Sports RPF
| RPF Fandom | |
|---|---|
| Name(s): | Sports RPF, sports fandom |
| Scope/Focus: | Sports |
| Date(s): | 1990s onwards? |
| See also: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
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Sports RPF encompasses any number of sports in its fandoms and with that comes hundreds of athletes one can use as characters. Sports RPF has been around since at least the 1990s, with Figure Skating RPF being one early type. It increased in popularity & visibility during the 2000s (for example, appearing regularly in the Yuletide exchange from 2007), and further in the early 2010s.
Some sizeable sports RPF fandoms include:
- Baseball RPF
- Basketball RPF
- F1 RPF
- Figure Skating RPF
- Hockey RPF
- NASCAR RPF (auto racing)
- National Football League RPF (American football)
- Olympics RPF
- Football (Soccer) RPF
- Relay Ball RPF
- Tennis RPF
- Professional Wrestling RPF
- ...
Each subset fandom comes with its own set of 'rules' and style.
Fandom
Women's Sports Popularity on TikTok
During the 2022 UEFA Women’s Euros and, later, the Women's World Cup, accounts focused on women's sports and fannish discussions around those sports began to first appear with regularity and then gained increasing popularity, moving beyond football and into other sports. Events, achievements, celebrations, and controversies – both within the game and outside of it – were commented on as much as the games themselves and some TikTokers, such as Jackie J, built their platforms on celebrating and discussing women's sports. Other fannish videos like reels of footage of players like Lucy Bronze, Marta, Mary Earps, and Zećira Mušović set to various backing tracks become popular during the World Cup.
The attention women's sports received on TikTok did not go unnoticed by sports' media or the teams or players themselves, and it provided a means of promoting women's sports to an audience without some of the barriers faced via more traditional means. For example, English team Burnley FC Women's Team streamed all of their videos live on TikTok, providing free viewing of their games to fans and gaining a significant amount of fans in the process[1].
Tropes
- Winner's Room - the winner — either a player or the entire team — is given the opportunity to have sex with a player of their choice from the losing team following a game.
- ^ How the TikTok effect is taking women’s sport fandom to the next level - Sports Pro Media. July 12, 2023. (Accessed November 6, 2023)