This essay privileges an understanding of “sport” as an embodied perceptual effect, phenomenologically experienced and habitually, institutionally, and discursively structured. This develops one of Bourdieu’s (1992) key insights, attending to the placing and “re-placing of the body in an overall posture which recalls the associated thoughts and feelings”, and extends to thinking semiotically beyond the body (69). I would like to approach these structures as an affordance–as materialized configurations that various publics might latch to. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork of premier league fandom in New York City, I explore the localized poetics of spectatorship as a means to investigate transnational circulation, complex governance structures, and cultural performance (Besnier and Brownwell 2017). Within this poetics, I ground play and creativity as symbolic proposals for knowledge production.