Home versus away: legitimizing and challenging home claims and social exclusion through football in Turkey

Abstract

Claiming spaces as homes indexes hierarchies. I focus on the home/away (deplasman) binary in football (soccer) where through the case of Turkey, I show how affective football fandom layers the normative charge of home versus deplasman. Home attachments and away antagonisms are formed and solidified as fans connect emotionally to stadiums and to neighbourhoods. This carries over to the national scale when (footballing) home is conceptualized as homeland. The emotionality and power-laden implications of the home/away binary leads to (the acceptance of) social exclusion but this acceptance is challenged through the very spaces of football. I refer to migrant experiences in Istanbul and to the cases of stereotypically nationalist Trabzonspor and Kurdish Amedspor to offer a novel way to conceptualize exclusion vis-a-vis the emotionality of home/away. This article is based on over a decade of ethnographic research on football in Turkey including men's professional football, women's football, and migrant footballers.