#Sportsball anti-fandom as identity performance on X: The case of Australian Football League Women's (AFLW)

This article identifies a novel form of sports anti-fan identity present amongst X (formerly Twitter) followers of The Australian Football League Women's (AFLW) competition – #sportsball fans – whose nascent attachment to women's Australian Rules football is publicly performed as an ironically detached becoming-a-fan-ness, often rooted in a self-identified, pre-existing aversion to both sport and sports fandom. The term #sportsball serves as a shorthand for these types of new fan identities, for whom ironic distancing and expressions of surprise at their sudden affective attachment to football serve as a bridging device for traversing different textualities, for protecting the curated online self, and for managing expectations within pre-existing online communities. Identified via a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) analysis of 71,332 posts drawn from official match day hashtags for the AFLW's inaugural 2017 season, #sportsball fans represent a significant contribution to our understanding of mediated fan practices and online identity construction.