This study analysed football fandom utilising an ethnographic approach. Football fandom was selected as a research site for the study because it offered scope to explore for the presence of non-traditional forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). It also offered scope to explore the extent to which fandom was a form of sacred consumption (Belk et a1 1989). Ethnography was selected as an appropriate methodology for several reasons. It provided the opportunity to develop a holistic perspective on fandom and it further provided scope to utilise an emergent design approach in the development of a conceptual understanding of fandom. What emerged fiom the ethnographic investigation of two separate football fan communities was that consumers experience and maintain a sense of the sacred by operating their own unofficial markets in competition with the official market in fanrelated goods and services. They also maintain localised systems of cultural capital which allow them to socially construct and maintain a sense of hierophany within their own communities (Belk et a1 1989), in opposition to the homogenised fan identity proffered by the official market. These systems of cultural capital not only allow fans to experience the sacred but also facilitate their sense of relationship with like-minded others in self-selecting communities of shared taste.