Defending local culture through the global game in Southern China: Guangzhou Football Club fan culture

Chinese fans of domestic sports clubs have received scant scholarly attention. This study addresses this literature gap by exploring the fan culture associated with supporters of Guangzhou Football Club (Guangzhou FC). For local Guangzhou FC fans, collectively rooting for the team offers a way to defend their local culture as represented by the Cantonese language. Besides describing the features and evolution of Guangzhou FC fan culture as the team became a national icon after spending almost a decade in China’s second division, this paper discusses the following issues concerning football fandom: how fans maintain their local identity when the club strives for success at the expense of its local roots, the impact of globalisation on local identity, and the relationship between local and national identities. Moreover, this paper attempts to show that studying sports fan culture can offer insights into Chinese society such as state-society relations and the problems created by the country’s socio-economic transformations.