Football Fanaticism: What Reality in the Moroccan Context? A Literature Review

Abstract

This article falls within the field of sport marketing and draws on psychological and sociological approaches to better understand the phenomenon of football fanaticism. Today, this phenomenon constitutes a significant social reality, particularly through the relationships between supporters and their football clubs. While several studies have examined football fanaticism in North American and European contexts, few have jointly mobilised Social Identity Theory and Team Identification Theory to analyse this phenomenon in the Moroccan context, where the existing literature remains focused on the security and protest dimensions of football supporter culture. This research therefore aims to fill this theoretical gap by proposing an interpretation of Moroccan football fanaticism grounded in these two explanatory frameworks.Through a literature review adopting a critical approach to the analysis and synthesis of previous studies, this research examines the concepts of fan and fandom, the evolution of football fanaticism, and the main supporter profiles identified in the sport literature. The sources included in the review were selected from the Google Scholar, Cairn, HAL, and ScienceDirect databases using keywords such as fan, fandom, football fanaticism, football supporter culture, ultras, social identity, and team identification, without any time restriction. The selection was based on the thematic relevance of the studies to the research question. The review also sheds light on the principal theories explaining football fanaticism and explores the realities of this phenomenon in the Moroccan context, as well as the research perspectives that emerge from it.The objective is to highlight the multidimensional nature of football fanaticism and to provide a better understanding of the dynamics characterising the relationship between supporter communities and their football clubs. This research also identifies avenues for future studies on the construction of club identity and the values conveyed through supporter practices, thereby encouraging further empirical research on these dimensions, which remain underexplored in the Moroccan context.

JEL Classification : M31, L83, D91

Paper type: Theoretical Research