Umberto Eco depicts football (soccer) fandom as a state of psychosis so pathetic that it should be considered perversion if not insanity. Perhaps less acerbic than this is the stereotypical image of the football hooligan with no regards for ethical conventions neither on nor off the pitch. This paper proposes to challenge such images of football fandom by focusing particularly on the concept of fairness and fans’ ethical considerations in football. Football is love and football is war. In Turkey fans write romantic love songs for their teams depicted as “the one and only lover,” “the melancholy of the night,” “the last cigarette,” or the “meaning of life” itself. At the same time, fan rivalries in the biggest Turkish city Istanbul have repeatedly led to physical violence ending in casualties, death and imprisonment. If football is a plane of heightened emotion and affect, then how is the consideration or sentiment of fairness positioned and oriented? In this paper, I argue that instead of writing football fandom off as insanity, we would be better served trying to understand the ways of legitimizing and justifying the various “insane” practices and discourses of fans. For example, the Istanbul club Be?ikta? JK’s (BJK) fans pride themselves for being anti-racist and condemn fans of Bursaspor (from the city of Bursa) for their racist remarks and behavior towards Diyarbak?rspor (from the Kurdish city of Diyarbak?r). BJK fans explain their said anti-racism through a terminology of righteousness and ethics. However, the same group of BJK fans also justify physically attacking rival fans on bases of fairness, fair exchange and ethics. My aim is to highlight the negotiations and the processes of legitimization that take place when recalling and invoking fairness. The productive problematic is the contingency of fairness. This inquiry will both serve to illuminate the cultural practices of a large segment of society (football fans) and also complicate the notion of fairness to include its mutability and circumstantial flexibility. I conducted initial research for this paper between March-June 2009 in Istanbul. In September 2010, I started my PhD dissertation fieldwork on football in Turkey which will continue until September 2011 in Istanbul. The proposed paper is a product of this fieldwork which includes participant observation during matches and interviews with fans, media authorities, football federation officials and football players.