Abstract

Supporting a football team is a voluntary and collective practice, sometimes taken to extreme levels, but primarily contingent and situated. This article applies the methodological framework of the semiotics of passions and combines it with an ethnosemiotics approach focused on observing stadium spaces and people who experience it. The aim is to clarify the deeply somatic nature of supporting and, by this, to investigate the tension between the disciplinary devices that shape today’s sportsmanship and the need to ensure the emotional expression, both individual and collective, of football match spectators as a necessary element to ensure the economic, cultural, and media interest