Transnational Passions: A Statistical Study of Norwegian Football Supporters

Abstract

This essay is based on the central findings from a survey conducted among members of Norwegian supporter clubs for English football clubs in 2000. The Norwegian case of long distance support of English teams is probably the biggest and best organized of the transnational love affairs. Norwegian football fans’ anglophile liaisons form part of a personal football geography and history in which supporters have developed passionate relationships to football teams across national boundaries, mediated initially via impulses from television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Apart from an empirical presentation of survey data this article aims to explain changes in football support and its concomitant socio‐cultural orientations from a Norwegian perspective during the past 30 years. Of particular significance is the exponential increase in the consumption of English football in Norway, evident most especially in the ever‐escalating sales of football tourism to England. The essay also throws light on the recent massive increase in live TV coverage of English football matches on TV screens in Norway.

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