The mediated carnivalesque: Performance and fan culture in contemporary sport spectatorship

Live sport events are increasingly characterised by highly visible and participatory spectator cultures, including costumes, signs/placards, collective singing and choreographed crowd practices. While such forms of engagement have been documented in existing research, less attention has been paid to how carnivalesque festivity, dramaturgical self-presentation and mediated fandom operate together as an integrated cultural formation. Drawing on the case of Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) events, this article develops a Mediated Carnivalesque Model that brings together Bakhtin's theory of carnival, Goffman's dramaturgy, and scholarship on performative sport fandom and mediated spectatorship. The model conceptualises PDC darts as an illustrative and intensified example of contemporary mediated leisure in which spectators’ expressive participation is both enabled and structured through organisational scripting and broadcast visibility. It operationalises the carnivalesque through aesthetic inversion, norm suspension, collective excess and institutionally bounded transgression, and demonstrates how these dynamics function as resources for impression management, identity performance and co-production. In doing so, the framework advances understanding of fan culture by showing how commercial orchestration, attention economies and performative identity work interact within live sport settings, offering a lens for analysing spectator cultures across mediated sport environments.