Introduction

Being a sports fan has become an expensive passion. Much of our attention in this book has focused on the history, political economy and textual analysis of media sport. However, central to both the media and sporting industries is, of course, the fan and/or reader/viewer, the people who consume sport, either in its relatively raw form or in its increasingly mediated form. Part of what we want to do in this chapter is to examine the consumption of mediated sport and attempt to develop an empirically grounded theory of audiences for televised sport. In the latter part of the book we have also been interested in the relationship between sport, media and identity formation. To this end it is also worth saying something about how fandom relates to this process and to re-emphasize the extent to which the media are not the sole agents shaping the process of identity formation among fans and other collectivities.