We're a Tourist Club Now: The Ethics of Sports Fan Tourism

Sports fan tourism is a booming industry that is actively cultivated both by sports clubs and by national governments. However, sports fan tourism has recently been subject to significant criticism, particularly by fans of English Premier League football clubs. In this article, we will examine the ethical basis of these criticisms. We will argue that the criticisms of tourist fans can be developed into a well-grounded ethical critique of the practice, at least when it is sufficiently widespread. However, the claim that individual tourists are blameworthy is less plausible. We will begin by outlining our understanding of sports fandom as a form of love to investigate whether this understanding of fandom can support a criticism of tourist fandom as an illegitimate form of fandom. We will argue against this as a general criticism of tourist fans, as tourists can be genuine fans, just like local fans. We will then explore an alternative way of criticising the rise of tourist fandom, which is the effect on the atmosphere in sports stadiums. We will argue that fan stadium practices constitute a form of affective niche construction and that the increasing numbers of tourists in stadiums threaten to damage these affective niches and so unfairly deprive fans of affective niches that are central to their identities. We will finish by exploring the implications of this argument for how we should ethically evaluate sports fan tourists, arguing that the problem is a structural one and so appropriate responses should also be structural.