A Game of Two Halves

Football Fandom, Television and Globalisation

Cornel Sandvoss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134378319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della televisione

First audience studies book to examine football as the most popular (and lucrative) television genre in the world Analyses football and its fans as a case study of modern life and globalisation

Chapter 1: Introduction

Football and modernity

The day I commenced the research for this book in August 1998 I arrived at the BayArena, home of German first division side Bayer Leverkusen. The name of the ground had been changed at the beginning of the season to promote the team’s sponsor and owner – the pharmaceutical multinational Bayer. I had bought a season ticket for the largest section of the recently redeveloped ground named ‘Family Street’. Nothing in the crowd savoured of the scenes of football-related violence and hooliganism that had come to sum up the public image of the sport in the years before and after the Heysel disaster in which 39 fans were killed in 1985.¹ Even the overt display of masculinity and sexist chauvinism so often associated with football fandom seemed strangely lacking. Indeed, the spectators in ‘Family Street’ accurately reflected its name. Families, fathers with their sons and daughters, mothers and their children slowly took up their seats, protected from the warm August sunshine by the ground’s glass roofing, and avidly followed the pre-game entertainment on newly installed giant video screens. And in contrast to the 1980s, when the term ‘rushing’ referred to the practice of rival fan groups storming sections of the ground occupied by fans of the opposing team, there was very a different ‘rush’ at the BayArena. At half time hordes of fans, often driven by their children, fought their way to a newly built onsite McDonald’s restaurant. It was here, under the golden arches of McDonald’s, that my research began.

As spectator football is subject to dramatic transformations, it has become increasingly popular. Football fandom now crosses age, gender, class and geographic divides. Even in the United States, where ‘eleven men in funny shorts’ have traditionally evoked more irritation than enthusiasm, officials of the newly founded professional soccer league now proudly state that soccer’s popularity has overtaken traditional North American sports such as ice hockey.² If the first day of my research had indicated football’s commercial nature, the last day of my fieldwork, which I spent among an enthusiastic crowd of DC United fans at Washington’s RFK Stadium – 43 games, 17 stadia, and 15 months later – powerfully illustrated the global state of the game. Yet what are the premises of the global presence and appeal of professional football clubs? How do football clubs form the ground for the fandom of millions of supporters from different social, cultural and geographic backgrounds? What role do they come to play in the everyday life of their audiences? To investigate the reasons for football’s outstanding popularity, and the social and cultural consequences of its unrivalled standing within popular culture, is the aim of this book.

The rise and fall of cultural practices such as football fandom is not coincidental, nor can they be explained by looking at such practices in isolation from their historical framing. Rather they are powerful reflections of historical, social and economic conditions. With this conviction at heart, the following investigation seeks to explore the context of football fandom in the modern era – in particular focusing on the role of television as the single most important factor behind the transformation of football in the past 50 years. Football fandom is not only a remarkable phenomenon of (post-)modern life, but also a signifier of its very essence. This book serves as a case study of those macro transformations crucial to the changing nature of football fandom today: consumption-based identity formation and narcissism, globalization and rationalization. As such, I hope this book presents readers not only with a new perspective on football fandom – which in part also translates to other (team) sports – but also provides another piece in the puzzle of understanding modernity.

The empirical basis of this discussion and its theoretical abstraction derives from 15 months of qualitative research I conducted in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. During this period I focused on two selected clubs – Chelsea Football Club and TSV Bayer 04 Leverkusen – and their fans around the world, as well as fans of other clubs within the respective regions of these clubs. In addition I also interviewed a number of fans in the newly founded Major League Soccer in the United States, here focusing on fans of Washington-based DC United. In total I interviewed 89 fans and conducted 44 participant observations. A discussion of my methodology can be found in the Appendix.

In its methodological and theoretical framing, this book is thus closer to audience studies and the sociology of consumption than most academic work on football and its fans to date. Following the growing attention to violence among spectators, the study of hooliganism has long been the core concern of academic investigations of football fans. Stuart Hall’s exploration (1979) of the interrelation between hooliganism and its media coverage aside, approaches to football hooliganism ranging from Ian Taylor’s influential analysis (1971) in which he identifies hooliganism as a response to social control, to various recent accounts of spectator violence (Murphy et al. 1990; Dunning 1994; Giulianotti et al. 1994; Kerr 1994; Roversi 1994; see also Giulianotti 2000) are largely criminological,³ and hence are of limited value in the analysis of fandom as broader social phenomenon.⁴ A second strain of research focusing on spectator football consists of the various studies of the political economy of the game. Arnold (1991), Alan Tomlinson (1991), King (1998) and Lee (1998) explore the political economy of football in Britain, with other work focusing on the institutional basis of local football cultures in Europe (Gehrmann 1988; Horak 1994; Lanfranchi 1994a, 1994b) and around the world (Vamplew 1994; Mason 1995; BarOn 1997; Leite Lopes 1997; Nkwi and Vidacs 1997; Tuastad 1997; Colombijn 1999). In addition recent work has explored aspects of the global interconnectivities of contemporary sport and football (Harvey and Houle 1994; Rowe et al. 1994; Williams 1994a; Blake 1995; Tomlinson 1996; Miller et al. 2001). Finally an increasing body of work has been dedicated to the symbiosis between sports and the media (Klatell and Marcus 1988; Barnett 1990).⁵ In contrast to recent historical trends in media and communications research most of these studies privilege textual (Colley and Davies 1982; O’Connor and Boyle 1993; Maguire et al. 1999) and institutional analysis (Sugden and Tomlinson 1998) over audience research. Their focus lies with the text (football) and its production rather than the audience (fans).

While providing a useful background for my discussion the methodological basis of such work limits its benefit for our understanding of football fandom. As Rose and Friedman (1994: 34) argue, ‘it would be simplistic to assume that any spectator who derives pleasures from television sports spectatorship is unproblematically taking up the hegemonic values of television sport’. The above studies, whether focusing on media texts or institutions, have little to say about fans themselves, on what grounds their fandom is constructed and what role football occupies in their lifeworld. In order to answer such questions we have, as Jhally (1989) argues, to progress beyond mere institutional and textual analysis.⁶ What is needed is an exploration of the cultural, social and economic framing of football as well as its macro premises that manifest themselves in the everyday life of fans. Before we can engage in the detailed analysis of contemporary football fandom, it is, however, important to identify the historical framing of spectator football as well as of the media that have entered a symbiotic relationship with football. Their historical condition constitutes the basis for understanding their contemporary condition. Let me therefore briefly summarize the historical background of the rise of football and television.

Excursus 1: Association football and modernity

Life in the Middle Ages was marked by an acute lack of mobility for the vast majority of the population. Yet, despite frequent hardships, crop failures, epidemics and other incalculable threats, most members of medieval agricultural societies had considerable amounts of free time at their disposal. One form of entertainment that evolved in this condition of limited mobility yet substantial spare time was the practice of ‘folk football’. Organized on a local level involving a vast number of participants, folk football first emerged in medieval England (Schulze-Marmeling 1992), although its precise time and place of origin remain contested.⁷ Further evidence of the proliferation of folk football can be found in the various highway acts and other legal initiatives that sought to ban football. Both Guttmann (1994: 7) and Marples (1954: 28) refer to the ban enforced by the Mayor of London in 1314 as the first written documentation of football.

The authorities’ dislike of folk football is hardly surprising. The game was marked by an almost complete absence of rules and regulations. Neither the space of competition nor the number of participants was defined while the length of a game was, if at all, determined by sunset. Victory was secured by carrying the ball into the opponents’ village or half of town. The violent conduct of folk football often caused homicides and injuries (Elias and Dunning 1986; Holt 1989: 36–7). Accordingly, the geographer John Bale (1993: 13) has interpreted early folk football as a mass participation event blurring distinctions between actor and spectator reminiscent of the tradition of carnival – a point also made by Schulze-Marmeling (1992) who emphasizes the ‘subversiveness’ of the game. The carnivalesque element of football in the Middle Ages as a temporary inversion of the social order thus reflects the lack of physical and social mobility in the feudal societies of medieval Europe.

With the turn of the seventeenth century the established balance between work and leisure came under the pressure of various economic, social and cultural transformations. The growing number of puritans targeted Sunday afternoon amusement and sports and successfully introduced the sad Sabbath (Marples 1954). Puritanism also prepared the ground for amateurism and related ideas of sporting ‘fairness’ and ‘honesty’ as ‘play ethic became the ultimate mirror image of Protestant work ethic’ (Brailsford 1991: 26; see also Overman 1997). The spread of the Protestant work ethic in turn prepared the ground for the dramatic economic, social and cultural transformations that were both the premise and the consequence of rational industrialism and industrial modernity. While the introduction of industrial technologies of production did not result in the immediate disappearance of workers’ freedom (Thompson 1974), most of the population were increasingly deprived of actual spaces of leisure. Cunningham observes how in the later eighteenth century,

The wealthy tried, successfully in many instances, to appropriate … public spaces for their own exclusive use, to privatise them. At the same time … they frowned on and became suspicious of public gatherings of the lower orders for whatever purpose. The result was that leisure became increasingly class-bound. The leisure class retreated to the home or to those fenced-off private enclosures … and those excluded sought new patrons in publicans … leisure became class-bound and impenetrable for those outside the class in question.

(Cunningham 1980: 76)

Through the proliferation of private property and the measurement of space, the lower classes were thus forced into the requirements of capitalistic rationalization. The pressures from the new forces of capitalist regimentation through privatization and changing work patterns thereby eroded the basis of the unregulated leisure activity of folk football and eventually led to its near complete extinction by the 1830s (Vamplew 1987). The unregulated practice of folk football could no longer be accommodated in the emerging patterns of industrial life. Instead, driven by middle-class utilitarians concerned about the precarious leisure situation of the working classes and their supposed resulting moral decline, new forms of ‘rational recreation’ (Cunningham 1980: 76) incorporated the principles of rationalization and industrial production that had dramatically transformed the patterns of work and leisure. Unsurprisingly, many of the new forms of rational recreation originated in one of the earliest rational, bureaucratized institutions of modernity: public schools.

The first known reference to football at public schools was made as early as 1519 by William Horman, then headmaster of Eton (Marples 1954); however, the modern form of the game did not evolve at public schools until between 1750 and 1840 (Dunning 1971: 134). During this period football emerged as a suitable vehicle to exercise authority and control over often rebellious upper-class pupils (Taylor 1992), an observation that has attracted particular attention within figurational sociology, which has interpreted modern sport as a manifestation of what Norbert Elias (1986a, 1986b, 1994) has famously called the ‘civilizing process’. The transformation of the medieval ball-kicking practice into modern football at public schools was part of the bourgeois struggle for emancipation and capitalist hegemony, and is thus reflective of what figurational sociologists have described as processes of pacification, privatization, commercialization and individualization (Maguire 1992). Dunning’s and Elias’s work reminds us that the technological innovations of previous centuries, especially the introduction of the mechanical measurement of space and time (cf. Giddens 1990), were necessary premises for the development of modern football, but they were not sufficient premises in themselves. The rise of football was as much an expression of the attempts of an enlightened middle class to establish new social and cultural values of rationalism as it was a reflection of technological change. If we understand technologies as (rational) systems of organization as Simpson (1995) suggests, the crucial technological advance in the proliferation of modern football was born of the institutional network of public schools and universities: in 1842 representatives of 14 colleges who had played various different ball games at public schools met in Cambridge and agreed on a common set of rules (Guttmann 1994). These rules, updated by an ad hoc committee in 1863, still form the code of rules of contemporary Association football or, as it has become known in North America, soccer. The interlocal network of the upper classes in early modernity thus led to the standardization of the game that made its future supra-local and transnational diffusion possible. In this sense the Protestant work ethic, the industrial restructuring of work and leisure practices, and technological change constituted the central premises for the rise of the modern leisure practice of football.

Clock-regulated labour in the age of laissez-faire capitalism had left workers without leisure time and recreational opportunities (Riordan 1993). However, by the mid-nineteenth century – as processes of industrial production became increasingly complex and diversified leading to a growing need for skilled, less easily replaceable workers – the working classes successfully campaigned for free Saturday afternoons, shorter working hours and increased real wages (Brailsford 1991). Still newly emerging leisure practices bore little if any resemblance to pre-industrial times. The overall amount of leisure time had been reduced and in contrast to the Middle Ages work and leisure were now sharply demarcated. As former spaces of leisure had been commodified by the upper and middle classes at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the working classes were forced to take up new leisure practices. They soon found a new pastime that reflected the needs of the new patterns of everyday life in industrial society: spectator sport.

Participation in sports remained a minority activity throughout the nineteenth century (Vamplew 1987). However, spectator sports offered an alternative form of entertainment. As much as working life had been rationalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the division between players and spectators – fuelled by the same underlying principles of rationalization and Taylorization – now led to rationalization and commercialization of leisure. One of the first professional English clubs, Aston Villa, introduced gate money in 1874 and by the late 1870s crowds of 20,000 were commonplace. Two decades later an average of 50,000 attended league games (Guttmann 1986). In addition to the introduction of the half-Saturday, another important premise in the rise of spectator sport was technological change. The rationalization of everyday life in the late nineteenth century including areas such as transport and housing resulted in the need for new, domestic technologies. New urban leisure markets emerged, as the share of the urban population in England rose from 50.1 per cent in 1851 to 77.0 per cent in 1901 (Vamplew 1987: 13). The rise of professional football was further embedded in the introduction of a nationwide railway system in England (Jones 1988: 44). Improved public transport enabled thousands of spectators to gather in a particular space. Football stadia evolved soon after the introduction of gate money had created both the need to fence off non-paying spectators as well as the financial means to improve facilities and stands. Together public transport and the public stadium (even if admission was charged) constituted the first mass medium of modern sport.

Association football quickly spread throughout the British Isles (Wagg 1995a), with standardization and bureaucratization providing the crucial premises in the supra-local adoption of football. Moreover, Britain’s commitment to free trade and its role as core industrial power of the time ensured the quick diffusion of the game by British tradesmen, colonials and emigrants throughout the world (Birley 1995). Football, following the path of modern industrialism, spread from England and Wales to Europe (Duke 1995; Lanfranchi 1995; Wagg 1995b), North America (Waldstein and Wagg 1995) and South America (Guttmann 1994; Del Burgo 1995), and eventually the African continent (Stuart 1995). Accounts of the diffusion of the game to different parts of the world underline the intrinsic interrelation between football and industrial modernity. As more and more regions became integrated into the emerging capitalist global economy (Pohl 1989) the leisure practice of football – standardized in its rules and rationalized in its demands on time and space – constituted the cultural equivalent to the changing processes of industrial production.

The rise of football as a form of mass leisure thus reflected the dramatic transformations of modern work and leisure. Yet the role of football’s agency in the proliferation of industrialism and capitalism remains controversial. In his neo-Marxist analysis Brohm (1978) identifies sport as a manifestation of bourgeois industrial society. To Brohm, ‘the vertical hierarchical structure of sport models the social structure of bureaucratic capitalism, with its system of competitive selection, promotion, hierarchy and social advancement’ (Brohm 1978: 49). Thus sport and recreation have served to reproduce structures of (capitalist) domination (Jarvie and Maguire 1993). In contrast, Guttmann (1986) employs a Weberian rather than Marxist framework. He identifies modern sport as the consequence of quantification, specialization and the quest for records (Guttmann 1979). Thus Guttmann argues that modern sport is based upon bureaucratization and rationalization rather than capitalism in itself, although this distinction remains, of course, problematic. Either way, we can safely conclude that the transformation of unregulated mass participation folk football into the rationalized, institutionalized and bureaucratized practice of Association football reflected the modern and rationalized conditions of production and consumption in industrial societies – regardless of whether we emphasize the role of capitalism or of industrialism in this process. Hence football is rooted in the industrial system of modernity organized on the basis of what Weber (1921) has termed Zweckrationalität (formal rationality).⁸

Excursus 2: television and modern everyday life

At the turn of the twentieth century, centralized, urban leisure started to compete with more decentralized forms of consumption aided by the rise of new technologies such as the telegraph and railways (Ingham and Beamish 1993). New communication technologies helped to establish the national dimension of sport by enabling sports results to be communicated instantly over vast distances. Radio reporting was immediate and, crucially, national rather than local. When Preston North End won the FA Cup in 1938, many listeners in Britain could for the first time follow the event on their radio sets simultaneously.⁹ Thus mass communication crucially contributed to the social and territorial diffusion of football. In a similar vein Lever and Wheeler (1993) outline the impact of mass media on modern sports in the United States:

One catalyst for changing cultural values was the emerging system of mass communica...