Political football: Making football fandom a symbol of political dissent

Abstract

This study aims to examine the role and effects of politicization of football fandom in the Gezi Movement, which was the biggest social upheaval of Turkish political history in the 2000s. This movement brought a lot of people from different backgrounds together, including dissident football fan groups of Turkey. These football fan groups united under the same political objectives and they attracted many unorganized people to join them in the Gezi Movement. This thesis scrutinizes how has it become possible for these unorganized individuals to unite under the same umbrella against a political power and how football fandom became a channel of politicization in the Gezi Movement. In a sense, football fandom was not the igniter of this movement, yet it channelled the political dissent of unorganized people who were already in the Gezi Movement. For this purpose, I mainly benefited from the literature approaching the sport from below, which takes sports or specifically football as the people’s game and as a weapon of football fans in a political sense. Through giving a detailed historical background, through drawing examples from all over the world and through analyzing twelve semi-structured interviews, this study depicts a broad picture of common experiences and collective interpretations of unorganized people engaging with football fan groups in the Gezi Movement.