different textualities, for protecting the curated online self, and for managing expectations within pre-existing online communities. These findings have implications for understanding the qualitatively different ways that fans may experience sport in the era of participatory digital media, as well as emergent forms of sports fan community being generated by women's sport leagues and specific digital media practices.

In concluding this paper, there are limitations which should be recognised. Firstly, this study's focus was on one season of the AFLW competition, and the single social media platform of X. The fact that it was the competition's first season, which took place amidst heightened media coverage and an explosion in social media activity, meant that it is possible there were many more negative or polarising posts captured in this dataset than there may have been in subsequent seasons. We also note the limitations of hashtag studies as a research model (Bruns and Stieglitz, 2014) due to conversational spillage around discussion of particular subjects and events as communities are never completely united around particular hashtags or keywords. Undoubtedly, a great deal of AFLW-related X material during the 2017 season was not captured during the data collection for this project, simply because these posts either were not using any hashtags (official or otherwise) or were using other informal ones. In addition, users who begin a conversational thread using a particular hashtag are capable of moving between topics and keywords, subsequently putting these conversational publics out of reach of the researcher (Bruns, 2023). Some users may also be unaware of the hashtag, or actively choosing not to use it, as is often the case with official promotional hashtags for sporting events (Vann, 2014) and thus there is scope to further examine different sets of terms and phrases associated with AFLW X in future studies.