‘It was precious to me from the beginning’: material objects,long-distance fandom and home

Material objects and football fandom are intimately linked. As a repository of emotion, memorabilia holds value as a marker of identity. For many football fans, the conception of ‘home’ is integral to their identity. Despite its centrality to football fans’ construction of identity, the notion of ‘home’ has received little attention from sports scholars. Drawing on recent work in cultural geography, this paper employs concepts of home to explore the ways in which materiality holds identity for football fans. Evidence from New Zealand-based fans of European teams displays how material objects are able to collapse distance between fans and their club, acting as palimpsests for memory and narratives for significant emotional experiences. Embedded in the New Zealand home of the fan, memorabilia resides as an emotional bridge to their football home locality, stadia and supporters.