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Photo by AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Sveinson, herself an ardent Green Bay Packers fan, was driven to start her research after an altercation in 2014, during a trip to Seattle to watch an NFL regular season game between the Packers and the Seattle Seahawks. She saw a man in a Packers jersey on the street. Another man approached the Packers fan and shouted “Fuck the Packers!”

It made her uneasy. “I don’t want to be yelled at during the game. I don’t want to be heckled,” Sveinson said. If the whole point of sports spectatorship is leisure, than why causing such anxiety?

While barbs between opposing fans are to be expected, the bulk of her research focuses on the dysfunctional relationships between fans of the same team. “I was just trying to maybe critique the notion that sport fandom is a solely unifying experience,” she said.

Throughout the 2017 season, she compiled 850,000 tweets all mentioning @BlueJays, #BlueJays or the slogan #LetsRise. From there, she narrowed her data pool to 8,500 tweets that also mentioned fan, fans or fandom. The point was to watch how fans, just by talking to one and other, can reinforce certain cultural values. The exercise is known as critical discourse analysis, a method of looking at how every language contributes to societal views. What she saw – through the unenviable task of reading and rereading thousands of tweets from fans of an underperforming team in 2017 – was a culture as prone to exclusion as inclusion.

Photo by AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Reading a sampling of the tweets Sveinson found, the idea of a team bringing people together in any meaningful way does start to look like a fantasy. “Sometimes it felt very exhausting,” she said.