The Local Belongings, National Identities and Global Flows in Turkish Football: The Case of Eskişehirspor Fans

Industrial football, which has been neo-liberalized and increasingly articulated to consumption culture, seems to be a field on which almost all features of globalisation appears. Historically, the increasing cultural complexity of football as a substantial agent of local/national identity reflects the globalisation more. Inevitable consequences of the globalisation from global football trade and the fan culture to the economical organisations of the football clubs are also seen in football extraordinarily.

Does the globalization process weaken the position of football as a fundamental source of local and national belongings or does the globalization in football also make localization possible concurrently with homogenization at global level? To what extent do the earlier boundaries between local, national and global become vague as football increasingly becomes globalized? In the light of these questions, this paper aims to discuss how and in which way do the global and local dynamics transform the world of meaning of supporters along with industrialization and globalization of football. Based on a sociological fieldwork conducted on Eskişehirspor [Turkish football club located in the middle Anatolian city of Eskişehir] fans (1,117 questionnaires were used and 40 in-depth interviews were conducted in the research) this paper argues that the dialectic between the globalization of football, local belongings and nationalism preserves its importance in the case of Eskişehirspor, although it seems to be complicated and contradictory. [A high degree of sentimental attachment to the team, a strong feeling of a sense of a loyalty not only to the city’s identity but also to Turkish nationalism have always been regarded as the one of the distinctiveness of the Eskişehirspor fans in Turkey.] The paper maintains that the simultaneous coexistence of the globalizing football culture and the nationalism(s) will continue to widespread in the Turkish case as seen around the globe.