Abstract
The decisive changes of the past twenty-five years in English football have been brought about by a combination of developments. After three horrible stadium catastrophes in the 1980s, the Taylor Report suggested measures which paved the way for an increased regulation of the spaces of football. A number of reasons furthered their implication, for example the (tele)visual representation of the World Cup 1990 in Italy, which painted a tempting alternative to the state of English football, or the neoliberal opening of television markets which fuelled the establishment of the Premier League in 1992. This chapter discusses the context of these interconnected developments, especially the drastically accelerated commercialisation of the game and its impact on football fandom.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The 96th victim, having fallen into a coma in April 1989, died in 1993 when his life support machines were turned off.
- 2.
It is a sad irony that Bradford’s promotion to a higher division meant that this was the last match before Valley Parade would fall under the jurisdiction of the ‘Green Guide’ with stricter requirements in terms of stadium safety: “Metal girders for a new roof already lay outside the ground waiting to be fitted in the summer” (Caton 2012: 8).
- 3.
Notwithstanding the multiplicity of factors that contributed to the catastrophe, interpretations that try to clear English supporters of any blame have to be seen as dangerously inadequate, yet are still in circulation. See John Reid’s reading of the incident: “The Liverpool fans were penned into a dangerously overcrowded section of terracing and, in an attempt to gain more space, they broke down a flimsy barrier. Unfortunately they clashed with Juventus fans who were in the next section. During this clash an unsafe wall collapsed, with fatal consequences” (2009: 11).
- 4.
Although the involvement of Liverpool F.C. and its fans in both Heysel and Hillsborough is certainly a coincidence (enabled, of course, by the club’s frequent appearances in high-profile matches), this fit a dominant discourse: Northern England, first and foremost Liverpool, was suffering worst from economic recession (Belchem 2007: 227–228), and Liverpudlians, especially working-class football supporters, were expected to behave accordingly, i.e. anti-socially.
- 5.
The club based at Hillsborough.
- 6.
Hamilton charts and analyses the public infatuation with and later condemnation of Gascoigne, with Italia ’90 as the short-lived climax of the midfielder’s career. The reference to John Milton (‘Agonistes’) hints at a fallen hero “more sinned against than sinning” (Hamilton 1993: back cover).
- 7.
An annual opera festival in East Sussex.
- 8.
- 9.
The acronym here stands for ‘Affordable Football Club’.
- 10.
An example which shows the limitations of fan-ownership are Ebbsfleet United, purchased by fans via the internet portal myfootballclub.com. There, fans experimented with complete democracy from 2008 until 2013, voting on everything from transfer deals to team selection and tactics (Ruddock et al. 2010: 324), soon realising that flat hierarchies, as practised in Wimbledon or Manchester, work better than no hierarchies at all.
References
Bairner, A. (2009). Re-appropriating Gramsci. Marxism, hegemony and sport. In B. Carrington & I. McDonald (Eds.), Marxism, cultural studies and sport (pp. 195–212). Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Bale, J. (1993). Sport, space and the city. London and New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, J. (1993). The transparency of evil. Essays on extreme phenomena (J. Benedict, Trans.). London and New York: Verso.
Bazell, M. (2008). Theatre of silence. The lost soul of football. Cambridge: Pegasus.
Belchem, J. (2007). The new Livercool: History, culture and identity on Merseyside. In C. Ehland (Ed.), Thinking northern. Textures of identity in the North of England (pp. 217–238). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Berlin, P. (2013). Money, money, money: The English Premier League. In R. Steen, J. Novick, & H. Richards (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to football (pp. 121–135). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bower, T. (2007). Broken dreams. Vanity, greed and the souring of British football. London: Pocket Books.
Boyle, R., & Haynes, R. (2009). Power play. Sport, the media and popular culture (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bridgewater, S. (2010). Football brands. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brown, A. (1998). United we stand. Some problems with fan democracy. In A. Brown (Ed.), Fanatics! Power, identity and fandom in football (pp. 50–67). London: Routledge.
Buford, B. (1991). Among the thugs. London: Secker & Warburg.
Carrington, B. (2009). Sport without final guarantees: Cultural studies/Marxism/sport. In B. Carrington & I. McDonald (Eds.), Marxism, cultural studies and sport (pp. 15–31). Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Caton, P. (2012). Stand up sit down. A choice to watch football. Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador.
Chisari, F. (2004). ‘The cursed cup’: Italian responses to the 1985 Heysel disaster. Soccer & Society, 5(2), 201–218.
Cloake, M. (2014). Taking our ball back. English football’s culture wars. Self-published.
Conn, D. (2005). The beautiful game? Searching for the soul of football. London: Yellow Jersey Press.
Conn, D. (2011, August 16). The Premier League has priced out fans, young and old. Guardian. Retrieved October 25, 2014, from http://www.theguardian.com/sport/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2011/aug/16/premier-league-football-ticket-prices
Crabbe, T., & Brown, A. (2004). ‘You’re not welcome anymore’: The football crowd, class and social exclusion. In S. Wagg (Ed.), British football and social exclusion (pp. 26–46). Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Crowther, P. (2006). Our club our rules. FC United of Manchester. By the fans for the fans. Self-published.
Davidson, N., & Hunt, S. (2008). Modern football is rubbish. An A–Z of all that is wrong with ‘the beautiful game’. Cheltenham: Sports Books.
Dempsey, P., & Reilly, K. (1998). Big money, beautiful game. Saving football from itself. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Dunning, E., Murphy, P., & Williams, J. (1986). Spectator violence at football matches: Towards a sociological explanation. The British Journal of Sociology, 37(2), 221–244.
Dunning, E., Murphy, P., Williams, J., & Maguire, J. (1983). Football hooligan violence before the First World War: Preliminary sociological reflections on some research findings. In A. Tomlinson (Ed.), Explorations in football culture (pp. 13–49). Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association.
FC United of Manchester. (2012). The manifesto: Who we are and what we mean. Retrieved March 23, 2012, from http://www.fc-utd.co.uk/manifesto.php
French, P. (2006). Prawns in the game. How football got where it is today. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Media.
Goldblatt, D. (2006). The ball is round. A global history of football. London: Penguin.
Hamil, S. (1999). A whole new ball game? Why football needs a regulator. In S. Hamil, J. Michie, & C. Oughton (Eds.), A game of two halves? The business of football (pp. 23–39). Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Hamil, S., Michie, J., & Oughton, C. (Eds.). (1999). A game of two halves? The business of football. Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Hamilton, I. (1993). Gazza agonistes. GRANTA, 45, 9–125.
Hillsborough Independent Panel. (2012). The report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel. Retrieved December 27, 2014, from http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/report/HIP_report.pdf
Hobsbawm, E. (1997). Introduction: Inventing traditions (11983). In E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (Eds.), The invention of tradition (pp. 1–14). Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
Holt, R. (1989). Sport and the British. A modern history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Home Office. (1985). Committee of inquiry into crowd safety and control at sports grounds. Interim report. Chairman: Mr Justice Popplewell. London: HMSO.
Home Office. (1990). The Hillsborough stadium disaster. 15 April 1989. Inquiry by the Rt Hon Lord Justice Taylor. Final report. London: HMSO.
Hornby, N. (1992). Fever pitch. London: Gollancz.
Horton, E. (1997). Moving the goalposts. Football’s exploitation. Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Inglis, S. (1996). Football grounds of Britain. London: Collins Willow.
Irwin, C. (2006). Sing when you’re winning. Football fans, terrace songs and a search for the soul of soccer. London: Deutsch.
Judt, T. (2010). Postwar. A history of Europe since 1945. London: Vintage.
Kech, C. (2015). Heysel and its symbolic value in Europe’s collective memory. In W. Pyta & N. Havemann (Eds.), European football and collective memory (pp. 152–170). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kelner, M. (2012). Sit down and cheer. A history of sport on TV. London: Bloomsbury.
Kennedy, P., & Kennedy, D. (2016). Football in neo-liberal times. A Marxist perspective on the European football industry. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Keoghan, J. (2014). Punk football. The rise of fan ownership in English football. Durrington: Pitch.
King, A. (2002). The end of the terraces. The transformation of English football in the 1990s. London and New York: Leicester University Press.
Kuhn, G. (2011). Soccer vs. the state. Tackling football and radical politics. Oakland: PM Press.
Lee, S. (1998). Grey shirts to grey suits. The political economy of English football in the 1990s. In A. Brown (Ed.), Fanatics! Power, identity and fandom in football (pp. 32–49). London: Routledge.
Lovejoy, J. (2011). Glory, goals and greed. Twenty years of the Premier League. Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Lyons, A. (2014, November). Editorial: Gate crash. When Saturday Comes, No. 333, 7.
Malcolm, D., Jones, I., & Waddington, I. (2000). The people’s game? Football spectatorship and demographic change. In J. Garland, D. Malcolm, & M. Rowe (Eds.), The future of football: Challenges for the twenty-first century (pp. 129–143). London and Portland: Cass.
Michie, J., & Walsh, A. (1999). What future for football? In S. Hamil, J. Michie, & C. Oughton (Eds.), A game of two halves? The business of football (pp. 209–224). Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Millward, P. (2011). The global football league. Transnational networks, social movements and sport in the new media age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Parsons, T. (1994). Dispatches from the front line of popular culture. London: Virgin.
Piskurek, C. (2011). Sing when you’re standing. Football chants and the state of fan culture. Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 18(1), 57–67.
Porro, N., & Conti, F. (2014). Italia novanta. ‘Magic nights’, globalization and a country at the crossroads. In S. Rinke & K. Schiller (Eds.), The FIFA World Cup 1930–2010. Politics, commerce, spectacle and identities (pp. 279–297). Göttingen: Wallstein.
Redhead, S. (1997). Post-fandom and the millennial blues. The transformation of soccer culture. London: Routledge.
Reid, J. (2009). Reclaim the game. London: London Socialist Party.
Ridley, I. (2012). There’s a golden sky. How twenty years of the Premier League have changed football forever (12011). London: Bloomsbury.
Ruddock, A., Hutchins, B., & Rowe, D. (2010). Contradictions in media sport culture: The reinscription of football supporter traditions through online media. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(3), 323–339.
Scraton, P. (2009). Hillsborough. The truth. Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Shaw, A. (2006). Standing to lose (11998). In A. Lyons, M. Ticher, R. Guy, & E. Upright (Eds.), Power, corruption and pies. Volume two. The best writing from the second decade of When Saturday Comes (pp. 30–32). London: WSC Books.
Storey, J. (2006). Cultural theory and popular culture. An introduction (4th ed.). Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Taylor, I. (1989). Hillsborough, 15 April 1989: Some personal contemplations. New Left Review, 177, 89–110.
Taylor, I. (1991). English football in the 1990s: Taking Hillsborough seriously? In J. Williams & S. Wagg (Eds.), British football and social change: Getting into Europe (pp. 3–24). Leicester, London and New York: Leicester University Press.
Taylor, M. (2008). The association game. A history of British football. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Tempany, A. (2016). And the sun shines now. How Hillsborough and the Premier League changed Britain. London: Faber and Faber.
The Football Association. (1991). The blueprint for the future of football. London: The Football Association.
The Football League. (1990). One game, one team, one voice. Managing football’s future. London: The Football League.
The Sunday Times. (1985, May 19). Editorial. The Sunday Times, 16a.
Varley, N. (2000). Parklife. A search for the heart of football. London: Penguin.
Wagg, S. (2004). Fat city? British football and the politics of social exclusion at the turn of the twenty-first century. In S. Wagg (Ed.), British football and social exclusion (pp. 1–25). Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Walvin, J. (1986). Football and the decline of Britain. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.
Wilson, B. (2014, May 22). Premier League riches await Championship playoff winner. BBC News. Retrieved October 29, 2014, from http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27516368
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Piskurek, C. (2018). The Recent History of English Football. In: Fictional Representations of English Football and Fan Cultures. Football Research in an Enlarged Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76762-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76762-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76761-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76762-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)