Platformed Football Fandom: Affective Storytelling Practices on TikTok

TikTok has rapidly become a central platform for sport consumption among younger audiences, yet scholarly understanding of football fandom on TikTok remains limited. Affective publics, which are networked collectives that assemble around shared emotions, rather than formal structures provide a productive theoretical lens for understanding how fan creators construct and sustain collective identity through emotionally charged content. A fan creator is operationalized here as a noninstitutional individual who produces football commentary, analysis, or reaction content with demonstrable intent to build audience engagement through regular content production. Addressing a significant gap in the literature, this study examines how football fan creators construct affective publics through platform-specific storytelling practices. Using a content analysis of 50 TikTok videos posted during the 2025 European football season, the study systematically codes multimodal and affective features, including emotional hooks such as dramatic or curiosity-driven opening statements designed to prevent viewer scrolling. Examples of such hooks are narration strategies, editing pace, audio use, and on-screen text. Intercoder reliability was high (Cohen’s κ = 0.81–0.92). Findings reveal a striking convergence of affective conventions, with near-universal use of dramatic hooks (94%) and universal emotional expression (100%) and narration (100%). Contrary to assumptions about TikTok’s rapid editing pace, many videos adopt slow, talk-to-camera formats, indicating genre-specific temporal norms particular to football commentary. The study extends the Affective Publics framework by documenting how affective expression has converged into a consistent set of platform literacies within football fan creator communities on TikTok.