Between conflict and happiness: narratives of professional football

Abstract

Football, in local spaces, goes beyond the field lines and becomes a social phenomenon that shapes the identity and feelings of citizens, in this sense, the objective of the research is to observe how the dominant stories and narratives about professional football in Ambato have an impact on the processes of conflict and happiness of the audiences. To meet the objective, the qualitative methodology uses the Delphi technique through a panel of five experts linked to local sports journalism, which allows the origin of these stories and their effects to be confronted. It was evidenced that narratives are constructed through family inheritance, media discourse and media action, from which a conflict arises between Técnico Universitario and Macara, in addition to a comparative dynamic in which the defeat of the rival generates greater satisfaction than one's own success, which shows that the polarization of discourses increases social conflict in the face of competing traditions.  Therefore, it is concluded that the football imaginary acts as a regulator of the collective mood, establishing patterns of behaviour that are manifested in the rejection of adversarial symbols and segregation of spaces.