Since the 1880s, fans of fandom — or super fans — have emerged to cheer the game in ways that distinguish them from mere fans. They’ve created clubs, asked for T-shirts, defined rituals, and built the sport of super-fandom.
If super-fandom has a precise origin story, it probably begins in England, where working-class men, factory workers and northern industrial clubs dominated the game. By the 1920s, Argentina’s first fan groups, called barra bravas, had begun forming at clubs like San Lorenzo and would harden into the violent, organized barra bravas on certain occasions. In Brazil, the torcidas organizadas – which traced back to the 1940s and brought drums, choreography and carnival-like spectacle – electrified a group of Korčulan sailors. After witnessing it at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, and just months later, they went home and founded Torcida Split – now the oldest organized supporter group in Europe. Italy’s ultras claimed the curvas in the late 1960s, with Sampdoria’s Ultras Tito Cucchiaroni being the biggest (and possibly the first) group to actually call itself “ultras,” in 1969. France’s organized fan culture started in the late 1970s, but the country’s first true ultras group, PSG’s Boulogne Boys, didn’t form until 1985.
For more than a century, soccer fans have kept reappearing and multiplying across continents. Humans are tribal animals, marking territory through sound, bonding by shared enemies. The basic instinct of being loud or even barbaric is what drives fans to keep showing up, generation after generation. It’s also what tips a fraction of them into hooliganism, the darker side of fandom that comes with destructive riots, hate speech, fires, and sometimes even racial abuse, but that is an entire sect of its own. Strip away the chants, the scarves, the rivalries and the ritual of being a fan, and it’s a biological act of the human machinery –– dressed up in club colors.
In the sport’s early years, shirts strictly belonged to players. That changed in 1973 when Leeds United became the first club to sell a replica kit to supporters. The commercialization wave that followed in the 1970s and 1980s turned fan identity into a business asset, and by the 1990s, the replica shirt had become a match-day totem of soccer’s global grip and camaraderie.
Over the years, fans – whether at the stadiums or at home – have built rituals, collected lucky charms, and developed private ceremonies to will their team to victory, experiencing each match with an almost quasi-religious devotion. Delpeche’s living room tells you everything. “Away games, I watch at home with my three lucky rugs,” he said. “The living room is all flagged up. Lucky mascots everywhere.”
