Co-authored with Pratik Nyaupane.
In US professional soccer, organized fan groups practice a subculture that sustains the lives of marginalized people within the group and provides a platform for resistant politics. In order to materially and ideologically control their spaces and brands from potential disruption, soccer leagues and teams engage with these groups through what we call cultural extraction. The purpose of cultural extraction is to at once depoliticize subculture and capitalize on it by claiming some elements as belonging to the institution and strictly policing others. In this practice, the soccer companies incorporate organized fandom into inclusionary branding in which subcultural practices are reduced to identity-based spectacle in support of the broader cause of consumer-based team support, rather than distinct communities with collective politics. We show how cultural extraction limits American soccer leagues’ efforts to become more tolerant and diverse places by evaluating the public contestations over fan-generated subculture in Portland and Los Angeles..
Book Chapter in Social Control and Disorder in Football: Responses, Regulation, Rupture edited by Mark Turner and Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen for Routledge
Email me directly for a copy of the chapter
Chris W. Henderson 