Online-based addiction and violence prevention among football fans

Adolescents and young adults who are part of the German football fan scenes show an increased consumption of alcohol, cannabis and other psychotropic substances (Deimel et al. 2019). It is not uncommon for this problematic consumption to lead to different dynamics of violence or to individual psychosocial problems. The social work fan projects introduced by the DFB form the basis of the social counselling culture of this fan-cultural lifeworld and accompany fans through their everyday life in the scene.
The project ‟SubFAN: Substance Consumption in Football Fan Scenes“ starts here: The online-based counselling and information portal is aimed at active football fans in adolescence and young adulthood who have a need for psychosocial counselling and in particular problematic substance use. This often leads to delinquent behaviour, such as outbreaks of violence inside and outside stadiums, among themselves or between opposing fans. The counselling portal relies on anonymised and low-threshold counselling provided by ten fan projects in North Rhine-Westphalia. This digital transformation of the counselling setting is being tested for the first time in Germany and is being accompanied by research. The first results of the target group-oriented online counselling portal (www.fan-support.de) will be presented in the form of a lecture.