Zenith Football Fans’ Community Resilience in a Time of FAN ID Law

Football fans community of Zenith is undergoing large-scale changes in the last 10 years. Some of them are good if we speak of the decline of violence on the stadiums and beyond. Some of them are worrying – the aging of active fans. However, the key change is the adoption of Fan ID law – digital system of identification of football supporters. It was met with the fierce protest by football fans community of Russian football clubs. Despite all the efforts football fans could not cancel or at least alter the project of the law. Then football fans communities in Russia reached a decision to boycott Fan ID. With this decision football fans stopped visiting home games and the stadium, stopped going on the away-games to the other cities. It raised the question if football fans community would collapse in these conditions. However, the football fans community of Zenit managed to mobilize the active football fans, find new sports to watch and cheer for, thus ensuring the resilience of football fans community. In this article I attempt to find out what factors, characteristics of the football fans community, views of individual football fans enabled this resilience. I embarked on the ethnographic journey to meet football fans, understand what place football fans community holds in the lives, why are they so loyal and committed to it. Besides, I study the organization of power and decision making in the football fans community of Zenith to see how the mobilization and unification of football fandom was achieved under the Fan ID law. Lastly, I examined the views of football fans towards the state to understand the context where the individual refusal to issue Fan ID originates.