“We came for the Sluts, but stayed for the Slutsk”: FK Slutsk Worldwide Facebook page between ironic and genuine football fandom

4.1 The backstory

In order to analyze the content posted in FK Slutsk Worldwide and its theoretical implications, it is important to consider the peculiar context in which the Facebook group came to be. This context not only explains the unlikely emergence of an international fandom for an unremarkable football club in a little-known national league, but it has also been continuously reflected upon and negotiated by the group’s members, as will be shown below.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting cancellation of all major football leagues in spring 2020 presented a challenge for football fandoms around the world, which suddenly found themselves deprived of the opportunity to do the one thing central to their identity as fans: support their favorite clubs in competitive matches (Waliaula and Okong’o 2020). While many online communities dedicated to top football clubs continued to thrive, they had to adapt to the new circumstances and maintain the fans’ morale even in the absence of actual football. The temporary cancellation of football matches did not prevent the fans from supporting their favorite teams and expressing this support online, but they longed for watching and discussing real football games, especially as many of them had to spend much time at home.

This is where the Belarusian Premier League and FC Slutsk in particular came into play. At a time of lockdown, any ongoing professional sporting event is likely to attract intense media attention (Parnell et al. 2020: 5), which, in turn, stimulates the interest of supporters. This is exactly how a group of Australian supporters came across FC Slutsk, which FK Slutsk Wordwide founder Shane Robinson relates thus: “One of the boys was on a betting website and came across this Belarusian Premier League that was still going. We just chose the first team that was playing that night, which was Slutsk, and it’s kind of taken up from there” (quoted in McCormack 2020). After watching Slutsk play via an online stream, the group decided to create a Facebook group dedicated to the club. Within days, the group was receiving attention from football fans around the globe, reaching 7,000 members in under two months and landing Robinson interviews with both Australian and international media. Commenting on the group’s unexpected popularity, Robinson said: “It’s been absolutely insane. We started it as a small group to have a few laughs, a bit of a chat, find a few ways to watch the games” (quoted in McCormack 2020).

It is evident from this account that, at its inception, the group bore humorous undertones. This is also clear in the content that was being posted in the group in the early days of its existence.

4.2 Early days: the novelty stage (late March–mid-April 2020)

As the group started to get traction, its administrators took on the responsibility for providing opportunities for newcomers to engage in supporting FC Slutsk. The administrators would post links to live streams of upcoming matches, while members discussed the team’s lineups, the betting odds for each game, and shared other content, including humor. During the games, group members posted photos of themselves watching FC Slutsk playing and commented on the key moments in the games. It is difficult to estimate exactly how many of the Facebook group’s followers engaged with the football team’s performance (rather than just the humorous banter in the group), but during each match, several dozen fans would leave comments and posts related to the team’s performance on the pitch.

During the first weeks of the group’s existence, the incongruity of an international online fandom for a previously unknown local club was explicitly and implicitly present in many FK Slutsk Worldwide posts, accounting for a significant number of humorous items that were created and shared by the group members. In the absence of shared experiences and long-standing humorous tropes, most of the humor was produced in a way that would make it easily understandable to all members and would not require much contextual knowledge (cf. Adetunji 2013: 159 on the metaphorically coded teases of a long-term fandom).

A major subject of discussion in the group was the name of the club itself. While the name of the town of Slutsk (the club’s namesake) is pronounced as slootsk, its spelling resembles the English word “sluts”; and English speakers unfamiliar with Slavic languages may assume the words are pronounced similarly as well. According to some of the Facebook members’ posts, this resemblance was what initially attracted them to the group. Naturally, it also inspired a lot of humor that plays with the similarity between “sluts” and “Slutsk,” as well as the preference of the latter over the former at the times when top football leagues are not available (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Image macro based on wordplay. The image is a popular “Distracted Boyfriend” meme template that locates the image macro within the trends of online communication.^[5]

The name “Slutsk” may also evoke other associations for football lovers, namely, with Russian football coach Leonid Slutsky, formerly the head coach of the Russian national team and FC CSKA, one of the leading clubs in Russia. International FC Slutsk fans suggested that Slutsky should be involved in coaching the club and created humorous image macros playing with the similarity between his name and the name of the club. From there, the humor was picked up by different parties. On April 10, Leonid Slutsky was interviewed by YouTube vlogger KraSava (КраСава).^[6] One of the topics that they discussed was FC Slutsk and its upcoming match against a team from Vitebsk. Leonid Slutsky delivered a mock pep talk, humorously suggesting a starting line-up and giving instructions to the players as if actually coaching the team. The speech inspired several humorous image macros created by FK Slutsk Worldwide followers. One of them, for example, revolved around the fact that in his mock pep talk Slutsky did not include Artem Serdyuk (one of the most beloved FC Slutsk players among the international supporters) in the starting line-up (Figure 2). This example already hints at the trends that become more visible during the next stage, namely, the close following of FC Slutsk-related media and the need to have contextual knowledge to understand the humor of the group.

Figure 2:

Leaving Serdyuk out of the starting line-up.^[7]

Another topic that featured prominently during the first weeks of the group’s existence is the comparison and contrast between FC Slutsk and world-famous football clubs. As humor is often used in football fans discourse to negotiate the serious implications of discriminatory expressions (Rivers and Ross 2019: 5), some world-famous players would be unfavorably compared to those representing FC Slutsk (Figure 3).

Figure 3:

Comparing FC Slutsk players to world-famous players such as Lionel Messi.^[8]

Emblematically, many of the earlier examples of humor in the group referred to the unprecedented situation where famous football clubs and players had to stop playing football while FC Slutsk continued to play. Sometimes the fans would digitally manipulate the photos of top football players by replacing their faces with the faces of FC Slutsk players who play in a similar position or share a visual resemblance to them, or adding the FC Slutsk logo to the images.

While the posters themselves did not explicitly reflect on their intentions when drawing parallels between FC Slutsk and world-famous clubs, there is a number of possible interpretations of this trend, which are not mutually exclusive. One is that, by continuously invoking major football celebrities in the group discussion at a time when none of them were playing, fans sought to cushion the drastic change in the content of their football consumption and fandom amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Hyperbolizing FC Slutsk players’ ability and prominence by comparing them to the likes of Messi and Ronaldo also served as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that the fans themselves did not take the club’s newly found fame too seriously. At the same time, it is possible that discussing Slutsk players and coach on the same terms as their world-famous counterparts served to rhetorically elevate the status of the former, thereby helping legitimize the FC Slutsk fandom as such.

Reflection on the community itself was indeed pervasive in the group, with much of it humorously addressing the group’s spontaneous emergence and lack of established traditions and history — things highly valued in conventional football fandom (Parganas et al. 2015). The following ironic remark is a good example, highlighting the implicit tension between the group’s brief existence and its members’ budding sense of belonging: “As a lifelong Slutsk fan of eight days now, I can safely say this is not a fleeting love.”

Given the peculiar circumstances that gave rise to the worldwide support of FC Slutsk, the group members also discussed whether this support would continue after the end of the pandemic. While many of these discussions were serious in tone, humorous comments were also frequent. The use of humor in this context helped sidestep the sensitive question of whether the fans would continue to follow FC Slutsk’s performance after the pandemic, creating a sense of ambiguity about the future of the club’s international fandom (Figure 4).

Figure 4:

Discussion on the post-pandemic future of FC Slutsk fandom.^[9]

A smaller thematic group of humorous items that appeared in the group in this initial period refer to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which it impacted world (and Belarusian) football. Some of them refer to the Belarusian president’s (presumably humorous) suggestion that vodka and sauna can help prevent the spread of coronavirus.^[10] The incongruity of Belarusian football leagues continuing to play amid a pandemic did not escape the group members’ attention either. The fans even jokingly suggested that the pandemic had been orchestrated by the Belarusian Premier League to draw attention from football lovers across the world (Figure 5).

Figure 5:

Commenting on the Belarusian league’s continuation during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[11]

Despite the presence of COVID-19-themed posts in the group, they accounted for only a minor part of what was shared. This can seem striking, considering just how many jokes, memes and other humorous items related to the pandemic were spreading across social media in spring 2020. Yet, the group members’ reluctance to discuss the pandemic is also understandable given the fact that the group was created to compensate for the lack of football action in other leagues and to help football lovers adapt to the new reality of the world. As such, FK Slutsk Worldwide might have become a space to escape reality and suspend fears and uncertainty that the pandemic brought. Through engaging in usual fan discussions and online activities, the group members were able to shield themselves from the otherwise pervasive subject of COVID-19, and even humor rarely penetrated this shield.

As the examples above illustrate, during this initial period the content posted in the group was not just largely humorous in nature, but much of it also displayed some degree of “ironic distance” and amusement, which are associated with ironic fandoms (Bekkering 2016: 139). Yet, despite the ironic undertones of the discussion in FK Slutsk Worldwide in these early weeks, FC Slutsk club management quickly recognized the group’s potential and sought to capitalize on it. Just a few days after the creation of FK Slutsk Worldwide, the club created an official group on Facebook, with posts almost exclusively in English (in contrast to their long-standing Russian-language group on VK, aimed at local supporters). The club also regularly engaged in conversation with its newly found international fans on the FK Slutsk Worldwide fan group. While the club’s side of the conversation was mainly serious in tone, they also contributed humorous content on occasion (Figure 6).

Figure 6:

This image macro was contributed by the official FC Slutsk group.^[12]

Also noteworthy was the conversation between the international fans in the group and its Belarusian members, who, while a minority, quickly grew to be a visible presence. From the early days of the group’s existence, some of the international fans expressed interest in how the community was being received by local fans. Consider the following question, posted on April 2, 2020: “Does anyone know, are long time Slutsk fans happy about this new wave of fans from all corners of earth?” The post received two replies, both of them assuring the author of Belarusians’ positive attitude towards the initiative. One of the commenters offered a detailed response:

I am not a slučak [a person from Slutsk], but as a Belarusan, i am glad for several things.

More interest to the country.

Really good steps from the club to turn global trollying into a real worldwide community. It is not easy to accept the reality with humor, especially if your club belongs to such an oldschool management organisation as a sugar plant^[13] in Belarus. Real respect.

Try to organise global crowdfunding, as the guys are facing really bad times.^[14] It is a challenge to be discussed country-wide, as the example shows how Belarus is isolated from global pay-systems.

This post demonstrates both the author’s recognition that the international fandom for FC Slutsk originated at least in part as a joke (“global trollying”) and their belief that the club’s willingness to initiate a dialogue with its international fans could help it build a genuine international fan base and possibly overcome its financial struggles.

Overall, while not numerous, Belarusian members in FK Slutsk Worldwide were a diverse group. A few of them were long-time Slutsk supporters who contributed photos of themselves attending matches at the club’s stadium; most, however, had not supported Slutsk before. Of the latter group, many mimicked the online behavior of international Slutsk fans by creating similar humorous content, while others saw the group as an opportunity to educate its international audience about Slutsk and Belarus, linking to numerous articles and videos on Belarusian history, music, etc. One member even offered to give free lessons of the Belarusian language to the group members. Many international Slutsk fans also gradually developed an interest in Belarus: not only did they begin to explore the Belarusian market in search of a possible sponsor for the financially struggling club, but they also shared links related to Belarusian culture and asked Belarusian members for recipes of typical Belarusian dishes.

Not all conversations between international and Belarusian members were equally amicable, however. In one of the comment threads, a Belarusian supporter started teasing an international fan because of the associations his name might evoke in Belarusian. When confronted by fellow Belarusians, he explained that he began the teasing because the international fan was mocking the club due to the phonological similarity between the club’s name and the word “sluts.” Further, he accused the other Belarusian members of being subservient toward the international fans, hinting that they might be doing it in the hope of gaining a material profit. While not common, such examples point to a lingering tension between the group’s ostensible status as a fandom and its ironic roots.

4.3 Identity formation (mid-April–late May 2020)

As the fans got to know each other better, communication between them began to transform. Some of the topics outlined above persisted, but the ways they featured in the FK Slutsk Worldwide Facebook group changed. For example, most of the humorous references to COVID-19 in the FK Slutsk Worldwide group date back to late March and early April when the Belarusian Premier League’s continuation despite the continued spread of the virus was particularly striking. As the spread of the virus in Europe began to slow in May, and other leagues started reopening, the topic lost its appeal. Instead, serious discussion full of concern began when players of several other Belarusian clubs tested positively for COVID-19. Tellingly, many of the posters expressing concern over the players’ wellbeing were the same “ironic fans” who just weeks earlier had been actively creating and sharing humorous content about FC Slutsk. One may speculate that, as the threat of Slutsk players contracting the coronavirus grew increasingly real and less psychologically distant, the norm violation — to use McGraw and Warren’s theory (2010) — became less benign and thus less likely to inspire humor.

Reflections on the group’s recency and lack of established tradition likewise ceased to be a prominent thread in the discussion. So, for the most part, did ironic juxtapositions of FC Slutsk and major international football clubs. Instead, the group’s humor grew increasingly rooted in the FC Slutsk’s actual history and performances on the pitch.

A case in point is the proliferation of ironic image macros targeting the club’s rivals and competitors in the Belarusian Premier League. Most of them were explicitly derogatory toward the other clubs and depicted FC Slutsk as a vastly superior side. As is common in traditional football rivalries (Benkwitz and Molar 2012), the disparaging humor in the group targeted not only the other clubs’ players, but also their supporters. Some initial image macros in this vein were already posted in the early weeks of the group’s existence, but they were not especially numerous and tended to be highly generic, whereby the rival’s name could be replaced by any other team. Gradually, however, these image macros became more specific and reflective of individual clubs and their fans.

As is common with image macros, many of them used the same background images, thereby creating a continuity and establishing an in-group tradition. While some of these images were based on globally popular memetic images customized through the addition captions referring to FC Slutsk (on local adaptations of global memes, see Shifman 2014: 169; Shifman and Thelwall 2009), others used original images from the team’s games. One example is based on FC Slutsk’s away game at FC Isloch (resulting in FC Slutsk’s victory), where one of the home club’s supporters was spotted playing an accordion in the stadium. This inspired a number of humorous posts and discussions and for a brief period became one of the group’s memes (Figure 7).^[15]

Figure 7:

FC Isloch lost to FC Slutsk 1:2 at home.¹⁵

This shift from more generic content to content rooted in the common lore the group had developed during its short existence, indicates the emergence of a shared community identity beyond ironic amusement — a key feature in any fandom (Baym 2007). This identity was not only constructed through memes and Facebook comments, but also through community practices: football watching parties on Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms, creating a video remix of the club’s unofficial English-language anthem (itself created by one of the group’s members), and so on. As the group grew, there were also hints of smaller regional subcommunities budding, with members posting questions such as “Any Canadian fans on here?,” “There are any Slutsk fans from Burkina Faso here?,” etc. While the global pandemic was hardly a conducive setting for in-person get-togethers, some of the New York-based fans discussed plans to meet at a local bar after the end of the pandemic and watch football together.^[16]

The growing sense of FK Slutsk Worldwide coalescing as a community is also reflected upon in the humorous content targeting the group’s members themselves. Compared to the displays of self-irony in the content from the group’s early days, many of the newer posts were more personalized, featuring, e.g., a group member’s face photoshopped onto an existing image macro. Whereas previously the group’s posts might have played with the relative obscurity of both FC Slutsk and its international fandom, now they were more likely to highlight — in typically hyperbolized fashion — this fandom’s global reach (Figure 8).

Figure 8:

Highlighting the number of Slutsk supporters.¹⁶

Belarusian group members continued to communicate with the international fans; however, here, too, the dynamic had changed. Whereas in its early days, few of the Belarusians that the group attracted were actual Slutsk fans, eventually, long-time supporters of the club became a prominent voice in the community. Expressing appreciation for the club’s newly-formed international fandom, many of these local fans sought to contribute by sharing photos of the club stadium, player dressing rooms, and their supporter kits — things most international fans did not have access to. Sometimes, the appreciation for the international fandom was mixed with a tinge of disbelief as, for example, was expressed by a Belarusian group member in one a comment addressing a Kazakh FC Slutsk supporter who had created and posted numerous humorous image macros to the group: “You are a funny guy … You spend so much time on our kolkhoz^[17] Slutsk. Respect to you. Incredible times. You will, of course, remain in Belarusians’ memories for a long time.)) Thank you! [in Belarusian]^[18]” (May 26, 2020).

The communication between the fans and the club itself also reached a new level. The FC Slutsk public relations team arranged several Q&A sessions with some of the players, inviting the international supporters to submit their questions and then livestreaming the responses on Facebook. Further still, the players themselves began to communicate with their international fans directly, despite the language barrier and the time difference. Some of them also used humor in their communication with the fans. Forward Artem Serdyuk, who had become one of the most popular players among the club’s international fans, often replied to fans’ posts featuring him. When one of the fans posted a short video clip of him exercising before the game under the title “Artem doing his impression of Let’s Twist Again …,” Serdyuk replied: “dancing dancing ordered?,” referring to the international fans’ request for the club to come up with a distinct goal celebration. Indeed, in their next game, the FC Slutsk players performed a “kangaroo goal celebration” as a tribute to their Australian supporters (Figure 9).

Figure 9:

Kangaroo goal celebration.¹⁹

However, as time went by and the novelty wore off, this ironic aspect, too, became less pronounced, with fans increasingly focusing on the club’s performances and overall situation, leading to the Facebook group increasingly resembling a genuine fandom. A comment by one of the group members sums it up: “We came for the Sluts, but stayed for the Slutsk.”

4.4 The aftermath: beyond ironic fandom (since late May 2020)

While humor was a very prominent part of the discussion in the FK Slutsk Worldwide group during the first months of its existence, it became less visible in late May and June 2020. This can be explained by several reasons. First, the international popularity of the club and international fans’ activities on Facebook have generally declined. FC Slutsk’s performances worsened compared to the previous months when the club was seen as an underdog punching above its weight: now, most of their matches resulted in either draws or defeats. Coupled with the return of many top European leagues and the easing of lockdown restrictions, this spelled a decrease of attention towards FC Slutsk. The perceived humorousness of the idea of large international support for a small local club had, too, by now faded away. Some of those who had joined the group “just for fun” stopped following it actively as it did not provide constant and varied amusement: the jokes about FC Slutsk’s name and its superiority over the world’s top football clubs had grown stale, and these members were not sufficiently invested to be able to follow the in-group jokes of the later period.^[19]

Other members, however, continued following FC Slutsk’s progress and posting in the Facebook group (mostly on match days), expressing their joy when the club scored or won and bitterly discussing their losses — just as they would have done on their favorite club’s page before the pandemic. The official FC Slutsk Facebook group also continued to provide the information on the match line-ups, game results and other club’s activities to their international followers. Ironic fandom turned out to be a short-lived phenomenon: it has partly transformed into a bona fide fandom, and partly faded away.

The trajectory of the FK Slutsk Worldwide group displays three relatively distinct stages: the novelty stage, the stage of group identity formation, and the transition to a bona fide fandom (which ultimately involved only a part of the group’s initial membership). This transformation is indicative of an inherent tension at the heart of an ironic fandom. On the one hand, such fandoms stem from a place of amusement at and ironic distance from their subject. On the other hand, any fandom relies on fans’ attachment to its subject and a shared sense of intimacy both between the fans themselves and the people they are fans of (McCormick 2018). In other words, a shared sense of irony alone is not enough to sustain a fandom in the absence of a shared appreciation for something else about its object, especially as humor relies on novelty, which the same limited set of signifiers is unlikely to continuously provide.

Previous scholarship on ironic fandom has touched upon the permeable boundaries between ironic and genuine fandoms (Bekkering 2016, 2018). The case of FK Slutsk Worldwide further problematizes this boundary, suggesting that the relationship between ironic and genuine fandoms may be considered not in oppositional, but in temporal terms. That is to say, what emerges as an ironic fandom may need to establish a shared community identity and develop a sense of appreciation for the fandom’s object in order to sustain itself, necessitating at least a degree of “genuinization.”