PurposeThe professional German football team Fu beta ball Club Sankt Pauli of Hamburg (FC St. Pauli) are renowned for their inclusive celebration of community alongside fervent fan-driven social and political activism. The club attract local, national and international interest and relatively frequent academic examination, yet little scrutiny is afforded the woman fan's experience or the gendered practices that often complicate the position of women as spectators. The purpose of this paper is to offer insight through examination of a woman sports fan's experience of the FC St. Pauli stadium tour.Design/methodology/approachTo build on innovative approaches to exploring fandom through mixed method and ethnographical investigations (see Hoeber and Kerwin, 2013; McParland, 2012; Richards, 2015), a reflexive form of autoethnography (Delamont, 2009; Ellis et al., 2010; Holman Jones, 2016) is employed here to frame and to contribute place-based research on women as sports fans (Pope, 2012; Schallhorn et al., 2024; Symons, 2024), within the context of professional football. The paper focuses on a woman sports fan's experience of the FC St. Pauli fan space, including an attempt to attend a match, her participation in a club tour, and her encounter with club fans.FindingsThis approach explores a woman fan's experience in visiting FC St. Pauli and enables nuanced consideration of the multi-layered and complex experiences of women as fans in predominantly male professional football club fan spaces, in this case, within the German context. Its place-based (Allison, 2023; Parry and Richards, 2019) and reflexive autoethnographical account (Bakhsh, 2022) highlights some of the ways one German club challenges the treatment of diverse fans. The employment of this method of approach offers new understanding of the gendered experience of participation in sports fandom.Originality/valueWhere it affords analysis of prior knowledge of the famous club's community and their activities, this reflexive autoethnographic study increases knowledge of the woman sport fan's experience of professional German football club, FC St. Pauli.

In 2023, two international football (soccer) tournaments amplified attention on the women's game in Oceania. Football organisations are efficient at measuring participation of these events, of their training programmes, and related activities. However, their evaluation of the impacts within or on local football communities remains relatively rare, particularly for those marginalised through gender. Women and girls commonly engage in football for more complex reasons than those underpinning the participation of men and boys. Football organisations in the Pacific Islands tend to treat women's football communities differently to those around men and boys. Yet often the same conventional processes of appraisal are applied. This chapter offers critical reflection on evaluation processes of a new initiative, This is How We Football, aimed at participation of young women and girls in safe environments. The initiative is deployed by regional governing body, Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). In its efforts to address a wider range of gender norms and related issues identified within local communities, the programme includes the use of Indigenous/local epistemologies and oratory practices alongside conventional measures. This chapter considers the incorporation of place-based approaches to evaluation and the challenges and opportunities the process presents for OFC. In doing so, it contributes to wider understanding of engagement with local football communities in parts of Oceania.

Recognizing the importance of timing in efforts to drive institutional change, this study examined how actors engage in “temporal institutional work” in their attempts to disrupt inequitable institutions in sport. A qualitative case study was conducted on football (soccer) in Australia wherein significant gender equity reforms have been enacted. The findings revealed how the temporal activities of entraining (e.g., capitalizing on external interventions), constructing urgency (e.g., through advocacy), and enacting momentum (e.g., through consensus-based leadership) allowed actors to exploit a time-sensitive window of opportunity for change, quickly foster a perception of irreversibility that structural change would occur, and generate synchronicity with broader reforms. Inspired by the breakthroughs in Australian football, this research highlights temporal-based strategies for combating gender inequity in sport. Theoretically, this study extends research on institutional work in sport by illuminating the key role that timing norms play during institutional change.