Fans Create Fans

Norwegian fans brought a coordinated “Viking Row”

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The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being defined by more than the matches. During the tournament’s opening week, Japanese supporters stayed behind to clean the stands after their match against the Netherlands. Tens of thousands of Scottish supporters transformed parts of Boston and Providence into temporary extensions of the Tartan Army. Norwegian fans brought a coordinated “Viking Row” into stadiums, public spaces, and viral videos. A fan-led Qatari supporters’ group expanded its traveling contingent by inviting students, expatriates, tourists, and members of local Arab communities to join its organized section.¹

These activities sit largely outside the traditional match production. FIFA organizes the tournament, national teams compete, broadcasters distribute the games, and sponsors support the event. Yet supporters create much of the culture that surrounds it. They produce the songs, marches, rituals, clothing, humor, generosity, collective movement, and local interaction that turn a scheduled match into a larger social experience.

This episode examines whether that culture can help create new fans. The research does not support the absolute claim that every passionate supporter creates another lifelong supporter. Fandom is more complicated than that. A viral celebration can generate attention without creating loyalty, and intense fan behavior can be welcoming or exclusionary. However, the evidence does support a more useful conclusion: visible, welcoming, and participatory fan culture can help move people from casual awareness toward deeper involvement by creating social proof, shared emotion, identity, and a sense of belonging.

Sports-consumer research describes fandom as a progression rather than a switch. A person may first become aware of a team, develop an attraction to it, form a personal attachment, and eventually develop lasting allegiance. Fan culture can play a role throughout that process. A song, march, cleanup tradition, public celebration, or supporter video can attract attention. Joining the activity can create a relationship. Participating repeatedly with the community can help turn that relationship into part of a person’s identity.²

This gives media an important role. Fan culture can only influence the people who can see, hear, or participate in it. Traditional sports broadcasting occasionally shows the crowd, but it is designed primarily around the competition on the field. Social media has widened the lens by allowing supporter-created moments to travel independently from the match. Spatial media, including volumetric video, creates an opportunity to go further by treating the culture around the game as part of the experience rather than as background.

At Skyrim.ai, this idea is relevant to how we think about Stadium OS. A real-time spatial sports platform can create new views of the action, but it can also provide a foundation for new ways to experience the people, traditions, and communities that give the action meaning. The next generation of sports media should capture more than what happened during the game. It should also capture and connect what the game caused people to do together.

The Event Is Larger Than the Match

Sports organizations produce competition. They establish rules, create schedules, operate leagues, sell tickets, distribute media rights, and place teams and athletes on the field. All of those functions are essential, but they do not fully explain why people become emotionally attached to sports.

The match provides the uncertainty, achievement, conflict, and drama. Fans turn those ingredients into culture. They create traditions that can last longer than a player’s career, travel farther than a team’s home market, and communicate meaning even when a newcomer does not understand every rule or know every player.

A casual observer may not initially care about a team’s formation, statistical history, or place in the standings. That same observer may still be drawn toward a supporter march, an anthem sung by thousands of people, a creative costume, a coordinated celebration, or an act of generosity. The culture gives the observer an accessible way to understand what the team means to other people.

That distinction matters because fandom is frequently treated as a product of the competition alone. Teams are expected to attract fans by winning, signing well-known athletes, producing highlights, and maintaining visibility. Those things matter, but they are only part of the system. The community around a team can become its own reason to watch, attend, share, travel, and return.

The opportunity for sports organizations is not to manufacture supporter culture. Forced traditions rarely carry the authenticity of rituals developed and sustained by fans. The opportunity is to recognize that supporters are co-creators of the sports experience and to provide the access, infrastructure, media tools, and distribution that allow their culture to grow.

Fandom Is Developed, Not Switched On

One of the most useful frameworks for understanding fan development is the Psychological Continuum Model introduced by Daniel Funk and Jeffrey James. The model describes four stages in a person’s psychological relationship with a sport, team, or event: awareness, attraction, attachment, and allegiance.²

At the awareness stage, a person knows that a team or sport exists but has not yet developed a meaningful preference. Awareness may come from family, friends, school, media, a major event, or an encounter with a visible supporter community. A viral video of Japanese fans cleaning a stadium or Scottish supporters marching through Boston can create awareness even when the viewer knows little about either national team.

Attraction begins when awareness becomes a positive preference. The observer may enjoy the humor, values, music, energy, aesthetics, personalities, or social atmosphere associated with the team. The attraction may begin with the community rather than the competitive performance. Someone can like the Tartan Army before understanding the Scotland team, or admire Japanese supporter culture before following Japan’s World Cup results.

Attachment develops when the team and its community acquire personal or symbolic meaning. The individual may join a supporters’ group, attend a watch party, learn the songs, wear the colors, travel to a match, contribute to a charitable effort, or form friendships through the community. The relationship has moved beyond appreciation and has begun to become part of the person’s identity.

Allegiance is the most durable stage. The individual continues supporting the team through poor performances, changing players, disappointing seasons, and long periods between major events. This level of connection takes time. It cannot be proven by one viral moment or a temporary increase in attention during a World Cup.

This framework gives us a more precise way to understand the phrase “fans create fans.” Supporter culture can create awareness and attraction quickly. It can help create attachment when it provides repeated opportunities to participate. Allegiance develops only when that relationship is sustained.

Why Fan Passion Spreads

The attraction of fan culture is not only visual. Shared activities can produce measurable social and emotional effects. Researchers use terms such as collective effervescence, collective joy, and physiological synchrony to describe the feeling of unity that can occur when people participate in a meaningful activity together.

Research summarized by the Associated Press found that physiological responses can synchronize during exciting in-person events. The heart rates of fans attending the same sporting event can begin to align, while active participation through cheering, singing, applauding, moving, or performing the wave appears to strengthen the shared experience. The same synthesis reported that fans attending in person showed higher endorphin levels associated with social bonding than people watching the event remotely.³

Related experimental research has found synchronized arousal between performers and socially connected spectators during a fire-walking ritual. Another study involving nearly 300 participants found that synchronized movement and physical exertion independently increased reported social bonding, with a particularly strong effect when people moved and exerted themselves together.⁴

These findings help explain why a coordinated fan ritual can feel more powerful than its individual components. A chant may be simple. A clap may require no special knowledge. Rowing in unison may have no direct effect on the match. Yet performing those actions together makes membership in the group visible and physical. The participant does not merely watch the community; the participant helps create it.

Shared identity can also shape behavior beyond the stadium. In a field experiment involving Manchester United supporters, researchers found that fans were more likely to help a person who appeared to be injured when that person wore a Manchester United shirt. When the researchers encouraged participants to think of themselves more broadly as football supporters, the boundary of assistance widened and supporters became more willing to help someone wearing a rival team’s shirt.⁵

The important lesson is not that every fan group automatically becomes generous or inclusive. It is that the boundaries of identity can be expanded. A person may begin outside a national or team community but still be invited into a broader identity as a football supporter, World Cup participant, host-city resident, or member of a shared celebration.

For casual fans, that invitation can be more important than expertise. Belonging can precede knowledge. The person can join the song before knowing every player, attend the watch party before understanding every tactical decision, and enjoy the community before deciding whether the team will become a lasting part of their identity.

The World Cup Is Showing the Process in Real Time

The opening week of the 2026 World Cup provides several examples of how supporter culture can travel beyond the people who originated it. These examples are observational rather than controlled studies. They do not prove that a specific number of lifelong supporters were created. What they do show is how fan behavior can attract attention, cross community boundaries, and give outsiders a reason to participate.

Japan: Values Become Fan Culture

Following Japan’s 2–2 draw against the Netherlands on June 14, Japanese supporters remained inside Dallas Stadium and collected rubbish from the stands using large blue bags they had brought with them. The practice has appeared at multiple World Cups and first attracted broad international attention during Japan’s World Cup debut in 1998.⁶

The cleanup is not simply an event promotion. The Associated Press traced it to social and educational norms in Japan, where children commonly share responsibility for cleaning classrooms and are taught not to inconvenience others. International media attention has reinforced the behavior and helped transform it into a visible expression of Japanese identity and national pride.⁶

The most revealing moment in 2026 came when NFL quarterback and Fox Sports correspondent Jameis Winston joined the supporters. He did not merely describe their activity to the broadcast audience. He picked up a blue bag and participated.⁷

That does not prove Winston became a permanent supporter of the Japanese national team. It demonstrates something more immediate and relevant to this episode: a supporter-created ritual crossed the boundary of the original group and gave an outsider a clear, low-barrier way to join.

The fans became the content. The values expressed through the cleanup became the story. Media carried that story beyond the stadium, creating positive associations with the supporters, the team, and the country among people who may not have watched the entire match.

Japan’s example also shows that influential fan culture does not always need to be loud. Supporter identity can be communicated through behavior. Respect, responsibility, hospitality, humor, creativity, and generosity can be as culturally powerful as a chant.

Scotland: Passion Becomes Support Infrastructure

Scotland’s Tartan Army offers a different model. Tens of thousands of Scottish supporters arrived in the Boston region for the country’s first World Cup appearance since 1998. Following Scotland’s opening victory over Haiti, thousands marched through Boston behind more than a dozen bagpipers before attending a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Reuters reported that the supporters’ singing and energy became part of the baseball experience for local fans as well as the visiting Scots.⁸

Their impact extended beyond visibility. Boston businesses experienced extraordinary demand, and Mayor Michelle Wu praised the supporters for their warmth, their engagement with residents, and their support of local businesses. Her comments reflected an important fan-growth mechanism: local people were not only observing the Scots; they were developing a positive relationship with them.⁹

The deeper story was happening in Providence, Rhode Island, where fan-led organizers created a more affordable base for thousands of traveling supporters. The group negotiated hotel discounts, coordinated transportation using American school buses, worked with local businesses and public agencies, organized events, and raised more than $26,000 for local causes.¹⁰

This is more than a large group wearing kilts. It is a supportive network that reduced the cost and difficulty of participation. It helped existing fans travel, gave them places to gather, connected them with a host community, and created opportunities for residents to encounter Scottish culture without attending the match.

The Tartan Army therefore served several functions at once. It was a visible expression of national identity, a travel network, a social community, a charitable platform, an economic force, and an invitation to local residents. The network made the experience larger than the ticketed event.

This is where passionate fandom can widen the entrance into a sport. A Boston resident does not need to begin by studying Scotland’s roster or its qualifying history. That person can begin by hearing the bagpipes, joining a march, meeting supporters, visiting a participating business, or watching the next Scotland match because the community has given the team a human connection.

Norway: A Ritual Becomes Shareable Media

Norwegian supporters created another form of entry through the synchronized “Viking Row.” Fans sit or crouch in rows, move as though rowing together, clap rhythmically, chant, and eventually rise. During the World Cup, videos showed Norwegian supporters performing the ritual in and around Boston, including while moving up an escalator.¹¹

The ritual works particularly well as media because it is visual, repeatable, and understandable without translation. A viewer does not need to know Norway’s history, tactics, or squad. The movement itself communicates unity, energy, humor, and cultural identity.

Norway’s opening match also demonstrated the scale of synchronized fan reaction far beyond the host city. After Erling Haaland scored twice in Norway’s victory over Iraq, the NORSAR seismology institute registered clear ground vibrations in Bergen that coincided with his goals. The institute attributed the signals to the combined movement and cheering of supporters watching in Norway.¹²

The seismic readings do not measure fan conversion, and the Viking Row does not prove long-term loyalty. Together, however, they illustrate the collective dimension of fandom. Thousands of people reacting at once can create a physical signal in one country and a media signal around the world.

The Viking Row turns that collective energy into a recognizable piece of supporter culture. It gives broadcasters and social platforms a visual story, gives existing supporters a ritual to share, and gives newcomers something they can immediately understand and potentially imitate.

Qatar: A Fan Community Deliberately Expands

The Qatari supporters’ group Mudaraj Al Anabi provides the clearest example of fan-originated culture becoming organized infrastructure. The group was created after young supporters concluded that Qatar’s fans had appeared scattered and insufficiently visible while the country hosted the 2022 World Cup. They launched the initiative before the 2023 Asian Cup to coordinate chants, encourage attendance, and build a stronger culture around the national team.¹³

According to the group’s media officer, approximately 1,000 supporters traveled from Qatar for the 2026 World Cup, but their section grew to roughly 4,000 as students, expatriates, tourists, and members of Arab communities joined them. The Qatar Football Association supported the effort with tickets, travel assistance, and other logistics, while the fans maintained the identity, chants, and culture of the group.¹³

This example provides a useful model for understanding how fandom can grow. The culture began with supporters. An institution then helped reduce practical barriers. The visible group gave people outside the original traveling contingent a place to join.

It also shows why calling fan activity either “organic” or “official” can create a false choice. The group can remain authentic and fan-led while receiving institutional support that allows it to scale.

Fan-Originated, Institutionally Facilitated, and Media-Amplified

The World Cup examples reveal a common pattern. The most compelling supporter cultures often begin with fans, but they rarely grow entirely on their own.

The Scottish organizers required hotels, buses, venues, public agencies, local businesses, and host-city cooperation. Mudaraj Al Anabi worked with the Qatar Football Association on tickets, flights, and logistics. Japanese supporters created and sustained their cleanup tradition, but broadcasters and social platforms transformed it into an international story. Norwegian supporters performed the Viking Row, while other fans, broadcasters, journalists, and social accounts helped it travel.

The most accurate description is that these cultures are fan-originated, institutionally facilitated, and media-amplified.

That distinction should shape how leagues and teams approach supporter culture. The objective should not be to script every chant or manufacture a tradition from a marketing campaign. It should be to identify the communities already creating value and help remove the barriers that limit participation.

That support can include transportation, gathering spaces, supporter-section access, multilingual information, affordable events, local partnerships, community liaisons, media distribution, and tools that help fan groups organize. The institution provides the infrastructure, while the supporters retain ownership of the culture.

This balance matters because authenticity is part of the attraction. Fans can usually tell when a ritual exists because a marketing department instructed them to perform it. The strongest fan traditions carry meaning because people choose to repeat them and because they connect the present event to a shared history.

Attention Is Not Allegiance

Major events, winning teams, visible supporter groups, and viral moments can attract casual fans. They do not necessarily retain them.

Research examining online NBA communities found that successful teams attracted more bandwagon users. Those users participated in the new communities and often received positive responses, but their language showed less attachment to the teams than that of established supporters.¹⁴

A later longitudinal study found that bandwagon behavior was temporary for most of the users examined, with many eventually returning to their original team communities.¹⁵ This is an important warning against treating social attention as permanent fan growth.

A video may generate millions of views. A celebration may lead someone to follow a team during a tournament. A successful season may create a temporary audience. None of those measures alone establishes allegiance.

Retention requires another layer of community. Newcomers need repeated opportunities to participate, recognizable people with whom to participate, shared stories, and reasons to remain connected when the exceptional moment passes. The community has to provide a next step after the viral clip, the championship run, or the World Cup.

Hammarby Women in Sweden provides a useful longer-term example. A supporter-led effort helped develop a matchday culture around the women’s team that included songs, drums, tifos, pre-match gatherings, and a “one club” philosophy connecting the men’s and women’s teams. In 2023, the club drew 17,623 spectators to the Swedish Cup final and more than 7,000 traveling supporters to the decisive away match of its league-winning season.¹⁶

The team’s success, club identity, community relationships, and fan culture all contributed to that growth. It would be inaccurate to attribute attendance to one factor alone. What the example shows is that supporter culture can become a durable part of the sports product rather than an occasional reaction to it.

The strategic difference is between creating an audience for a moment and building a community that survives beyond the moment.

The Culture Must Be Welcoming

Not every passionate fan community attracts outsiders. Passion can also become hostile, exclusionary, intimidating, or abusive. A supporter culture that treats casual fans as illegitimate, demands expertise before participation, or defines itself primarily through hostility toward others can narrow the entrance to fandom rather than widen it.

A study of NBA-related online communities found that users who regularly participated across rival fan groups used more negative and abusive language in their home communities than users without the same level of intergroup contact. The study does not mean that all interaction between rival supporters is harmful, but it demonstrates that visibility and interaction alone do not guarantee positive community outcomes.¹⁷

That is why the thesis of this episode depends on three characteristics. The fan culture must be visible so that outsiders can discover it. It must be participatory so that people can do more than observe it. Most importantly, it must be welcoming enough for newcomers to join without already possessing the history, knowledge, or status of a lifelong supporter.

Research by British Future on football clubs as social infrastructure reached a similar conclusion. Its recommendations included creating inclusive club identities, consulting local communities, developing welcoming spaces around stadiums, and pairing existing supporters with newcomers to share the matchday experience. The work argued that clubs can grow their fan bases by helping people from different backgrounds find an accessible way into the community.¹⁸

A casual fan is not a lesser fan. A newcomer asking basic questions is not weakening the culture. Those people represent the future of the fan base. The established supporter who welcomes them is doing more than being friendly; that supporter is helping the community reproduce itself.

Supporters Are Co-Creators of Sports Media

Traditional sports broadcasts are designed around the field of play. Cameras follow the ball, the athletes, the score, the coaches, and the decisive moments. Supporter reactions are usually treated as brief transitions or supporting images. The crowd is shown after a goal, before a commercial break, during an anthem, or when something visually unusual attracts the director’s attention.

That production model makes sense when the match is the only product. It becomes limiting when supporter culture is itself part of the reason people watch.

The current World Cup examples show that fans can produce some of the tournament’s most memorable content without touching the ball. The Japanese cleanup happens after the broadcast would traditionally be ending. The Scottish marches take place outside the stadium. The Viking Row can happen on an escalator. The Providence supporters’ network operates across hotels, buses, businesses, public spaces, and charitable events. Qatar’s fan section was developed through years of organization before arriving in the stadium.

Social media has already widened the production model by allowing people inside these communities to publish their own perspectives. A fan with a phone can capture a song, march, ritual, joke, or cultural exchange that the primary broadcast never sees. That moment can then reach more people than were present in the venue.

This should change how the industry thinks about fan-created media. These moments are not secondary content around the “real” event. They are part of the event’s meaning, identity, and reach.

Fans are not only consuming the sports product. They are helping write it, distribute it, interpret it, and recruit others into it.

Spatial Media Can Capture More Than the Field

Spatial media, including volumetric video, creates an opportunity to expand sports coverage from a single directed view into an explorable representation of the event. That opportunity is often discussed in terms of the action: virtual cameras, new replay angles, player perspectives, tactical analysis, and the ability to revisit a play from almost any position.

Those capabilities are important, but the same approach can be extended beyond the players. A spatial representation of a sporting event can include supporter sections, pre-match gatherings, public watch parties, tifos, marches, coordinated movement, celebrations, and post-match rituals.

A remote supporter could choose a position within the most active fan section rather than receiving only a field-level camera angle. A viewer could move from the play to the reaction it caused in different parts of the stadium. A fan-created spatial highlight could preserve the sound, movement, and scale of a coordinated celebration rather than reducing it to a short reaction shot.

The technology could also connect supporter communities across locations. A fan in Norway could experience reactions from Boston and Bergen. A Scottish supporter unable to travel could join a shared digital environment built around the Tartan Army’s songs and movement. A casual viewer could explore the cultures surrounding several teams and discover a community before choosing which match to watch.

The research on collective participation gives us an important constraint. A more realistic image of a crowd will not automatically recreate the social effects of being inside it. Physical presence, sound, movement, and active participation matter. Spatial media should therefore not be presented as a complete substitute for attending a match.³

The more useful goal is to reduce the distance between observing and participating. A spatial experience should help a remote fan feel the presence of other people, express a reaction, follow a shared ritual, and contribute to the environment rather than simply watch a 3D recording of a crowd.

This requires more than visual fidelity. It requires social design. Shared audio, visible reactions, coordinated celebrations, supporter-created viewpoints, group identity, moderation, accessibility, and persistent communities will determine whether a spatial experience feels social or solitary.

What This Means for Stadium OS

Stadium OS is being built as a real-time spatial sports broadcast platform. It captures the game in real-time 3D, enables virtual cameras and replays, and provides access to live 2D camera feeds and real-time 3D spatial data through a developer platform.¹⁹

The immediate value of those capabilities is new storytelling around the competition. Broadcasters can create camera positions that do not exist physically, revisit moments from different perspectives, and develop new analytics, alternate presentations, and custom fan experiences.

The larger opportunity is that the same spatial foundation can support a broader definition of the event. Supporter culture can become part of the captured and distributed experience rather than an occasional image selected by the broadcast director.

This does not mean Stadium OS should attempt to manufacture fan passion. It means the platform can help authentic fan culture travel. It can create additional viewpoints, new forms of spatial highlights, and development tools that allow teams, broadcasters, supporter groups, and other partners to build experiences around the communities that surround the game.

Many of these applications represent future design opportunities rather than claims about currently deployed features. The important point is architectural: when a sports platform captures the event as spatial data rather than only as a sequence of fixed camera feeds, developers have more freedom to decide which parts of the experience become accessible.

The field remains central. The crowd no longer has to remain background.

A Better Model for Fan Growth

The sports industry often measures fan growth through audience size, attendance, followers, merchandise, subscriptions, and media reach. Those remain valuable measures, but they do not fully describe how a person moves from seeing a team to identifying with it.

A more complete model begins by capturing the culture that already exists. Media then amplifies that culture so people outside the original community can discover it. The community and its institutional partners create accessible invitations to participate. Supporter networks connect newcomers with people, rituals, events, and information. Repeated experiences provide the continuity needed to develop attachment and, over time, allegiance.

Under this model, the clip is not the end of the fan journey. It is the first invitation.

Sports organizations should therefore look beyond the number of people who saw a fan-created moment. They should examine whether people followed the supporter group, attended a watch party, returned for another match, joined a community, bought a ticket, participated in a local event, or remained engaged after the tournament ended.

The current World Cup examples demonstrate awareness, attraction, and early forms of attachment. They cannot yet demonstrate lasting allegiance. That will require longitudinal evidence after the tournament: continued viewing, repeat event participation, sustained membership in supporter communities, future travel, and identification with the team when the global spotlight has moved elsewhere.

This is also where media platforms can contribute. They can provide continuity between major events, connect geographically dispersed supporters, preserve traditions, make community knowledge accessible, and create recurring opportunities to participate. A World Cup may create the spark, but the fan network keeps the relationship alive.

The Strategic Argument

Leagues and teams frequently think of fans as the final audience for the sports product. The research and current World Cup examples suggest a larger role. Fans are also part of the distribution system.

They carry the team into streets, restaurants, schools, families, public spaces, online communities, and cities far from the team’s home. They translate the sport into songs, symbols, humor, values, and relationships that may be more accessible to a newcomer than the competition itself.

They are also part of the acquisition system. A supporter who invites a friend to a match, explains a tradition, shares a video, organizes transportation, welcomes a newcomer, or creates a watch party is performing work that no paid media campaign can fully reproduce.

Finally, fans are part of the retention system. When a team loses, a tournament ends, or media attention moves elsewhere, the community gives people a reason to remain. The relationships and rituals survive the result.

This does not reduce the importance of athletes, teams, leagues, broadcasters, or major events. It explains how their impact can travel farther. The competition creates the shared object of attention. The supporters turn that attention into culture. Media determines how widely the culture can be seen. Community determines whether the relationship lasts.

Conclusion

The evidence does not support a simplistic claim that passionate fans automatically create permanent fans. It supports a more meaningful conclusion.

Visible fan culture creates awareness. Welcoming fan culture creates an invitation. Participatory fan culture gives people a way to belong. Repeated community experiences can turn that belonging into attachment and, eventually, allegiance.

The 2026 World Cup is demonstrating this process in public. Japanese supporters are communicating values through a post-match ritual. Scottish supporters are turning fandom into community infrastructure. Norwegian supporters are transforming synchronized movement into globally shareable media. Qatari supporters are showing how a fan-led culture can expand when an institution helps remove practical barriers.

These examples are not peripheral to the tournament. They are part of what makes the tournament culturally powerful.

For the sports media industry, the opportunity is to recognize fans as more than spectators. They are creators, ambassadors, organizers, storytellers, and often the most credible recruiters a sport has.

For spatial media, the opportunity is to capture and connect more of that human experience. The next generation of sports platforms should show not only where the ball went, but where the emotion traveled, how communities reacted, and what people created together.

The game creates the moment. Fans create the invitation.

Footnotes

1. Current World Cup examples include Japanese supporters cleaning the stands after Japan–Netherlands, Scotland’s Tartan Army marching through Boston, Norwegian supporters performing the Viking Row, and the growth of Qatar’s fan-led Mudaraj Al Anabi supporters’ group. (People.com) 

2. Daniel C. Funk and Jeffrey D. James, “The Psychological Continuum Model: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding an Individual’s Psychological Connection to Sport,” Sport Management Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2001, pp. 119–150. The model describes awareness, attraction, attachment, and allegiance as progressively stronger forms of connection with a sport, team, or event. (Wikipedia) 

3. Albert Stumm, “Move. Cheer. Dance. Do the Wave. How to Tap Into the Collective Joy of ‘We Mode’,” Associated Press, December 2025. The article summarizes research into collective effervescence, physiological synchrony, endorphins, active participation, and shared emotional experience. (AP News) 

4. Dimitris Xygalatas et al., “Synchronized Arousal Between Performers and Related Spectators in a Fire-Walking Ritual,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; and Bronwyn Tarr et al., “Synchrony and Exertion During Dance Independently Raise Pain Threshold and Encourage Social Bonding,” Biology Letters, 2015. 

5. Mark Levine, Amy Prosser, David Evans, and Stephen Reicher, “Identity and Emergency Intervention: How Social Group Membership and Inclusiveness of Group Boundaries Shape Helping Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2005. 

6. Stephen Wade, “Why You May See Japanese Soccer Fans Cleaning Up the Stadium After World Cup Games,” Associated Press, April 28, 2026. The article traces the practice to Japan’s 1998 World Cup appearance and discusses its cultural and educational roots. (AP News) 

7. Natasha Dye, “Jameis Winston Helps Japanese Fans Pick Up Trash from Stadium Seats After World Cup Game,” People, June 15, 2026. (People.com) 

8. Reuters, “Scotland’s Tartan Army Switches Sports for a Day in Boston,” June 15, 2026. The article includes four photographs of the march and links to Reuters licensing. (Reuters) 

9. Reuters, “Unquenchable Scottish Thirst for World Cup Beer Pushes Boston Bars to the Limit,” June 17, 2026. The article documents the economic impact and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s response to the visiting supporters. (Reuters) 

10. Katie Notopoulos, “The World Cup Is Turning This American City Into a Temporary Scottish Outpost,” Business Insider, June 2026. The article covers the Providence organizers’ hotel, transportation, event, and charitable efforts. (Business Insider) 

11. “Norway Fans Perform the Famous Viking Row,” The Times of India, June 18, 2026. Additional video documentation of supporters performing the row on an escalator appeared in Bavarian Football Works’ World Cup fan roundup. These are used as visual documentation rather than quantitative evidence. (The Times of India) 

12. Reuters, “Haaland World Cup Goals Shook Norway’s Foundations, Says Seismology Institute,” June 17, 2026. (Reuters) 

13. Reuters, “Qatar Fan Group Born from World Cup Frustration Finds Its Voice,” June 18, 2026. The participation estimates are attributed by Reuters to the group’s media officer. (Reuters) 

14. Yichen Wang, Jason Shuo Zhang, Xu Han, and Qin Lv, “Jump on the Bandwagon? Characterizing Bandwagon Phenomenon in Online NBA Fan Communities,” accepted to SocInfo 2020. The researchers found that stronger teams attracted more bandwagon users and that those users’ language indicated less attachment. (arXiv) 

15. Yichen Wang and Qin Lv, “Jump off the Bandwagon? Characterizing Bandwagon Fans’ Future Loyalty in Online NBA Fan Communities,” accepted to IEEE SocialCom 2023. The longitudinal analysis found that bandwagoning was temporary for most of the users studied. (arXiv) 

16. Sophie Downey, “The Day Hammarby Women Took 7,000 Fans to an Away Game—and Won the League,” The Guardian, November 15, 2023. (The Guardian) 

17. Jason Shuo Zhang, Chenhao Tan, and Qin Lv, “Intergroup Contact in the Wild: Characterizing Language Differences Between Intergroup and Single-Group Members in NBA-Related Discussion Forums,” ACM CSCW, 2019. (arXiv) 

18. Paul MacInnes, “UK Government Urged to Harness Football Clubs for ‘Social Connection’,” The Guardian, May 14, 2024, summarizing British Future’s The Power of Football Clubs to Connect Diverse Communities. (The Guardian) 

19. Skyrim.ai, “Stadium OS.” The page describes the platform’s real-time 3D capture, virtual cameras, replay capabilities, developer platform, and access to live 2D and spatial data. (Skyrim.AI)