Forbidden Fruits? Institutional Rules, Agency, and Structure in European Football

This paper investigates the contested regulation of alcohol, standing and pyrotechnics in European men's football, utilizing Giddens’ structuration theory. Specifically, we analyze how the regulation of these three practices—representing key expressions of football supporter culture inside the stadia—reveals the making of a spatio-historically significant structure that is constantly “on-the-move” and co-produced by processes of institutional control, fan agency and acts of micro-resistance. The structuring power of European football's governing body (Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)), therefore, constrains and unleashes new dimensions of supporters’ agency that, again, reveal how attempts to regulate cultural practices and spaces are characterized by new sites of (non)compliance, resistance and (non)negotiated practices. The conceptual article extends our sociological knowledge on structure and agency within spaces of consumption, culture and sport.