The Pub as a Virtual Football Fandom Venue: An Alternative to ‘Being there’?

The sport spectator experience is one that is widely held to involve “live” presence at a sporting event, and that the raison detre of sports spectating is to witness events live and in person. This paper builds on a previous ethnography of football spectating in the pub to develop a theoretical basis for the suggestion that sports spectating is as much about shared experience as it is about live presence. In doing so, it utilises perspectives from tourism literature relating to the nature of proximity and to the importance of being able to re‐live and re‐tell experiences. The paper concludes that whilst the pub as a spectator venue can provide a proximity to the sport spectating experience, the longevity of the experience in terms of its value as an experience to be re‐told is significantly shorter than being able to say that one has “been there” at a live event.