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The new commercialism and PLCs 9. The changing face of football: a case for
national regulation? That was then . . . The onset of the close season. When I was growing
up in the 1960s on Merseyside, for the seasonal footballing last
rites we used to end up, late at night, on BBC TV (always the Beeb)
with flush-faced young men in the FA Cup-winners’ post-banquet booze-up
courtesy of, if I’m not mistaken, Jimmy Hill. During the day, and
as the years wore on, we had come to ‘know’ uncomfortably more and
more about these football players in the Wembley pre-match build-up:
who roomed with whom; the pranksters and the introverts; the breakfast
and luncheon rituals; superstitions – usually, shorts on first,
and who was the last one out, etc. Most of this TV fare was excruciating,
embarrassing even. We got more out of the managers, too, some of
them perceptibly freezing in the media headlights as the years wore
on. In 1974, Liverpool’s Bill Shankly and the visibly shaking Newcastle
United manager, Joe Harvey, were interviewed on a split screen on
the morning of the tie between the keen northern rivals. At the
end of the exchange and thinking himself off camera (perhaps!) Shanks
made the telling aside that Cup-final rookie Harvey was, clearly,
‘a bag o’ nerves’. On the field, Liverpool crushed the jittery Geordies.
The power of the media? On national TV, after the annual big match and
the feast which followed, these impossibly young football heroes
were usually now quite spent, nerves and trauma far behind them
– and they were also gently, but transgressively, pissed. Strangely,
on these occasions drink and glory seemed to make otherwise monosyllabic
young men, with brains in their feet, more, rather than less, articulate.
Certainly more interesting. Nothing, it should be noted, seemed
to have this effect on Jimmy Hill. All this was, above all, the
signal for footy obsessives, that it had all ended, the beautiful
game, for another year. The FA Cup final was still pretty much the only
live football anybody saw on TV in the 1960s; certainly the only
club football of this type. So, there were important things to look
out for here – the players’ once-a-year presentational tracksuit
tops, for example, stylish but hated by some of the older pros as
unnecessary and ‘too continental’. In the early 1970s Leeds United,
breathtakingly, even had the players’ names on their Wembley tops.
There was also the special edition FA Cup final shirts to admire,
complete, for the only time in the season, with embroidered club
badge, and even with the match date. Usually, certainly until substitutes
were allowed in the early 1970s, only ten of these shirts were made,
plus the goalie’s green (always green) top. They were produced then
just for the combatants, not for fans, as the hundreds of thousands
of replica shirts sold today are. Not to wear the ‘traditional’
club home colours at the final – to have to change on the coin toss
to accommodate opponents – was regarded as rank bad luck. Then there was the famous Wembley turf itself,
proudly unblemished, and depthlessly green compared to the mud heaps
or the dust bowls of the semi-finals only weeks before. But the
turf was also notoriously cruel, lying in wait to cramp up those
for whom the nervous tension proved simply too much. And, of course,
there was the inevitable sunshine, the north London summer heat,
which was surely made for foreigners, for the languid but explosive
Brazilians, rather than the doughty, honest, British journeymen
of the English game, now fully exposed in this last crucial act
of an over-long season. Very occasionally, even back then, FA Cup finals
brought no clear way of connecting strongly to the match itself
other than to the event as a national rite of passage which marked
the gathering of the sporting clans and another season almost gone.
Usually, the quality or glamour of at least one of the sides involved
(the Tottenham side of ’61 and ’62; the emerging Man United of ’63),
or the underdog status of others (Second Division Preston North
End in ’64; Leicester City in ’69) or the sheer drama of the match
(Everton against Sheffield Wednesday in ’66) was enough to get you
gripped. Howard Kendall, the youngest Cup finalist at 17
years of age, played for ‘brave’ Preston, who lost to West Ham in
1964, probably only partly because the hicksville hooped socks the
Lancastrians wore for the day could never have been allowed to lift
the Cup. David Nish, still the youngest FA Cup final captain, led
Leicester City, a boyish Peter Shilton in goal, to a fourth Cup
final appearance – and a fourth defeat for the East Midlands club
– against Man City in 1969. These were proper Wembley stories. For northerners, at least, the 1967 final was much
harder work. A new (but not improved) Tottenham overcame flashy
Chelsea; no one in our Bootle street got overexcited about this
one. Down in ‘the smoke’ they probably said the same thing (in spades)
about the 1968 bore when West Brom wore down an inspirationless
Everton. Howard Kendall, four years older than in his Preston days
but apparently no wiser, picked up more losers’ tat here. Half of
Liverpool – my half – both enjoyed this torture and ‘felt’ for family
members and friends who had, inexplicably, taken up the blue sash.
Not too deep down we probably felt they also got what they deserved. On Merseyside, as elsewhere in those days, local
finalists brought a new intensity to Cup final day. Special souvenir
editions of the local newspapers emerged. The Road to Wembley, plus
pullout team photos for display in the front window. People ‘dressed’
their houses then to advertise Cup final footballing allegiance,
though my mother would never allow my brother’s Evertonian blue
to go up in case neighbours or passersby mistook us for Catholics.
Some people in Liverpool still do this now, put up their football
pictures, though the gusto and some of the collective spirit has
inevitably gone out of Cup final fever. In triumphs in 1965 (Liverpool,
for the first time) and in ’66 (Everton, the ‘bluenoses’) the city
of Liverpool boasted back-to-back FA Cup winners. We had no real
sense then, I think, that people from outside the city – unless
they were actually from Merseyside, doing missionary work elsewhere
– might also be closely following our cause. In those days, each side in the FA Cup final received
around 12,000 tickets each, 24,000 in total, for a ground which
then held the magical 100,000 fans. As far as I can remember, we
never knew anyone who actually got a ticket for the match – for
the FA Cup final. These people, it seems, were privileged season-ticket-holders,
or liggers, or club secretaries or local football officials living
down in the home counties and elsewhere who fancied a big football
day-out in Brent. We knew none of these. Going to home games was
affordable, but for the Cup final we drew the curtains and watched
the drama unfold on telly. This, to my young eyes, was England;
the FA Cup final and all that went with it defined what it meant
in sporting terms to be English. In the 1960s, after all the FA Cup hype and the
TV drama was over, there was – well, nothing. Unless, of course,
as in 1966, the World Cup finals came to town. Or, your club had
actually won the Cup, in which case it was a few days more, hanging
onto lampposts, and draping bunting on the town hall for the obligatory
double-decker parade with the trophy in the city centre. Even following
a Cup final triumph, and Shankly’s mad and inspired speeches about
how we, the fans of the ‘Pool, were stronger and more passionate
even than Mao’s Red Army (which division were they in?), fans, players
and football staff, well, they soon just melted away, they disappeared
into pubs and local neighbourhoods. Goodbye to all that: then it
was cricket, Ken Barrington, Cowdrey and John Edrich, at least until
late August. (One or two footballers even played professional cricket
in those days.) Few top footballers left in the close season unless,
of course, the club wanted rid of them. No one could leave. Few
new players, if any, arrived. Managers were generally secure and
resolutely in charge. Largely anonymous chairmen wrote gnomic match-programme
notes and made sure the pies were hot. We expected the same guys
to return, reassuringly, to do battle again in the following campaign.
This was football. . . . and this is now Recalling all this 1960s material is not simply
an exercise in pleasurable nostalgia – though I have enjoyed it,
and it is nostalgia. And there is, clearly, a burgeoning market
for this sort of fans’ exploration of the game’s allegedly ‘warmer’
past.1 My recalling the 1960s is more a marker for talking about
what is different about 1990s football – and about England, itself
– and to warn against the kind of ‘back to the future’ theorising
which idealises and reifies the past (when, exactly, was the game
more ‘democratic’ and transparent?) and which often accompanies
‘serious’ debate about what is wrong with the game today and how
we should try to solve its various ‘problems’. I have also, purposely, used the 1960s here because
those who enjoy remembering the so-called ‘pre-commercial’ variant
of the sport, and who seem to yearn for its return, tend conveniently
to bypass aspects of the game’s real difficulties of the 1970s and
1980s and retreat to an earlier, happier, period. Or else, as Ian
Taylor has pointed out, they tend to idealise terrace culture of
that time, draining it of its often racist and violent excess.2
The message here seems to be about a preferred return to the more
innocent pre-teens of the sport rather than to its troubled adolescence.
Here, though, some of the real problems begin. Little of this kind
of thinking has any useful purchase, I would argue, on producing
realistic policies for football in the 1990s. So, what is different about football today? Too
many things to cover in a short chapter. Let us mention just a few
here. For one thing, increasingly, the sun seldom sets on the sport
in the national consciousness these days. Rather than disappear,
and give way, reasonably, to other seasonal sporting interests after
the Cup final, top football players now seem to move into even sharper
media focus at the season’s end. TV coverage of post-season competitions
(new tournaments, exhibition games, friendlies) and media excitement
about, and appetite for, football and ‘news’ about football proliferates
– especially as the fortunes of satellite operators, such as BSkyB,
have become increasingly indistinguishable from the success of its
football coverage, and as other marginalised TV outlets scramble
for any available ‘live’ football opportunities. FIFA and UEFA summer
events have multiplied. Football has become a 12-month sport, both
in terms of extended playing periods, and in terms of its non-stop
media promotion. This 12-month football cycle is partly due, too,
however, to the new commercial imperatives and the increasingly
‘global’ reach of top English clubs (Manchester United play matches
for sponsors in Australia, China and Hong Kong; they open up new
merchandise outlets in South-East Asia, etc). But it is also connected
to the inexorable movement of top players into the sort of media-orchestrated
realms of the culture of celebrity, unmatched even by George Best
in the 1960s: the summer ‘royal’ wedding of Victoria Adams and David
Beckham; Michael Owen’s Boyzone-like international fanclubs; Ian
Wright’s dreadful TV shows, etc. Football ‘personalities’ exert
an extraordinary sporting and cultural hegemony these days, colouring
front and back pages, and offering hours of speculation and ad-hoc
coverage on TV and radio, both in and out of season. And this all-year-round cycle is connected, too,
to struggles over the effective commercial control and the intellectual
property rights of the sport and its players – the so-called new
global ‘economies of signs and space’.3 Today, these intense struggles,
over the ownership of sporting images and brands, involve agents,
clubs, national associations, international confederations, transnational
corporations, sponsors and, increasingly, international media moguls.
Players and their advisors are also increasingly aware of the growing
value of their own commodification. The latest expression of this
has come in the so-called ‘player power’ transfer cases in England
in 1999, involving Nicolas Anelka, Jimmy Hasselbaink and even, briefly,
18-year-old Francis Jeffers of Everton, as clubs attune to the full
impact of the Bosman ruling and to a world in which players and
their advisors are much more self-reflexive about shaping their
careers, about the expanding global marketplace for footballers,
and about their alarmingly escalating earning potential. In this
sort of ‘winner-takes-all’4 jungle of the international free market
for scarce sporting talent, clubs are culpable too, paying, as they
do, wildly inflated contracts, and also busily destabilising contracted
players elsewhere while wailing as their own local stars try to
rubbish their contractual commitments. Top players now come and
go pretty much as they like. This model has all the markings of the ‘hyperreal’,
a world in which many quite moderate players grow rich as the dubious
‘democratisation’ offered by wall-to-wall radio and TV supporter
phone-ins, and the desperate media appetite for ‘football copy’,
accelerates managers and coaches into job-threatening ‘crises’ following
even a couple of early defeats. Media talk of possible titles and
trophies follows, correspondingly, at the first small signs of any
real cohesion and success.5 Far from expecting the same players
to return next season for the sake of continuity and team building,
new (increasingly from abroad) signings must be procured by top
clubs in the close season, it is argued, in order to boost season-ticket
sales and to stimulate jaded fan palates and to puff up expectations.
Match-ticket prices, accordingly, escalate. For all the talk about
fans’ reflexive awareness of the real nature of this media circus
or of their anxieties about the ‘business’ of football, nothing
succeeds, it seems, in quelling spectator discontent quite like
a multi-million-pound spending spree. If club chairmen were largely
anonymous patricians in the 1960s, they and their colleagues have
an increasingly high profile and are measured by fans by the depth
of their pockets in the much more cut-throat, media-hyped and ambitious
1990s. As well as these important developments, certainly,
the central role of the FA Cup final and of the BBC itself in uniting
and defining the national audience for sport – and, indeed, the
nation – has diminished markedly since the 1960s.6 In the new competitive
markets for TV sports coverage, the BBC can apparently no longer
even afford to purchase live coverage of the FA Cup final, which
has now gone to ITV and to satellite TV, the latter being the new
power brokers of top sport. There are few fans now who, truth be
told, would probably actually prefer BBC football coverage to that
offered by Sky Sports today, which, notwithstanding the ‘flattening’
hype about all its televised sporting contests,7 has both the necessary
cash and the almost endless air-time to lavish on its prize possessions.
Ironically, Sky also offers young male fans, at least, the prospects
of collective and participatory pub TV coverage, the ‘new terraces’,
in an age of what are for them ‘sanitised’ and allegedly atmosphere-free
all-seater grounds.8 The age of interactive sports coverage on digital
systems, which now allows viewers to control and switch camera angles
on live events and to ‘shop’ for additional information about clubs
and players, will further individualise the experience of the TV
watching of sport as well as add to claims about the ‘empowering’
and ‘skilling’ of the armchair viewer in important ways even relative
to the ‘live’ attender. The future of the BBC and of its public-service
remit are also under deep scrutiny today as TV and radio channels,
lifestyles and choices proliferate in response to pick-and-mix post-national
entertainment and sporting cultural preferences. Recent polls suggest
there is little support, especially among the young, for a non-commercial
public-service channel in the traditional sense.9 This public opposition
to the role of the BBC threatens the extent to which the existence
of national public broadcasting contributed to a sense of a society
‘under control’: of national public institutions being accountable
to a larger public and being influenced by it.10 Top football clubs
also depend, increasingly, of course, on their own TV markets for
finance as the age of independent TV deals and the ‘electronic turnstile’,
or pay-per-view match coverage, looms into view. New partnerships
and new ways of exploiting the football/television relationship
seem likely to emerge directly at clubs as the larger ‘European’
clubs seek competitive advantage and as ‘domestic’ clubs simply
try to hold on. Also, far from being unique these days as it was
in the 1960s, live coverage of the FA Cup final now takes place
alongside literally hundreds of ‘live’ football matches covered
each season by terrestrial, cable, satellite and now digital TV
outlets. Live football on TV is now available – for those who can
pay – pretty much round-the-clock and from all parts of the world.
This part-inversion of the mantra from the 1960s – that the world
was watching our Cup final, and who cares how they play the game
– also reflects how Britain has slowly been opened up to the new
sporting global flows and to foreign influences on how the sport
should be staged and played. In the 1960s, the exotic exceptionality
of foreign players in the FA Cup final – South Africa’s Albert Johanneson,
for Leeds United in 1965, for example – was enough to trigger media
profiles and ‘special’ (often racist) news features. These days,
following a dramatic influx of foreign talent to these shores, it
is not too fanciful to say that English players in FA Cup final
teams can excite media activity for some of the same reasons. Some
committed football viewers in England, newly versed in the nuances
of foreign leagues and in the international trade in top players,
can also now get almost as excited by live TV coverage of, say,
Barcelona v. Real Madrid as they do by any big club clash in England.
Some also travel abroad to watch these international club confrontations,
as global football tourists. Finally, this more ‘globalised’ meshing of previously
diverse interests in football, and the complexities of the struggles
for control and influence in the international game, also challenge
the very integrity of historic national football competitions. Back
in the 1960s this idea – the abuse of a treasured national sporting
ritual – would have seemed incredible. But, in 1999–2000, the FA
Cup, the world’s oldest and most revered knock-out football competition
– now in an era when the knock-out format is not only unloved abroad
but is also regarded as ‘bad business’ – is taking place without
the FA Cup-holders, Manchester United. Extraordinarily, United have
apparently been urged by the competition’s own originators, the
Football Association, to play instead in a FIFA-organised international
club tournament in Brazil. The FA Cup has already been changing slowly in
the new football world. Such recent developments mark not just the
increasing power of top clubs in Europe – a fact already signalled
by the threatened ‘privatisation’, and the subsequent forced reorganisation,
of UEFA club competitions for 1999–2000 – but also the changing
role and priorities of FIFA and of the FA itself. The FA’s sights
here are set squarely – in blinkers, some might say – on attracting
the World Cup finals to England in 2006, hence the ‘sacrifice’ of
the Cup-holders in the 2000 FA Cup. FIFA, strategic and increasingly
compromised ‘guardians’ of national team football,11 but itself
alarmed by the growing influence of the ‘G14’ top clubs in Europe,
harnesses, by way of an England ‘sweetener’, the richest and most
popular club in the world for a prominent FIFA event in Brazil.
And United? Well, they can claim the altruistic defence of the wider
public good, while their sponsors and shareholders rub their hands
at the promised TV exposure in the important new markets in South
America, Australasia and the Asian regions. Fans, being fans, want
United to be World Club champions, sure; but, hey, why can’t we
do it all, they also ask. Regulation and other matters This sort of jockeying and horse trading – the
bargaining of local priorities against international ambitions;
the tensions between club and national team interests; and the new,
highly commercial, global interests of the Football Association
– makes it hard, it seems to me, to argue, as some now do, that
Lancaster Gate itself should be promoted as a serious candidate
for some sort of independent football regulator for football in
England in the 1990s. (I will return to the general question of
regulation in football in a moment.) Remember, also, that it is
the FA which can apparently guarantee lowest ticket prices at the
World Cup finals in England in 2006 of £15 for adults and £9 for
children, while in 1999 some clubs in the FA’s own Premier League
insist, unhindered, on a minimum ticket price of £25 or more. Early
FA Premier League gate returns in 1999, and the dramatic fall-off
in season-ticket-holder renewals at ‘middle-range’ clubs such as
Leicester City, Derby County and Aston Villa, suggest that consumer
limits might already have been reached – and passed – on price,
at least at some clubs at the top level. This does seem to be a
matter largely of price rather than of the ‘unpredictability of
outcome’ arguments which have warned against the dangers of allowing
a small number of rich clubs to dominate domestic competition. The
latter is something which pretty much happens in football around
the world, certainly in Europe. In team sports, its control seems
even only partially effective in countries, such as the USA, which
have ‘closed’ sporting competition, mobile franchises, no competing
international markets for players, and with ceilings to any sort
of progressive, ‘European’ system of promotion and relegation.12 Arguments, generally, for stringent financial regulation
in English football of a kind which is independent of European markets
for sport are, in any case, rather difficult to sustain, not least
because of the various market ‘seepages’ which are likely to occur
– players, income, and so on – but also because of the real and
complex ambivalences which many supporters at top clubs, understandably,
hold towards their own club’s and the game’s future both here and
abroad. These are difficult matters, often expressed in the nature
of the divergences between public issues and private interests.
There are not too many accounts of the ‘new era’ for football which
deal with them at all adequately. Let me say a little more on this. Arguably, much of the critical and often sophisticated
writing on the ‘new business’ of football proceeds, for example,
with apparently little reference to, or understanding of, the social,
political, economic and global shifts which have underpinned and
helped to sustain such developments.13 Such accounts are often impressive
and heartfelt, but they tend to isolate the sport from wider changes,
to be strongly national-based, to begin with unexplained assumptions
or assertions about the ‘rights’ of football fans, and also to have
a powerful masculinist emphasis. They also tend to be quite static
and sometimes fixed in their ideas about late-modern sports fandom.
They often threaten simply to set up, as binary oppositions, for
example, ‘fans’ against ‘consumers’, ‘live’ attenders against TV
fans, and ‘traditional’ supporters (good) against ‘new’ fans (obviously,
bad). They sometimes seem to conflate judgements on claims for fan
‘authenticity’ largely with assessments of their sex and social
class background – and this in a period when actually analysing
and ‘reading’ class is, itself, no simple task. They seem premised,
finally, on what I would contend are rather overly simplistic and
economistic arguments about a new, largely domestic ‘business class’
which has, allegedly, strategically ransacked the sport for profit
in the face of concerted and apparently homogeneous opposition from
‘the fans’ who, themselves, have fully worked through and agreed
upon social democratic (or better) solutions to the sport’s now
rather entrenched inequalities. Despite the important and impressively critical
edge of much of this work and, not least, its conclusions on the
real corrosive effects of the ‘free market’ on football (high ticket
prices, crisis clubs, and so on), I would like to argue we also
need other, much more broadly based, analyses of ‘new’ football
in order to tease out the real significance of recent changes in
the game. Fortunately, other responses to recent developments are
also available. Richard Giulianotti’s complex, sociological and
anthropological, account of football’s international transformation
from a ‘traditional’ sport to its ‘modern’ and, now, ‘postmodern’
forms, for example, has much more to recommend it.14 But it is also
restricted in its usefulness, in my view, by its own ‘masculinist’
frame and, ironically, by the fact that it actually lacks a really
convincing political economy of the changes which have occurred,
admittedly in a global context, at different rates and in different
ways at particular moments in a range of footballing cultures and
economies. John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson’s work on FIFA has
no such problem.15 Instead, it is a sophisticated, invaluable and
properly sociological analysis of transnational political and economic
change in the history, structure and dynamics of one of sport’s,
and the world’s, most powerful and influential non-governmental
organisations. As we have seen, FIFA is now a key actor in the new
socio-economic international relations of football, including club
football. Theorising FIFA’s role in the new future for football
will, surely, have to be a key part of any real understanding of
the reshaping of domestic and international football markets. Ian Taylor’s extremely perceptive and subtly critical
analysis of the emergence of the FA Premier League, and of what
he calls ‘market football’,16 is singled out in its importance by
his unusual determination to move beyond conventional conceptions
of ‘fandom’ and to look at how supporters connect with the sport
at what he calls ‘the level of the imagination’. This is especially
persuasive in this context because, as Taylor argues: If, with the editors of fanzines and the organisers
of the Football Supporters Association, we spend too much time bemoaning
the loss of the ‘true’ terrace football follower we may be missing
the significance of the emergence, rather closer to home, of new
ways of being a fan, for example, and new ways of proclaiming, in
an increasingly globalised world, one’s local origin and identity.17 Accounts of this kind are premised, at least in
part, on associated psycho-social shifts in late-modern identity
formation, including what the sociologist Ulrich Beck has called
the rise of ‘individualisation’.18 One does not have to accept the
dubious premise of the ‘inevitability’ of ‘free markets’,19 or the
quite ridiculous claims about ‘classlessness’ in Britain, or even
cling to the impossibilism of a return to a reworking of the post-war
Keynesian settlement to see, as Will Hutton argued recently,20 that
we are, indeed, living in an age when some of the old parameters
of identity construction, through gender relations and the family,
work, social class and local community networks are, certainly,
eroding or changing. As these old sources change, we are pressed
more to become the creators of our own identities, primarily through
diversifying patterns of leisure and consumption. Hutton and Martin
Jacques21 argue that these shifts can be used to account for the
recent huge rise in the popularity of sport and of personal fitness
and even for the recent growth of individual (over team) sports.
The uncertainty and ‘risk’ involved in the construction
of late-modern identities may also account, of course, for some
of the important new ways that fans now connect with their favoured
football clubs. This is especially the case in relation to the ways
emerging club/fan links might now contradict more normative gender
and class identities, and also the changes in the specifically modernist
ties of family and place which have traditionally connected especially
male football fans with their local clubs. It will not deal, however,
with the very real cleavages which have clearly opened up between
less affluent, local male followers and football clubs at the highest
levels of the sport in England in recent years, and at a time when
inequality in Britain has generally been rising.22 The extent to which such barriers, of price and
ticket access, act alone against live football match attendance,
and can now be said to constitute a key form of ‘social exclusion’
in the 1990s is a moot point.23 This is especially so in the light
of the wide range of other, mediated, relations with football clubs
which are available and which are increasingly mobilised today,
and the arguably much more pressing and more fundamental sources
of social exclusion which have become more solidified in the last
20 years, for example: the relative lack for the urban poor of reliable
forms of employment and decent pay; of good social housing and health
care; of reasonable educational and training opportunities; of public
safety at home and on the street, and so on.24 Certainly, however,
it is undeniable that previously well-established ways of passing
on important traditions of ‘live’ working-class male football support,
specifically from father to son, have indeed been seriously disrupted
in many major English footballing cities in the recent period and
have probably added to the very real sense of social and psychic
isolation of white urban working-class males in Britain in the 1990s.25 Anthony King’s recent work on ‘masculinist’ Manchester
United fans takes up some of these important themes,26 but it is
also significant for the ways it tries to locate the ‘new consumption’
of football within this wider discourse on the post-Fordist transformation
of social and economic relations in Britain, and also of the new
importance of cities and regions – rather than nations – in emerging
new global cultural and economic networks. Again, aspects of King’s
approach are, arguably, overly economistic and, like almost all
accounts of contemporary fan culture, he focuses too much on a relatively
small part of the football audience: young, working-class, white
males who follow a very large club. But he is successful in identifying
both forms of resistance and compliance, for example, among ‘the
lads’ in Manchester to new forms of football consumption. Young
United fans such as these are strongly opposed to aspects of the
new consumption of football – for example, the so-called new ‘consumer’
fans, the excessive merchandising, the seats – but they are also
very proud of the business acumen and success of the club’s administrators,
and even of its stadium and products. They see the club in a very
new cultural and market position vis-à-vis other large European
clubs. In this sense, even ‘masculinist’ fandom in the 1990s both
resists and, paradoxically, contributes to the new consumer trends
in the sport and, indeed, to its ‘globalisation’. King also highlights, importantly, the new preferred
guise, for these fans, of United as a post-national, regional but
fully European club, a club which now increasingly strains at its
identification by the British media as a signifier for England,
or a ‘representative’, for example in European club competitions,
of the FA Premier League itself. Instead, the club signifies for
these supporters, specifically, new and important aspects of the
search for ways of expressing a properly European cultural identity
which both has strong regional resonances with United’s north-west
Manchester location but which also profoundly bypasses the national.
Talk here, therefore, in any simple terms at least about the regulation
of football in a national context is to lose sight not only of the
new global economics of top football but also of the extent to which
the new traditions of articulating and expressing attachments to
major football clubs – and also what such clubs now mean to their
followers – already extend some way beyond the domain of nation
states and of their own signifiers. Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to look at recent
changes in global, ‘market’ football by comparing it with the national,
‘Keynesian’ model of football in England in the 1960s. I have used
a case study of the FA Cup because of recent indications that the
new conditions of ‘market’ football require that the current holders
of the cup, Manchester United, will play elsewhere during the 1999–2000
competition. The role of the FA itself in United’s absence from
its own prized national competition reveals, I have argued, both
the complexities of new post-national football tensions, and reasons
why the FA may not be the most appropriate choice for a new and
effective regulatory role in English football. I have also argued that journalistic and some academic
accounts of recent changes in the game, impressive as they often
are, are much too narrowly focused and too economistic, and that
they miss, for example, important aspects of the effects in sport
of ‘de-traditionalisation’, as a social and economic process which
creates the conditions, not only for increasing personal insecurity,
but also for the ‘reflexive’ renegotiation of personal identity
– perhaps through sport and sports spectatorship.27 The obvious
need for some form of regulation in football, of a kind which limits
some of the recent damaging effects of the free market – and of
increasing general inequality in Britain in the 1990s – must be
assessed against this wider canvas of recent social and economic
changes. It must, if it is to be effective and relevant, I have
argued, take into account, above all, the changing nature and context
of football ‘fandom’ in the 1990s and the new post-national interpenetrations
of football cultures. At lower levels of the league structure in England,
where finances are especially tight, there is a good reason to argue
that the old ‘commercial’ models for smaller football clubs are
now simply outmoded, and that imaginative new forms of club control
and financing – which centrally involve supporters and other local
stakeholders – are likely to be much more desirable and more successful
in the longer term than any simple reintroduction of traditional
forms of economic cross-subsidisation between professional clubs.28
Any economic support system linking larger clubs with smaller clubs
must deal, it seems clear, with issues of club structure and control
as well as with simple finance. Fans, it should also be noted, can
be strikingly conservative, too, even when potentially ‘progressive’
changes to club structures are in the offing. Finally, it should be clear that – even if Merseysiders
and others who have suffered in the 1990s might want it – there
can be no return to the English footballing ‘island state’ of the
1960s. This is not to accede, limply, to the view that ‘nothing
can be done’. Far from it. It is simply to recognise that the new
millennium holds the sorts of new challenges for the game at national
and ‘global’ levels which will have to be very differently addressed
from those faced when Hunt, St John, Yeats and their colleagues
at Shankly’s inspirational Liverpool were in their pomp. Author’s note: I would like to thank Stephen Hopkins
for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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