'Here We Go, Here We Go'. Football Fans’ World Cup Travelogues

This paper focuses on ten travelogues written by football fans during four FIFA World Cup tournaments (1994–2006), and explores how attendance at the World Cup Finals is represented in popular literary form. Outlining the history of travel writing and the lack of attention given to it by historians, this paper situates the book-format football travelogue in its literary and historic context. Relevant to the historian, ethnographer, literary scholar and sociologist, these football travelogues provide an opportunity to scrutinize the fans’ perspective of the world's largest single sporting event. The paper reviews the written styles and content and identifies five common themes. A historic and literary analysis is undertaken to reveal both commonalities and divergence, and ways of seeing that typically resulted in the presentation of cultural stereotypes. It is concluded that travelogues, written by fans, offer opportunities to both construct and extend a literary discourse on football fandom.