Homophobia has been rampant during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, but despite the lack of rainbow armbands, the players themselves expressing their emotions publicly is allowing queer and female fans to enter the space of sports fandom.
“The moment i scored, i look at him. His smile, his sparkly blue eyes, his arms asking me to hug him. I jump into his tattooed muscled arms and i remember everything he told me before the game. I look deep into his ocean eyes, and hug him even more,” wrote a Twitter user named Barbiana under a PopCrave post showing French players Kylian Mbappe and Olivier Giroud embracing after a 3-1 win against Poland to advance to the World Cup quarterfinals.
PopCrave, which has 1.1 million Twitter followers, has an audience consisting mostly of pop culture enthusiasts and self proclaimed ‘stans’ – superfans of the people PopCrave reports on. The users on stan Twitter are overwhelmingly queer and female – two demographics which are commonly left out of sports fandom.
“We promised each other not to do anything, to keep it a secret. But it was to intense. This tension between us, the cheers, our coach congratulating us, i was not hearing any of this. Only his warm breaths and his “Congrats, Kylian.”
I could not resist it, it was too hard,” Barbiana continued.
“they said fuck fragile masculinity , from now on we're slay queens,” said another user under a different post depicting the same celebration, using terms commonly attributed to the LGBTQ+ community, ballroom culture, and stan lingo.
At the same time, a video of Korean players Lee Kang-in and Cho Kyu-seong kissing after a 2-1 win over Portugal circulated on Twitter.
“Name of BL pls,” one Twitter user asked under the post, referring to Boys Love K-dramas, series which focus on gay relationships.
“FIFA World Cup 2022,” replied another user.
By tapping into players’ emotions and interactions outside of gameplay, these posts are welcoming in people who are used to traditional means of fandom, such as TV shows, boy bands, and other forms of content creation – most of whom, at least in the Twittersphere, happen to be young women and queer people. Sports fandom is different from not just every other real-person fandom but every other fandom at large due to the fact that it’s male dominated. Traditional fandom has always been pioneered by women and queer people – from the Star Trek fans in the 1960s to the One Direction fans in the 2010s.
On the Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction database hosting works dating back to 2009, there is a library of sports real person fanfiction over 40,000 works deep. The most popular sports written about are men’s hockey, with over 13,000 works, and men’s football (including American football), with over 19,000. The earliest fanfictions in this database date back to the site’s inception, while new ones are posted every day. During the 2022 World Cup, where fans have been kicked out of games for wearing rainbow armbands and team captains threatened with sanctions for supporting LGBTQ+ rights, hundreds of works in the men’s football category have been posted to the Archive. Although not all of them focus on queer romance between players, the majority of them do, and while this is not representative of all fanfiction, ‘ships,’ short for relationships, are a huge aspect of what draws people to reading and writing works about their favorite characters and celebrities.
When sports fandom celebrates its athletes being open about their emotions, it opens the door for new fans to enter the fandom space and express themselves in ways more in line with the traditional female and queer-led fandom they’re used to. In all, it’s beneficial for everyone – from the athletes, typically portrayed as stoic and strong, showing their softer sides, to commonly left out fan demographics being able to express themselves. Really, in every sport, fandom grows the game. It’s about time for sports fans to welcome the female and queer fans who make traditional fandom what it is.
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