No Longer Worlds Apart? British Influences and Norwegian Football

Abstract

British influences have dominated the development of football in Norway in a process characterised more by admiration than antagonism. Today millions of Norwegians support one team in England and a local team in Norway. A person supporting a local team can relate the club to their own autobiographical universe as an authentically experienced reality. A Norwegian supporter of an English team is necessarily a ‘long-distance supporter’. This affects the ‘tribal’ aspects of the game (Mangan 1996), i.e. the structuring of rivalries and enemies associated with football. Our analysis considers to what extent we can relate the development of ways of playing and ways of support in Norway to hybridisation (Archetti 1998a). With the progress Norway has made in football competition in the 1990s and the beginnings of militant forms of fandom, there is a sense of ‘tradition in the making’ in Norway. Current public discourses on these changes tend to take a normative platform related to a more historical attempt at the ‘de-rivalisation’ of the game. Analysed through historical and anthropological perspectives, this chapter aims to illustrate how the influences from and contacts with the British have fuelled the construction of football playing and supporting in Norway. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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