The Collective Action of Disabled Supporters in English Football: Networks, Opportunities, and Constraints

This presentation draws on empirical data collected as part of a wider qualitative research project with disabled football supporters of clubs in the English Football League (EFL) and National League (NL) to explore their collective action through their involvement in club-specific fan groups known as Disabled Supporter Associations (DSAs). By investigating how disabled people collectively resist, challenge, and confront the problems they encounter in and through English football fandom, this presentation offers new insights into the structures and purposes of these supporter groups, how disabled supporters engage and perform collective action through DSAs, and what they perceive to be the major challenges to their activism. In doing so, the presentation advances discussions of football fan activism by examining the actions of a largely overlooked group of supporters whose experiences have been neglected in the sociological study of football, while also contributing to wider disability activism research focused on the spaces and places of disabled people’s collective action in contemporary society.