Football fandom may appear as quite a marginal object in the social sciences, with regard to both its form (a passionate attachment) and its content (football). The social sciences have long seen the passions as a minority phenomenon, which is believed to be linked to individual preferences and to be an object of psychology. The sociology of culture paid attention to amateurs of art or cultural objects but was quite reluctant to study football fandom. The present article aims at questioning football fandom as an object of social sciences. Based on the case of Russian football fans, it explores the main characteristics of football fandom and shows how it could influence fans' social representations. It shows in particular the heuristic value of the notion of "passion", which allows us to grasp the intense relationship between the fan and the object of fandom. In that sense football fandom appears to be a rich mediator: it is materialised in several external signs, becomes an object of identification and knowledge, as well as a source of solidarities and oppositions. The passion for football also includes a dramatic dimension that allows the production of narratives and the creation of new social representations. At the same time, football fans are far from being blinded by their passion and demonstrate reflexivity and a critical distance toward their practice. This reflexivity is thus another reason for social sciences to take the passions seriously.

The article is devoted to the consideration of actual trends in the study of fandoms as a phenomenon of the media culture expansion era, and in particular, fandoms related to sports. The intensive development of digital technologies has shifted the focus of fan studies to the forms of organization of fan communities/fan cultures that are born and supported by these technologies, providing radically new communication opportunities. The emergence of fandom as a particular subculture and the field of joint creative activities occurred among the fans of concrete stories and writers, television series, comic books and computer games, and became a bright phenomenon in the nearsports area. The implementation of group interests and needs using new technologies has created a special type of community - mediafandoms. The article examines how the key problems of fan studies are transformed in the digital society: identity problems, the relationship between the subculture and the dominant culture, the intersection of fan culture and mass/popular culture, cultural production and consumption. One of the attributes of fandom life - the so-called creative consumption, including such a form as "text poaching" - is under consideration too. Analysis of fan-creativity and its products (artifacts) reveals a tendency to hybridism, manifested in the erosion of the boundaries of sporting fandoms and their interchange with the creativity of other subcultural communities. The activity of fandom is considered in the perspective of the "gift economy" as an adequate model for describing gratuitous cooperation, creative production and distribution of fan products (which is typical for a large part of the fandom). Concerning the characteristics of sports / nearsports digital fandoms, we pay attention to their participants' "binge-watching", "expectation" and "foretaste"; the liminality of these communities because of situational/eventual inclusion of people who do not share subcultural values in general. Also considered the aggressive forms of confrontation with "others'/aliens' fandom” in the virtual space, the "hatedoms” formation which are generated both by the specific nature of this fan culture and, to some extent, by the competitive nature of the sport itself.

The article deals with the phenomenon of sports team cohesion. Classical and modern studies of cohesion are analyzed, the regularities of formation of a cohesive team and the risks of its functioning are described. The article provides readers with an opportunity to look at cohesion as a dynamic characteristic and compare the methods of its measurement and support. The central idea of the article is the complex nature of the phenomenon of cohesion, which combines everyday knowledge, time dynamics, efficiency of joint activities, motivational and value unity, compatibility of group members and emotional attachment. The data presented in the article can be used for the analysis of sports teams and other similar groups, in the preparation of empirical studies, as well as for the development of psychological interventions. Structurally and substantively the article is analytical: the first part of the article is devoted to the problems of everyday understanding of cohesion in social groups related to sports; the second part deals with methods for determining, assessing and verifying cohesion in specific teams; the third part connects the concepts of cohesion and activity, revealing the essence of the main theoretical approaches to the study of this phenomenon; the fourth, final part, describes the main parameters of intra-group compatibility. The proposed work has a methodological orientation, as the described approaches, theories and methods can be integrated into specific sociological, psychological and other studies, as well as become the basis of applied means of forming a cohesive group.

The making of celebrities became an issue of sociological and historical researches recently. This article aims at analyzing how sporting celebrities appeared in the Soviet Union. It highlights the process of the edification of sportsmen, how they became celebrities and how that could be problematic in a socialist state. This article shows that the promotion of sportsmen started to be an issue of symbolic struggle. It first explains that sports celebrities appeared during the tsarist era and what kinds of debates sporting celebrities have launched. After the revolution, sporting celebrities were denounced and were considered as marks of the ancient capitalist world and from professionalism. As spectator sport grew in the Soviet Union and as the sports policy evolved, some sportsmen became a role model and examples for the Soviet citizen. They embodied new values, but these values evolved during the Soviet period. This article explains in a second part how the making of celebrities happened and what kinds of channels were used to make sportsmen 'known to people whom they don't know'. The third part of this article explains how in the 1950s and in the 1960s the edification of the sportsman as an example, the rise of spectator sport and the growing mediatization created a massive gap between sporting heroes, celebrities promoted by sports and political organs, and unofficial celebrities that rose from mass mobilization and fandom.

The paper examines how rugby referee requests video review of a game episode by a television match official (TMO) who assists referee in adjusting or revising in-game decisions. Author describes a number of fragments of test rugby broadcasts where actions of a referee from stopping play to video review request are shown. Author derives from the TMO Global Trial Protocol, a special document which regulates sequence and content of match officials' actions during consultation with the TMO. The description is made from the perspective of ethnomethodology and is provided with transcripts of conversations and video fragments. The paper suggests a number of guesses about sequence and content of the referee's actions related to blowing a whistle to stop play, stopping time with or without special signs and gestures, assistant referee's involvement, and location of participants of the situation. Author claims that it is not necessary for a referee to follow the Protocol in case his actions were properly understood by other participants. His moves, gestures and words as well as his orientation on players and assistants provide other participants enough information for meaningful interpretation of what is happening here and now. This allows to prevent halts and breaks during the game when the referee violates the sequence of actions provided by the Protocol. So social and ordered character of the situation under consideration is emphasized.

The article dwells on the material aspects of the economic history of sports of the late XIX century and first half of the XX century. Those aspects are analyzed on the example of the development of the French and international footballs market in the context of globalization involving a wide range of archival materials. The text combines several story lines: the evolution of the technology for the production of sporting shells from leather (which represented for a long time something intermediate between craft and industry) and its impact on the game itself, with a brief excursion into the technological history of the leather ball (standardization of dimensions and weight, care requirements for him, etc.), from the XVI century to modern high-tech production. Author highlights a significant segment of the sports business, its market, commercial and advertising strategies, forms of interaction with sports organizations, etc. The central place in the article occupies the history of the French market of fooballs, the relationship between the producers of balls and FIFA, as well as the procedure of selecting the "official ball" of football tournaments, including the World Cups. Author offers an explanation why the markets and ball-related industries remained national until the late 1960s. Then the era of global domination of adidas products began as a result of successful competition (with French firm 'Hungaria' among others rivals) that established adidas the first world brand of sports equipment and outfits. The conquest of the French market was the prelude to the era of a globalized football.

The concept of a "Central" or "All-Union" stadium arose in Soviet Russia for the first time in the history of Russian architecture, along with the formulation of the concept of a communist state, which was gradually gaining a totalitarian character, and the transformation of utopian models that had their roots in the first post-revolutionary years and avant-garde culture. In the history of Soviet architecture, there were three attempts to build the main stadium of the country; each of them was undertaken at the time of the formation of a new paradigm which viewed sport both as a factor of cohesion for the society and as an instrument of external representation. The best architects of the country were involved in the search for the image and the development of the architectural solution of the ideal socialist stadium. However, the path from the initial design to the implementation of the project stretched out for more than thirty years, almost turning into one of many unrealized utopias. The International Red Stadium (1920's), the Stalin Central Stadium (1930's), and the Lenin Central Stadium (1950s) were projects with different titles and programs, but they were united in the task of creating a giant architectural sports park to demonstrate the advantages of the communist sports and physical culture movement over the "bourgeois Olympic" movement. Paradoxically, but only with the entry of the Soviet Union into the international Olympic family, Moscow ended up with such a stadium, the Lenin Central Stadium, still the largest in the country.

The history of sports equipment is an under-researshed topic in history of sport as well as fashion studies. This article is dedicated to the socio-cultural studies of the culture of sport's fashion and design en general and football equipment in particular. The first part of the article sheds light on main difficulties of this field: the marginal status of sport as subjects of research in many academic disciplines; condishions and preservation of archives; some fundamental ideas established in specific research disciplines such as fashion studies where fashion of sport traditionally see as "no-fashion" and scholarly tradition to focus on particular topics; the problem of "visibility" of some topics in the academic research and the discourse of fans and connoisseurs, etc. In the second part of the article, is making an attempt to describe some qualities of the field of fashion of sport as a research object (such as the existence of very wide range of different subfields) and to propose a comprex interdisciplinary methodology. Finally, in the third part of this article, with the selected material is offered a range of new methods of analysis and new ways of seeing the phenomenon of the fashion and design of sport with the transfer beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines. The central place is occupied by the topics of technology and functionality, aesthetics, production and consumption. Possible approaches to work with them are analyzed using the example of football shoes (boots). The examples analyzed in this article, from our point of view, clearly confirm the thesis that the study of different aspects of production, consumption and using of sports equipment can significantly expand not only our knowledge of the history of sports and its material culture, but also other aspects of this field, including social and political ones.

This article investigates the phenomenon of political reaction - a topic that has rarely been the subject of systematic study. Political reaction is described here in the context of its brief historical and conceptual genealogy. The history of the concept of "reaction” and its inclusion in the political vocabulary dates back to the events of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. This explains why there is a genetic relation between both reaction and progressivism and between reaction and revolution. The author distinguishes two typical approaches to the concept of political reaction and its application: historico-chronological and discursive. Examples that illustrate the usage of these approaches reveal various political attitudes which can be described as "reactionary”, and serve as a basis for the analysis of their ideological and conceptual content. According to the historico-chronological approach, political reaction is understood as a reflex phenomenon that is a direct consequence of revolutionary change or reform; this reflex is represented by an attempt at restoring the order that preceded its transformation. According to the discursive approach, political reaction can be understood as negative (negation of change) or affirmative (assertion of the socio-political attitudes that were discredited). The article demonstrates that the rejection of change is neither the necessary condition nor the principle of a reactionary regime or rhetoric. Since the two presented approaches are limited and do not take into account a variety of factors determining reaction as a complex phenomenon of social and political life, the article offers an alternative approach to its conceptualization. A key principle of political reaction consists in the protection of order which defines the character of social change and limits political participation in the process of this change. Political reaction is conditioned by political and socio-economic challenges, which demands the transformation of the dominant social order for the sake of its reinforcement. In this context, political reaction is defined as a "passive revolution” within the framework offered by Antonio Gramsci for describing modernization that aims at preserving the hegemony of the elites and the appropriation of popular demand for social and political change.