Soccer discourse and the daily life of adolescents in a small Israeli town

This essay intends to demonstrate different uses of soccer fans’ discourse in daily life. The fans in question are boys who live in a run-down city and take part in ‘Kidum’, a ‘last opportunity’ project in high school. Those boys use soccer fandom practices in order to create their own symbolically free arena. Their actions are loaded with ‘counter discourse’ against blocked channels of mobility and are contrived in order to express and manage contradictions promoted by the image of their living place. In order to deeply understand the meanings of this discourse in daily life, the essay uses several theoretical frameworks, including theories and concepts about soccer fandom as well as the sociology of everyday and youth culture research, taken especially from Marxist British culture studies. The empirical research is composed of participant observation and semiotic analysis of films made by those adolescents. These facilitate descriptions of the functional, contextual and contradictional nature of soccer fandom discourse outside the soccer field. The analysis offered in the essay is expected to generate a critical discussion of the value of daily use of soccer discourse as a site for protest and negotiation. In other words, it poses the question: what social value is conveyed in the protest found in that kind of soccer discourse?