Home Team Away calls for a rethinking of sport fandom that is divorced from an attachment to location. As the first comprehensive account of the European football fandom in China, this book explores how the Chinese middle-class is formed through the cross-cultural, digital consumption of the Big-Five leagues. Yuan Gong captures the embodied experiences of fans and fan clubs, fan discourses and activities unfolding on digital platforms on Weibo, Weixin, and Hupu, combining fieldwork in Shanghai and virtual ethnography. Delving into participants’ various forms of fan engagement as readers, activists, producers, consumers, and digital citizens, Gong argues that Chinese fans’ decisions to follow and engage with European football result from their material conditions, ideological contestation, and technology appropriation as a new demographic bloc arising during China’s transition to authoritarian digital capitalism. By engaging with their home team away, the Chinese middle-class perform as citizens with a global vision despite the resurgence of the nationalist and anti-Western sentiments.

Yuan Gong is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University. 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The “Big Five” and Middle-Class Taste
Chapter 2: Making Sense of Football Texts 
Chapter 3: Watching Games on Screens
Chapter 4: (Un)forming Fan Communities
Chapter 5: Discussing Fandom Online
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index