Football supporters’ rights in Europe: a transformative moment or forever ‘a lost cause’?

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Ludvigsen, J (2025) Football supporters’ rights in Europe: a transformative moment or forever ‘a lost cause’? International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure. pp. 1-19. ISSN 2520-8683

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Abstract

Over several decades, scholars have demonstrated that, across contested spaces of leisure, the policing of football supporters raises questions speaking to their human rights and civil liberties, including the right to leisure. As this article argues, the recent, separate but consistent issues at high-profile European football events (2021-24) are emblematic of this. Yet, these events have been followed by institutional discursive emphases upon the importance of supporter rights and engagement for football’s future. Hence, this article contributes with an understanding of the wider macro-structures that have enabled or loom in the background of this regularized indifference towards supporters’ rights in Europe. It therefore focuses on a broader context, characterized by overlapping public (dis)order fields, discursive practices, and interlinked barriers to transformation within football’s political economy. As contended, these contribute towards an indifference toward football supporters’ rights and leisure spaces and worlds. This reveals how long-term political, bureaucratic and commercial struggles, thus, contribute towards a contradictive position on the (un)importance of human rights and civil liberties within an important leisure context.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: 35 Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services; 3504 Commercial Services; 4807 Public Law; 44 Human Society; 48 Law and Legal Studies; 4408 Political Science; 4410 Sociology
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Divisions: Humanities and Social Science
Publisher: Springer
Date of acceptance: 14 July 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access: 6 August 2025
Date Deposited: 06 Aug 2025 13:07
Last Modified: 06 Aug 2025 13:15
DOI or ID number: 10.1007/s41978-025-00188-2
URI: https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26905
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