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For a significant part of the twentieth century, Hong Kong was seen on the forefront of football development in Asia, and it was just in recent decades that the so-called “beautiful game” has been relegated to a less prominent spot in the cultural fabric of citizens’ everyday life. However, amidst the current socio-political conjuncture of the Special Administrative Region, which has been slowly unfolding over the last decade, football has again become a meaningful platform to imagine, articulate, and perform a local(ist) identity. Social scientists, cultural studies scholars and anthropologists have long examined the multi-faceted dimensions of football fan cultures around the world. The subject of study, however, has often been limited to European or American perspectives, with incomplete accounts of Asian experiences in this domain, calling for more interventions in the form of culturally informed research. First, this article aims to offer a qualitative overview of Hong Kong’s football fan culture, using a thick description of a supporters’ group that rearticulated and materialized subcultural practices of the popular local forum LIHKG – an online community that has later emerged as a central catalyst of recent protest movements. Second, the research attempts to provide an alternative understanding of the politicization of football fandom, by emphasizing the multiple fan identities being negotiated between consumerism, activism, and localism. By critically investigating common fan categorizations that have been put forward in the context of football’s hyper-commodification, the research questions the suitability of Eurocentric models on residual or emerging sporting cultures in non-European contexts. The paper further argues that the re-appropriation of football as a site of imagination and performance of identities reaffirms the idea of sport as a resource for cultural citizenship, as well as a decoding device for the ever-changing politicization of everyday life.

Rearticulating football fans in Hong Kong: between activism, localism, and consumerism