Standing with FC St. Pauli: an examination of a reflexive autoethnographic account of a woman sports fan’s experience of German men’s professional football

Purpose The professional German football team Fuβball Club Sankt Pauli of Hamburg (FC St. Pauli) are renowned for their inclusive celebration of community alongside fervent fan-driven social and political activism. The club attract local, national and international interest and relatively frequent academic examination, yet little scrutiny is afforded the woman fan’s experience or the gendered practices that often complicate the position of women as spectators. The purpose of this paper is to offer insight through examination of a woman sports fan’s experience of the FC St. Pauli stadium tour. Design/methodology/approach To build on innovative approaches to exploring fandom through mixed method and ethnographical investigations (see Hoeber and Kerwin, 2013; McParland, 2012; Richards, 2015), a reflexive form of autoethnography (Delamont, 2009; Ellis et al., 2010; Holman Jones, 2016) is employed here to frame and to contribute place-based research on women as sports fans (Pope, 2012; Schallhorn et al., 2024; Symons, 2024), within the context of professional football. The paper focuses on a woman sports fan’s experience of the FC St. Pauli fan space, including an attempt to attend a match, her participation in a club tour, and her encounter with club fans. Findings This approach explores a woman fan’s experience in visiting FC St. Pauli and enables nuanced consideration of the multi-layered and complex experiences of women as fans in predominantly male professional football club fan spaces, in this case, within the German context. Its place-based (Allison, 2023; Parry and Richards, 2019) and reflexive autoethnographical account (Bakhsh, 2022) highlights some of the ways one German club challenges the treatment of diverse fans. The employment of this method of approach offers new understanding of the gendered experience of participation in sports fandom. Originality/value Where it affords analysis of prior knowledge of the famous club’s community and their activities, this reflexive autoethnographic study increases knowledge of the woman sport fan’s experience of professional German football club, FC St. Pauli.