In not being ‘One of the Lads: An examination of the role of the female fan in “FeverPitch.”

The critical and commercial success of Fever Pitch (1992), Nick Hornby’s dramatised memoir of a football (soccer) fan’s fixation led to a 1997 film adaptation, which was then redrafted for a 2005 film. The book dissects the social, economic and cultural elevation of ‘the working man’s game’ into English Premier League affluence in the early 1990s. The 1997 film takes one of a number of narrative threads of the book, Hornby’s relationship with his partner who is also a fan of the same club, and repositions it as the central premise of a romantic comedy. The American version of Fever Pitch (2005) adopts baseball as its focus and distils and reshapes the obsessive fan behaviour into the third point in a love triangle in a romantic comedy. While each iteration offers a variant representations of female fans in romantic relationships, the works each significantly diminish the woman’s role in privileging the male protagonist’s love for his team and fan status. This paper will examine the relationship these women have with their ‘team’ in Fever Pitch and the ways heteronormative masculine values perpetuate and frame the idealised female participant in the sport’s fan space.