In-form: Football as the Popular Game of Malappuram

This paper argues that while it remains a fact that football is the most visible sport in Malappuram, football also allows identifications for the mainstream to describe Malappuram that is by definition in this discourse an other-ed space. By delineating the importance of affect in football and its resistance to being quantified, I argue that the form of football necessitates a spectator whose spectatorship has to be manifested in bodily rituals. I also argue that the category fan has historically been identified with a site of lack – sociological, economical, political – and it is this historical function that a Malappuram football fan serves in the mainstream imagination. I then attempt to read football fandom in Malappuram through the lens of glocalization to argue that more than identification, it is dis-identification – a divorce with the actual racial, geographic, national specificities – that is at the core of Malappuram football fandom.