1 Emotions in Sports Stadiums 1 Mike S. Schäfer & Jochen Roose “The ball changed possession, moving fast from one end of the field to the other. The tension mounted; it became almost unbearable. People forgot where they were standing. They were pushed, and pushing back, were again jostled back and forth, up and down the terraces. There was a tussle to the left of the guest team’s goal, a quick centre, a header. Suddenly the ball was in the net, and the joy, the delight, of the home supporters went up in a thundering roar that one could hear over half the town, a signal to everyone: ‘We’ve won!’” (Elias and Dunning, 1970: 47) One of the most striking characteristics of the sports stadium is the emotional intensity found there. On the one hand, stadiums play host to an “adoring audience” (Lewis, 1992) of enthusiastic, shouting, celebrating or crying fans, while on the other, they are a place in which deviant and violent behaviour, fuelled by emotions such as anger and hatred, can break out. Thus however it is expressed, sport seems to carry an “enormous emotional load” (Wohl, 1970: 122), something that has repeatedly been described in popular novels such as Nick Hornbys “Fever Pitch”, in countless mass media reports and, also, in academic accounts such as Norbert Elias’s case study on football which provided the introductory quote. Although this emotional intensity extends beyond the time and space in which the game is actually played, it is most striking at the site in which professional spectator sports are usually located: the stadium. 1 The authors would like to thank Alexander Leistner and Lars Riedl for valuable comments, and Inga Ganzer and Louise Hughes for proof-reading the manuscript.