[Football] Fans vs Fanbase

[McTavish]

Why do people increasingly refer to a club's "fanbase" rather that its "fans"?

According to Google the trend started in 1993, so during the first year of the Premier League. Is it part of corporate jargon - analogous to "customer base" or is it something different? I can't think of any instance when "fanbase" can't simply be substituted by "fans".

So what gives?

 

[ac gull]

legacy fans = don't spend much

new fans = those to be monetised

lots of parts to a fanbase these days

 

[Goldstone1976]

Fan base = that part of a fan’s anatomy below the knees.

Fan = the whole fan.

Maybe.

 

[Simster]

I always felt a fan base includes a more casual element from the area, rather than simply those who go regularly or semi regularly.

 

[Green Cross Code Man]

Fans means those going to matches to support. Fanbase includes worldwide armchair supporters. Maybe.

 

[Mustafa II]

Definitely a link between the rise of 'fanbase' and the rise of football, particularly European leagues, going global.

A VAST majority of our fanbase has never been to the UK, let alone Brighton, which is quite an incredible thought.

 

[A1X]

I’m stunned nobody searched Google for “fanbase” in 1800

 

[trueblue]

Fanbase is a broader term I think. For instance, Leeds have a vast worldwide fanbase (weirdly, considering how long it is since they were good). Which is why TV companies have always been so keen to so how their games live.

 

[ManOfSussex]

Fans means those going to matches to support. Fanbase includes worldwide armchair supporters. Maybe.

That's the way I read it. Fans/supporters are those who physically go to games and pay money to do so, as well as investing time and effort and therefore 'support' the club. Fanbase is as you say.

 

[Guinness Boy]

Fans means those going to matches to support. Fanbase includes worldwide armchair supporters. Maybe.

I always felt a fan base includes a more casual element from the area, rather than simply those who go regularly or semi regularly.

This and this. Fanbase includes the entitled internet weirdos from Outer Mongolia who celebrate transfers

 

[Sorrel]

The fans who go to the match are part of the product, too - part of the appeal to the wider fanbase.

The TV companies want the emotional narrative and the fans are part of that; that's why they want (almost every club) to have pitch-side away fans, so the players can run up to them: makes better TV.

There were a lot of tourist fans at the game yesterday, I thought, "supporting" Man City. I'd never seen so many people wearing half-and-half scarves. A little bit of me did wonder if that was the way that we were going, towards a tourist destination with a football match thrown-in. But we are a lot further away from it than Man City are.

 

[Albion my Albion]

I found one...........................................

Fans

Fan Base

 

[JetsetJimbo]

I’m stunned nobody searched Google for “fanbase” in 1800

Can't tell if this is a joke or not, so for the avoidance of doubt, that's not what the graph shows. There's an explanation of Google Ngrams here:

Google Books Ngram Viewer

Google Books Ngram Viewer

books.google.com

But the short version is that the search term is checked against a corpus of books

 

[Han Solo]

The best way to find out things like these are to check out newspaper archives, and from that we can see the term starting getting more than once-in-a-decade use back in 1990. Nearly all of the times the word was used back then revolved around music and most of the articles containing the word appears to be from a handful of journalists.

In 1997, there seems (I'm not dedicating more than 30 minutes on this...) to be a breakthrough in the sports pages. First it appears to be in articles about the new NFL season, suggesting that the word might have been mentioned in NFL pre-season press content (or web page) and then parrotted by the journalists covering it.
Soon after that, the phrase is used in a bunch of different football context. Interestingly perhaps more in Scotland and NI/Ireland than England.

From there on its just downhill and hard to gather much from the English newspapers.

More helpful in finding out when a more vast use of the word came about is to check the Swedish newspaper archive.

"Fanbase" isn't a word that really works in Swedish, so when it starts making Swedish newspapers its a clear sign that there's some hype and increasing usage of the word in general.

The first time "fanbase" is used in a Swedish newspaper is in 1999. Bit like in the UK, it is first only used by music people. In the first dozen years the use is increasing but sparse.

However, in 2013 there's a BOOM: and this, I believe, lead us to the crime scene, the reason why this somewhat redundant word is getting more and more traction: a massive increase in smartphone usage and equally big increase in social media. Swenglish phrases like "connecta med sin fanbase" suddenly becomes more common and may well be almost a word-for-word quote from some large social media platforms: "Connect with your fanbase!" etc.

Since Americanisation of language is certainly not endemic to Sweden, the background of its growing popularity may well be the same in the UK.

(that the word is orginally from the US - I'm not gonna be arsed looking that up - is something I assume as a "fanbase" sounds like a target demographic of customers rather than a group of people supporting a football team).