Politics and fan communication in football stadia in Germany – a multimodal linguistic analysis of protest banners

ABSTRACT Various forms of multimodal fan communication, e.g. choreographies, chants, and banners, have been understudied in linguistic research on the language and linguistics of football to date. In particular, banners have received almost no attention despite the fact that they are one of the most visible and attention-getting forms of direct fan communication in the stadium. Fan banners are often used to visually express protest through rather unconventional and creative linguistic forms of provocation. The massive commercialization and marketization of football has been subject to fundamental criticism that has caused conflicts and tensions in which defiant fan subcultures protest the unwanted modernization and sell-out of the game. In this paper I apply a netnographic approach and analyse the linguistic-semiotic characteristics and (meta-)pragmatic functions of protest banners displayed in stadia across Germany in early 2020. The findings suggest that meaning-making through fan banners and the de-coding of that meaning necessitates an understanding of the interplay of materiality, colour, text, imagery and sometimes temporality.


Banners as a multimodal form of fan communication
The increasing popularity and mediatization of football as the dominant spectator sports in Europe has led to an ever-growing media coverage and public attention which in turn has sparked considerable interest in the linguistic and discourse aspects of the language of football. 1While new reporting genres and other (multimodal) texts types have attracted particular attention, 2 various forms of fan communication such as chants, banners and choreographies have been understudied in linguistic research to date. 3 In particular, banners have rarely been discussed despite the fact that they are one of the most visible and attention-getting forms of direct fan communication in the stadium and are frequently used by fan groups to protest the increasing commercialization of the game and to express their views on other socio-political issues. 4It is only very recently that banners have been identified as units of analysis in research on linguistic landscapes and multimodality 5 and as "semiotic resources of visual communication". 6n Germany and elsewhere, the massive commercialization and marketization of football has been subject to fundamental criticism that has caused conflicts and tensions in which defiant fan subcultures, most notably the so-called Ultras, who oftentimes have an explicitly left-wing political agenda, protest the unwanted modernization and sell-out of the game. 7Fan banners are an important means to visually express this protest through rather unconventional and creative linguistic forms of provocation.Football stadia can be considered semiotic spaces where fans

Main types and themes of fan banners
Guschwan identifies three primary categories of fan banners: 1) fan-club banners, 2) banners displayed by individuals, and 3) large message banners held up by one or more rows of fans. 11Fanclub banners carry the name of the fan-club or supporter group and its colours and logo, usually picking up the colours of the football club that the group supports.Such banners are often professionally made of vinyl or thick fabric and are of a permanent nature in that they are reused for several years and are fixed to the stadium boarding or fencing to mark the area where the group members habitually congregate at every home game. 12anners displayed temporarily by individual fans during a match are often made of old bedsheets or large pieces of paper, two plastic poles and spray paint.They depict either one or more images, contain a textual message or are a mix of both text and image.Large message banners are also only temporarily shown and are typically made for one-time display at a particular game.They are held up by one or several rows of fans.Occasionally, such banners can even be several metres long and stretch over an entire block or stand in the stadium which requires the concerted action of a group of fans in the respective block.Such block banners are often professionally made of vinyl or thick fabric, and are sometimes re-used on other occasions.More typically, however, message banners consist of large sheets of (wall)paper or fabric, glued or taped together.They feature text-only messages by means of large block letters and take the coordination of several (rows of) fans to display.
Since banners are intended to have a wide and immediate impact, their messages are not only directed at the audience inside the stadium but also towards the photographers, TV cameras and basically everybody watching the match on TV.Guschwan distinguishes several major groups of themes usually seen in message banners. 13They can mark important events in the history of a (fan-) club or supporter group (such as an anniversary or the death of a fan).They are also used to make fun of opposing teams or rival fan groups, especially at matches played against local rivals.The possibly largest thematic group is made up of protest banners that express different forms of solidarity or protest against wider socio-political issues such as discrimination or racism.In particular, however, protest banners highlight the manifold negative effects of the increasing marketization and commercialization of football on fan rights and fan culture.This has long been a major theme of fan protest and addresses the affordability of ticket prices, the increasing fragmentation of match days, the renaming of stadia, or police surveillance and repression.The respective national and international football associations, but also team owners, politicians or other figures of authority have also been the target of fan protests.Banners can therefore be considered to be located at the intersection of football fandom and political activism.This is most clearly seen in active supporter groups, notably in the varied and well-organized Ultra groups that represent the politically active and most visible branch of fan protests. 14The present study focuses on protest banners that were displayed in football stadia across Germany at the beginning of the year 2020.These protests marked the most-recent, pre-pandemic culmination of a long series of widely-discussed and controversial fan protests against Dietmar Hopp.Hopp is the founder of an international software company and benefactor of Bundesliga club TSG Hoffenheim, his hometown club that due to Hopp's heavy financial investments gained promotion from the lower amateur leagues to the Bundesliga within only ten years' time.For many supporters Hopp personifies the commercialization of football because he has bought sporting success, being exempted from German football's 50 + 1 rule that prevents a single investor from holding the majority share of any club and thereby gaining full control of a team. 15atters are complex and cannot be detailed in this paper, thus for the present context it should merely be pointed out that as early as in 2008, when Hoffenheim had been promoted to the Bundesliga, massive fan protests set in that targeted the club and its success as an artificial construct that would take away a Bundesliga spot from other clubs with a longer history, tradition and larger fan base, but more limited financial means.From the beginning, it was organized supporter groups of Borussia Dortmund who led the most outspoken and vigorous forms of protest that frequently featured a banner with Hopp's image in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle and the message "Hasta la vista, Hopp", accompanied by chants that Hopp was the "son of a whore" (Hurensohn in German).Protests escalated when such insults directed at Hopp during a match between Hoffenheim and Dortmund in December 2019 16 lead to collective punishments and match bans for Dortmund fans.In February 2020 further explicit anti-Hopp banners were displayed in several stadia in all three professional leagues across Germany in solidarity with the Dortmund fans, additionally criticizing the German football association (German FA, Deutscher Fussball Bund in German) for breaking its promise to abandon collective fan punishments.In particular, the events around a match between Bayern Munich and Hoffenheim sparked reactions from supporter groups throughout Germany in early March 2020 and received massive media attention. 17When Bayern supporters showed Hoppbanners in solidarity with the Dortmund fans the referee interrupted and then suspended the match according to UEFA's three-step procedure which was originally, and ironically in the present context, introduced as a response to incidents involving overt racism in football, especially when directed towards players. 18The protests ended abruptly later in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic made football matches with spectators impossible.

Aims and data
In spite of their key functions for organized supporters, their visibility and impact in the stadium and beyond, fan banners have been understudied in research on the language and linguistics of football to date.Therefore, the present study focuses on protest banners and analyses published pictures of fan banners largely sourced from the websites of individual supporter groups, and a large collection of fan banners displayed in various German leagues as archived on the website "FaszinationFankurve" (https://www.faszination-fankurve.de).The approach could therefore be conceived of as a form of netnography, a branch of ethnography developed specifically as a set of procedures and ethical standards to study the online interactions of people in a more distant, observational and unobtrusive way 19 that has already been applied to football and fan communication. 20The present paper does not aim at an exhaustive, quantitative description of fan banners that might have been on display in stadia in Germany in early 2020 as it necessarily has to rely on the selected material that has been documented and made available by the respective supporter groups.Hence, no claim at an exhaustive coverage can be made.
Since a comprehensive multimodal-linguistic description of fan banners is lacking to date, the banners will first be described and analysed with a view to the interplay of their linguistic-semiotic characteristics, i.e. materiality, text (including colour and typeface), their (meta)pragmatic functions in terms of various types of speech acts such as insults and threats, as well as the expression of the socio-political stance of the supporter groups through linguistic creativity, including wordplay.
Two main research questions will be examined: Given the multimodal nature of fan banners, what is the role of the individual semiotic modes and how do they interact in meaning-making processes?What is the supporters' socio-political stance and what are the pragmatic strategies to convey it?

Materiality
Fan banners are often made of relatively cheap and readily available material, for instance old bedsheets, large sheets of other fabric or(wall)paper, glued or taped together, and spray paint.Sometimes, banner-like displays are formed by one or more rows of supporters holding up individual t-shirts with single block letters printed on them. 21The materiality of fan banners is obviously subject to practical constraints as the supporter groups who produce them have limited financial resources.However, materiality can also be interpreted as expressing creativity, but more importantly, a political stance, i.e. protest and resistance against the increasing marketization of the game because these simple grassroots DIY banners stand in sharp contrast to the high-end electronic commercial advertising hoarding in the stadium. 22Similarly, organized supporter groups typically refuse to buy and wear the official club products that are considered overly expensive, but rather produce and wear their own merchandise, e.g.t-shirts, scarves, flags and stickers.These products are also sold to other supporters on matchdays which provides a small source of income towards purchasing the materials for the production of banners and more complex choreographies.

Text and colour
As pointed out earlier, most protest banners contain text only, written in large block letters due to a practical reason: The text should be visible and readable for the spectators within the stadium and for the TV cameras.The font style or typeface of the letters often seems insignificant.Only rarely does it play role, e.g. when emphasizing more belligerent messages through the use of an Old-German-style typeface (Fraktur in German). 23The colours of the background and the letters used on the banner are often chosen in line with the colours of the club that the respective fan group supports.For example, a supporter group would typically use blue letters on white background (or vice versa) for their banners if the club's colours are blue and white.Importantly, though, colour is also regularly used for the coding of referents who are often not directly mentioned on the banners.Such referents can either be individuals (such as Dietmar Hopp), a group of people (supporters of a certain club) or an institution (such as the German FA).Individuals or groups are typically associated with a certain club, hence the colours associated with that club are used to identify these referents.This relatively straightforward coding scheme contributes significantly to the meaningmaking process of banners but might not be transparent for outsiders.
A rather complex example can be seen in a banner displayed by supporter groups of Borussia Mönchengladbach in solidarity with the (actually rival) Dortmund fans.The banner reproduced in Figure 1 was displayed together with the image of Dietmar Hopp in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle and reads (1) HURENSÖHNE BELEIDIGEN EINEN HURENSOHN UND WERDEN VON HURENSÖHNEN BESTRAFT ("Sons of whores insult a son of a whore and are punished by sons of whores").
The three instances of the swear word Hurensohn are coded in 1) yellow, 2) blue, and 3) green, respectively, and thus refer to the 1) Dortmund supporters (who insulted Hopp and whose clubs' colours are yellow and black -since they are long-standing rivals of Mönchengladbach they are referred to as sons of whores), 2) Hopp (the person who was insulted, blue being the colour of TSG Hoffenheim, his club) and 3) the German football association (who punished the Dortmund fans and whose logo features mainly the colour green). 24Further examples of such colour-coding will be discussed further below.

Imagery
While message banners, and protest banners in particular, typically consist of text only, they are sometimes supported by one or more image banners or are even embedded in larger displays that resemble choreographies.In the present context, the banners that appeared to protest Hoffenheim and its benefactor Dietmar Hopp were often shown with banners carrying Hopp's image in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle (Fadenkreuz in German).While the use of this particular image goes back to 2008 when first displayed by Dortmund supporters, 25 in February and March 2020 it was seen in stadia throughout Germany, for example as shown in Figure 1.This sparked an intense public discussion, not only in the national media but also within the organized fan scene itself, whether the use of the crosshair would have to be interpreted as a death threat or even a call for murder. 26The semiotics of the crosshair in this context has been discussed in a recent publication by Meier-Vieracker.He suggests that "while the clubs and the media interpreted the crosshairs as a call for violence, the fans framed them as a merely symbolic act of resistance and protest". 27He further argues that "the protesting fans claim a reflexive reading of the crosshair as a symbol of subversive fan practices themselves, which is indeed consistent with recent performance-theoretical accounts of fan culture.But still other fans contest this reading and emphasize the violent connotations of the crosshairs". 28s for the lexical semantics of Fadenkreuz in German, the Duden, a widely-used dictionary of standard German, notes that the expression jemanden im Fadenkreuz haben ("have somebody in the crosshair") has an extended, metaphorical meaning ("jemanden scharf beobachten" = "watch or observe somebody closely") 29 that is similar to English where it can also be used figuratively, i.e. to describe someone or something being targeted as if through an aiming device having crosshairs. 30urthermore, the corpus-based, electronic dictionary of German, Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS), provides a word profile featuring the most common verb and noun collocates of the term Fadenkreuz which suggest that it is indeed largely used in a metaphorical way in the sense of being subject to investigation or prosecution by police or tax authorities. 31This strong link between the symbolic crosshair and (criminal) investigation is also firmly established in German pop culture.The crosshair features prominently in the logo of the popular and longrunning police crime drama TV series Tatort ("Crime scene") produced by German public-service broadcasting organization ARD for their channel Das Erste ("The First"). 32During the said protests, fans showed a banner carrying the Tatort logo with the added word Sinsheim, a town in southwestern Germany, located in the Rhine-Neckar area of the state of Baden-Württemberg (the banner can be seen in Figure 4 further below which is reproduced there for another reason).Sinsheim, Hopp's hometown and also home to the stadium of TSG Hoffenheim, was thus, metaphoricallyspeaking, declared a crime scene that had to be investigated.
Additionally, it is interesting to observe that frequently it was not Hopp's crosshaired image that was displayed next to the text-only banners but rather the logo of the German FA in crosshairs as shown in Figure 2 (below the large text banner).This might suggest that the crosshair is used as an interchangeable symbol of profound criticism that is neither used to provoke violence nor is it targeted at a certain individual only, but also towards institutions. 33igure 2 also illustrates another visual use of metaphor.The text displayed by the Dortmund supporters is an allusion to a statement made by Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Bayern Munich's then chief executive.Rummenigge said that the fan protests during the match between Hoffenheim and Bayern Munich in late February 2020, and notably the display of banners referring to Hopp as the "son of a whore", represented the "ugly face of football and of FC Bayern Munich". 34The text is shown below a series of smaller banners that carry the pictures of five key figures of German football at the time, wearing red clown noses: Hopp (centre), his lawyer Christoph Schickhardt (second left), Rummenigge (right), and two key officials of the German FA at the time, president Fritz Keller (second right) and vice-president Rainer Koch (left).Below the text we see the said logo of the German FA in crosshairs.This choreography-like display suggests an alliance of these five protagonists to protect Hopp.According to the metaphor used by the supporters, they are associated with clown-like, stupid and annoying behaviour whose words and actions cannot be taken seriously.They represent the "real" ugly faces of football.Here, then, meaning-making is achieved through a complex display of a set of banners including a banner with a textual reference (the said statement made by by Rummenigge), five banners with the portraits of the said protagonists of German football at the time, the red clown noses added to these portraits and an additional banner carrying the crosshaired logo of the German FA.It is only through the interplay of text, colour and image that the full message of this ensemble is conveyed.

The (meta)pragmatics of protest banners
Insults: use vs. mention Similar to the crosshair image, the use of the swear word Hurensohn ("son of a whore") has sparked substantial discussion in the media and among fans alike.The term (and its plural form Hurensöhne) has typically been used in fan chants to collectively denigrate or insult the supporters of a rival team. 35While this particular word and the fan chants in which it is used have become less acceptable in many fan scenes because of its sexist connotations, swear words or words of taboo regularly occur in fan chants and are, in the specific context, accepted by the majority of spectators, thus they could be considered a common ingredient of fan culture. 36The use of Hurensohn in the context of fan protests through chants and banners can be traced back to the early protests against Hopp and Hoffenheim in 2008.In February and March 2020, however, the word was seen on countless banners in German football stadia and was used to refer to a broad range of individuals and institutions as will be shown below.Meier-Vieracker has argued in a blog entry that it is useful to distinguish between the actual use of the word as an insult and as a mentioned, (meta)discursive item. 37pplying a speech-act-based approach to the analysis of protest banners and fan banners in general we can observe a continuum from direct and explicit forms to indirect and implicit forms of insults, but there are also cases where it is clearly used as a mentioned item.
A rather straightforward case of a direct and explicit insult can be seen in Example (2) where the swear word is unambiguously used in reference to Hopp in one and the same sentence.
(2) ALLES BEIM ALTEN: DER DFB BRICHT SEIN WORT, HOPP BLEIBT EIN HURENSOHN!("It's all the same: The FA breaks its word, Hopp remains the son of a whore!"; three banners in horizontal order, red letters on white background) 38 Next, there are instances where the insult is established through the proximity of text and image.To do so, the reader has to identify and link the two banners shown, i.e.Hopp's image in the crosshair and, right below it, the banner carrying the insult (see Figure 3).As mentioned earlier, there are more indirect forms of identifying a referent, e.g. through colour-coding.Example (3) reproduces the text of a banner shown in the away end housing the Bayern supporters during the infamous Hoffenheim vs. Bayern Munich match in February 2020.Hopp as the target of Hurensohn cannot directly be identified since his full name is not explicitly mentioned nor is his image shown in or together with the banner.It is only through the colour-coded initials that knowledgeable spectators can interpret the banner as a reference to Hopp (compare the colour-coding of Hurensohn used to mark three different referents as discussed in relation Figure 1   (3) DU HURENSOHN!RFM ("You son of a whore!"; red letters on white background with the letters D and the first H in blue, the colour of TSG Hoffenheim) 39 That Hurensohn is not exclusively used as an insult towards an individual but rather to collectively denigrate or insult a group or institution can also be seen in banners that are directed against the German FA and its role in the Hopp cause, see ( 4).
(4) DFB DU HURENSOHN ("German FA you son of a whore"; black letters on white background) 40

Insults and humour
Several banners either border on the humorous or are intentionally designed to create humour.In such cases, a narrow reading of the banner as an insult would appear contrived or even forced.Such instances illustrate the hybrid nature of speech acts in these banners but also the challenges that result from a categorical speech-act-based approach to the analysis of protest banners and fan banners in general. 41he text in Example ( 5) is from a banner-like display formed by two rows of supporters holding up white t-shirts with large black block letters.The name Hopp is replaced with the name of Friedrich Bayer, the founder of what would become Bayer AG, a major German chemical and pharmaceutical company whose headquarters are in the city of Leverkusen.Bayer is the sponsor of the football club Bayer Leverkusen from which the club draws its name.
(5) FRIEDRICH BAYER DU HURENSOHN ("Friedrich Bayer you son of a whore"; black letters, each letter printed on a white t-shirt) 42 Many fans of traditional clubs denounce Bayer Leverkusen as being a so-called "plastic club", i.e. a club without tradition or a long-standing, committed fan base, existing solely as a creation or marketing tool of their rich sponsor (similar to the role of the global car manufacturer Volkswagen for VfL Wolfsburg or the creation of RB Leipzig by Red Bull, a company producing energy drinks).However, singling out company founder Friedrich Bayer and holding him responsible for the commercial success and controversial image of the club is an anachronism and can thus not be taken seriously since Bayer was long dead when the club was founded in 1904 by employees of Bayer AG.The banner reproduced in Example ( 6) even goes a step further in ridiculing and depersonalizing the assumed insult by using a template name for a random, average person (like "John Smith" or "John Doe" in English).( 6) MAX MUSTERMANN DU HURENSOHN!("John Smith you son of a whore!"; blue letters on white background with additional banner carrying the crossed-out logo of the German FA shown above the text) 43 The banner in Example ( 7) is clearly located towards the humorous end of the cline.The addressee of the potential insult is the spectre of relegation, in German Abstiegsgespenst (literally "ghost of relegation") that is said to appear when a football club is threatened by relegation.
(7) ABSTIEGSGESPENST DU HURENSOHN!("Spectre of relegation, you son of a whore!"; black letters on white background with a separate white banner showing a stylized ghost figure in red crosshairs displayed above the text) 44 Intriguingly, in the days following the fan protests both crosshair and swear word were picked up by German left-wing newspaper die tageszeitung (or short taz) which printed a picture of empty stands and ran the following headline on the title page of its 10 March 2020 edition: (8) Corona, du Hurensohn!("Corona, you son of a whore!") To the right of the headline appeared a stylized illustration of a virus in red crosshairs. 45icture and headline of course refer in a jocular way to the implementation of measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus that included the exclusion of spectators from football stadia throughout the country which resulted in so-called "ghost matches" (Geisterspiele in German).The fact that this combination of image and text was printed by a major news outlet on its frontpage might also be interpreted as a sign of it having arrived in the mainstream.In fact, the template X, du Hurensohn!(where X is a placeholder for any particular referent), sometimes used with the crosshair image, has be seen in numerous memes on the internet since.Finally, some banners illustrate the use of Hurensohn as a mentioned item at a metadiscursive level.First, in the text reproduced in Example (9) the term is explicitly marked as a mentioned item through the use of quotation marks.The banner criticizes the application of UEFA's three-step procedure, which was meant to be used in incidents involving overt racism in football, to what the fans considered forms of legitimate protest against the influence of rich and powerful individuals in German football.( 9) "HURENSOHN" IST KEIN RASSISMUS!SYN 79 ('"Son of a whore' is not racism!';red letters on white background) 46 Similarly, Example (10) alludes to UEFA's three-step procedure but frames it as an accusation levelled against the German FA's immoral practices and possibly a plot hatched against the fans: corruption (alluding to the German FA's successful bid to host the 2006 FIFA World Cup that was marred by bribery and corruption), repression (of fan culture and participation, and excessive presence and action by the police force on matchdays) and "son of a whore", probably used to refer to what the organized fans considered an infringement on their freedom of expression.
(10) DER DREI-STUFEN-PLAN DES DFB: KORRUPTION, REPRESSION, HURENSOHN! 47("The FA's three-step procedure: Corruption, repression, son of a whore!"; black letters on white background, second banner carrying the logo of the German FA in red crosshairs shown above text)

Threats and humour
Other banners are used in a playful way to evoke the potential illocutionary force of a directive speech act to bring about a change in reality.All the fans needed to do to cause the interruption or suspension of play, or even make the officials abandon the match altogether according to UEFA's three-step procedure, was to show an anti-Hopp banner.One intriguing and humorous way this was exploited by the supporters is through banners consisting of two parts that were shown in delayed temporal succession.Like fan choreographies that are sequentially built up in the stadium over several minutes, such banners take advantage of yet another dimension of the multimodal repertoire: temporality.Initially only the first part of the full banner was shown, the wording of which suggested that an insult was about to follow (hence suggesting a threat to cause an interruption of play), while the humorous message of the banner was only revealed when the second part of the banner appeared.Two cases in point are discussed below.
The banner reproduced in Figure 4 alludes to RB Leipzig player Timo Werner who, after a dramatic dive, was frequently denigrated by rival supporter groups singing the infamous chant "Timo Werner ist ein Hurensohn" ("Timo Werner is a son of a whore") in nearly every stadium in Germany.The banner uses this knowledge that is shared by the majority of the spectators and replaces the explicit term Hurensohn by the name of the said player, thus creating an analogy.
(11) DIETMAR HOPP IST EIN. . .TIMO WERNER! ("Dietmar Hopp is a. . .Timo Werner", white letters on black background) 48 In Example (12) the potential threat and insult is resolved through the truism that Hopp is, as a male person, the son of a mother.The jocular intention of the banner is explicitly marked by the added winking face.
(12) DIETMAR HOPP DU SOHN EINER. . .MUTTER! ;-) ("Dietmar Hopp you son of a . . .mother!"; black letters on white background) 50 The second pattern used to express threats, often explicitly marked as humorous, e.g. through the addition of a smiling or winking face on the banner as just mentioned, is through banners suggesting that either the team supported by the group showing the banner wins the game or the supporters would show an anti-Hopp banner to cause the suspension of the match.Examples ( 13) to ( 16) show several variants of this pattern.

Wordplay
Several additional patterns of linguistic creativity can be observed in the banners.Rhyme is a common stylistic, often humorous means of expression, and this is also observable in many of the banners shown during the said protests.However, in this section I would like to highlight two less often discussed forms of wordplay in banners: allusion and reinterpretation of initialisms.Two recurrent patterns of allusion can be identified in the data.Pattern one is illustrated in Examples ( 17) - (19) which are allusions to article one of the German Grundgesetz, the basic law of the Federal Republic of Germany.Article one states: "Die Würde des Menschen istunantastbar" ("Human dignity shall be inviolable").In Example (17), Menschen (the word human in its genitive case) is replaced with Hopp, and in Example ( 18) by the word Milliardär ("billionaire").Both banners criticize the lenient position taken by the German FA towards Hopp, e.g.exempting him from the 50 + 1 rule and taking drastic action against fans who stage protests against him as discussed in this paper.(17)  Example ( 19) is different as it frames article one of the basic law as §1 of the FA's bylaws, suggesting the FA values money more than human dignity.This is again, like example (10) discussed above, a criticism against the alleged illegal and corrupt practices within the FA.
(19) SATZUNG §1: DIE WÜRDE DES GELDES IST UNANTASTBAR ("Bylaws §1: The money's dignity shall be inviolable"; blue letters on white background, the circled and crossed out logo of the German football association placed above the banner) 57 The second type of allusion is shown in Examples ( 20) and ( 21).These refer to two well-known German nursery rhymes that are recited while an older person plays with a child sitting on their knee or lap.The regular first line of ( 20) is "Hoppe Hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt dann schreit er" ("Hop hop rider, when he falls then he will cry"), and the first line of ( 21) is "Hopp, hopp, hopp, Pferdchen lauf Galopp" ("Hop, hop, hop, little horse run galopp").The mention of Hopp and the German FA in context of nursery rhymes sung to children obviously suggests childish and immature behaviour with Example (21) even claiming that whatever Hopp will do, the FA will follow swiftly, thus again suggesting an alliance between the two.
(20) HOPPE HOPPE REITER WENN DER NAME FÄLLT DANN SCHREIT ER ("Hopp Hopp rider when the name is mentioned then he will cry"; three banners in horizontal order, black letters on white background with the letters HOPP in blue) 58 (21) HOPP, HOPP, HOPP, DER VERBAND FOLGT IM GALOPP ("Hopp, Hopp, Hopp the association follows in galopp"; two banners in horizontal order, black letters on white background) 59 The second type of wordplay to be discussed in this section is the re-interpretation of the initialism DFB that stands for Deutscher Fuball Bund, i.e. the German FA.The texts of the banners reproduced in Examples ( 22) -( 24) play with the letters <D>, <F>, and <B>.The letter <D> proves particularly useful for the purpose of wordplay in this context because it is also the first letter of Hopp's first name, Dietmar.Example ( 22) portrays the German FA as Hopp's "fine gang", thus again suggesting a close alliance between the FA, TSG Hoffenheim and Hopp, as does Example (24) which suggests it is not the German FA but actually an association at Hopp's service.Example (23) reiterates the aforementioned criticism towards the German FA for breaking its promise to abandon collective fan punishments that were nonetheless handed out to Dortmund fans in December 2019.

Conclusion
Multimodal forms of fan communication have been understudied in linguistic research on football to date.This contribution has zoomed in on several semiotic, structural-linguistic and pragmatic aspects of fan banners that have rarely been discussed comprehensively to date.Protest banners in particular offer rich potential for the study of various semiotic resources of visual communication.
What then is the role of the individual semiotic modes and how do they interact in meaning-making processes of fan banners?I have argued that the interpretation of the often implicit and coded messages conveyed through fan banners necessitates an understanding of the interplay of materiality, colour, imagery, text and sometimes even temporality.In particular, the colour coding of referents mentioned on the banners by means of the associated club colours as well as complex imagery including metaphor contribute significantly to the meaning-making process in fan banners.Large message banners used in more complex displays thus resemble fan choreographies which have been analysed as "coordinated multimodal forms of communicative collective action". 63anners typically refer to and have to be interpreted against intertextual references and a complex public and oftentimes political (meta)discourse in which they are embedded.What is the supporters' socio-political stance and what are the pragmatic strategies to convey it?Banners are key for organized fan groups to voice their protest against the increasing commercialization of the game and wider socio-political issues at the intersection of fandom and political activism in the specialized setting of the football stadium.I have argued that a traditional speech-act based analysis and a narrow reading of the banners along seemingly clear-cut categories such as insults or threats can appear forced and falls short of the contextual complexities.Several banners discussed in this paper are used in a playful, oftentimes humorous way to evoke the potential illocutionary force of an insult or threat that is then ridiculed through the addition of context as in Examples ( 5) - (7), emojis such as smiling or winking faces as shown in (12) and ( 16), or even cancelled as in Examples (11) and (12).

( 22 )
DIETMARS FEINE BANDE DEUTSCHLANDS GRÖßTE SCHANDE ("Dietmar's fine gang -Germany's biggest disgrace"; black letters on white background with the word initial letters D, F, and B in the first line painted in green, the colour of the German FA)60    (23) DEMENTER FUSSBALL-BUND (the first line of this multi-line banner reads "Demented football association"; white letters on blue background with the word initial letters D, F, and B painted in green, the colour of the German FA) 61(24) DFB -DIETMARS FUSSBALL BUND NBU ('DFB -Dietmar's football association; white letters on red background)62 ARTIKEL 1: DIE WÜRDE DES HOPP IST UNANTASTBAR!WB ("Article 1: Hopp's dignity shall be inviolable"; green letters on white background with the letters HOPP in blue, the colour of TSG Hoffenheim)55(18) ART. 1 GG: DIE WÜRDE DES MILLIARDÄRS IST UNANTASTBAR ("Art. 1 basic law: The billionaire's dignity shall be inviolable"; white letters on red background)56