Football and Community in the Global Context

Studies in Theory and Practice

Adam Brown, Tim Crabbe, Gavin Mellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415448161
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317969044
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

Football clubs across the world continue to embody many of the collective symbols, identifications and processes of connectivity which have long been associated with the notion of 'community'. In recent years, however, the very term 'community' has become the focus of renewed interest within popular discourse and amongst academics, politicians and policy makers. It has become something of a 'buzz' word, wheeled out as both a lament to more certain times and as an appeal to a better future: a term imbued with all the richness associated with human interaction.

'Community' has also been employed increasingly within football, for instrumental reasons concerned with policy and stadium redevelopment, and in broader rhetoric about clubs, their localities and fans.

This book brings together a range of key debates around contemporary understandings of 'community' in world football. Split into four sections, it considers

1. political and theoretical debates around football and its connection with community;
2. different national and ethnic football communities;
3. instrumental uses of football to bridge gaps within and between groups;
4. future directions in the football and community debate.

This book was published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

Introduction: football and community – practical and theoretical considerations

Adam Brown, Tim Crabbe and Gavin Mellor

Introduction

During the past 15 years, interest in association football across many areas of the world has risen to a new level. This is manifest in the blanket media coverage that seemingly accompanies every aspect of the elite levels of the game, the increased attendances which have been enjoyed in many countries, and the ritualised identifications with football that have come to permeate wider contemporary social formations. Professional football clubs have been regarded as sites for the expression of common identity for much of the game’s history, and it could be argued that recent developments in and around football have seen this process emphasized with renewed vigour. Football clubs now, as much as ever, embody many of the collective symbols, identifications and processes of connectivity which have long been associated with the notion of ‘community’.

At the same time that ‘community’ connections and identities are being expressed strongly through football though, the very term ‘community’ has itself become the focus of renewed interest within popular discourse and amongst academics, politicians and policy makers. It has become something of a ‘buzz’ word, wheeled out as both a lament to more certain times and as an appeal to a better future: a term which is imbued with all the richness associated with human interaction. Indeed, a ‘crisis of community’ has emerged in many areas of the developed world in recent years in which policy makers have sought to blame crime and ‘anti-social’ behaviour, health problems, poor educational standards and a variety of other ‘social issues’ on the decline of community and civic culture more generally. In this regard, the very notion of ‘community’ is increasingly open to debate as people reflect on what it is to be a member of a community, and what reciprocal responsibilities come with such formations.

It was in this context that we were interested in building upon our own research for the English Football Foundation¹ – which sought to explore the responsibilities that football clubs have for ‘fan’, ‘neighbourhood’ and other types of ‘communities’; the impact that new football stadia have on economic and social regeneration; and the role that professional football clubs have in providing or supporting ‘community services’ such as health, education and community sport development – to consider developments within the global context. Crucially we want to clarify and better understand who ‘football’s communities’ might be, and analyse how these groups of people can be said to constitute distinct and observable community formations.

Before considering the content of individual contributions to this collection, in this introductory essay we aim to set the scene through an analysis of the historiography of writings on football and community and the contribution that mainstream contemporary social theory can make to debates around football and a variety of community formations.

The history of football and community

It is today seen as axiomatic that professional football clubs have deep roots in ‘their communities’. Many of today’s most successful clubs and particularly the longest established clubs have their origins in ‘community organizations’ such as churches, social clubs or work’s teams. Indeed the vast majority of football clubs emerged from their formative years with names shared with towns, cities or areas of cities, and as such came to fulfil something of a representational role for large numbers of citizens from urban neighbourhoods.

The development of football clubs along these lines has meant that social historians and sociologists of sport, particularly in England, have frequently written about the historical emergence of relationships between football clubs and communities in relation to the social identity-building properties of football spectating. The eminent labour and sports historian Tony Mason, for example, has written that football ‘often contributes to an individual’s sense of identity with or belonging to a group or collectivity. It can be district, village, town, city or county. It can be class, colour or country.’² Similarly, sports historian Richard Holt³ has written that football clubs are historically one of the principal agents through which collective social identities are created and reinforced. He claims that football clubs are sites of representation through which people (usually men) are taught norms of behaviour, and that football teams and football ‘heroes’ have historically acted as exemplars of spirit and behaviour for the communities they represent. He suggests that football clubs enable communities to ‘know themselves’, and in doing so help signify what differentiates one town, city, region, county or nation from another.

To explain why football clubs emerged as sites for community representation, Holt notes that professional football developed in England at a time of rapid urbanization and provided opportunities for expressions of common identity during a period when it was becoming more difficult to feel a sense of belonging to amorphous, ever-expanding towns and cities. In noting that of the 12 teams that formed the first English Football League in 1888 all came from towns with populations over 80,000, except for Accrington and Burnley, Holt states:

The massive expansion in the scale and size of urban communities in the second half of the nineteenth century created new problems of identity for their inhabitants … In essence, football clubs provided a new focus for collective urban leisure in industrial towns and cities that were no longer integrated communities gathered around a handful of mines or mills … These inhabitants of big cities needed a cultural expression of their urbanism which went beyond the immediate ties of kin and locality. A need for rootedness as well as excitement is what seems most evident in the behaviour of football crowds.⁴

Holt is not alone in adopting this essentially functionalist reading of the development of links between football clubs and communities. Following Durkheim, Richard Giulianotti has stated that early football clubs can be understood as creating ‘organic solidarity’ and ‘collective consciousness’ within the potentially atomised urban environments that were common by the beginning of the twentieth century.⁵ He notes the arguments of those who suggest that modernity destroyed traditional communities through industrialization, urbanization and rapid social/ geographical mobility, and asserts that sports such as football ‘may [have] repair[ed] much of this social damage by enhancing the cultural bonding and integration of disparate individuals within modern societies’.⁶ However, Giulianotti ultimately rejects this position and suggests that early football clubs actually had strong connections to pre-modern, ‘mechanistic’ types of bonding. He notes that football clubs were (usually) named after places, and produced ‘the kind of affective tie to a specific locality that one finds in more traditional and localist societies’.⁷ According to this line of thinking, football clubs developed links with communities because they helped to sustain the close, face-to-face, geographic, affective communities that were under threat during modernity. To put it another way, they helped to preserve a version of Tönnies’ pre-modern Gemeinschaft emotional community bonds amongst people who otherwise only encountered modern Gesellschaft type connections.⁸

The apparent identification of the social and emotional duties that football clubs performed for new urban communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries means that much contemporary writing on football and community is based on a fairly commonsense notion of which people actually constitute football clubs’ communities. By associating the emergence of professional football with the (re)creation of geographical community ties when they were under threat from modernity, many popular and academic writers now adopt the position that football clubs’ communities are principally their immediate ‘geographical communities’ from which they draw the majority of their support. This has led to a situation in which few distinctions have traditionally been drawn between ‘geographical’ and ‘supporter’ communities around football clubs, particularly in writings on the pre-1990s game. As sociologists and social historians worked from the assumption that football clubs’ emerged functionally to satisfy geographical communities’ needs for new or traditional forms of social and emotional bonding, so it followed ipso facto that football clubs’ supporters must also be their geographical neighbours (or at least it was assumed that supporters lived in relative geographical proximity to their club). Indeed, in some historical work the impression (whether deliberate or not) is given that everybody identified with their local team, regardless of whether they were a regular, attending ‘supporter’ or not.⁹ This means that little historical (or indeed contemporary) work has been conducted on the specific types of communities that football supporters have constituted. It has simply been assumed that supporter communities have been synonymous with geographical communities in the context of football for much of the game’s history, and that supporters’ relations with football clubs have historically been based on a need to maintain and/or recreate existing geographical, face-to-face social relations.

In more contemporary writings on sport and community, some appreciation of the distinctions between geographical communities and supporter communities has begun to emerge. Andrews’ work on community formations around the Australian Football League¹⁰ is rare in the sociology of sport in that it engages in a prolonged discussion of different conceptualizations of community, including comments on community as a geographical locale, community as a social system, community as a sense of identity/belonging, and community as an ideology. However, this study is, to some degree, still locked into a belief that the ‘natural’ or ‘purest’ form of community around a sports club is a geographical community. Similar sentiments can be found in the work of Fawbert¹¹ and others who have studied the globalization of English football, and the subsequent emergence of dispersed or overseas fans of English clubs. Again, in these studies the presumption is often that the natural historical community of a football club is its geographical community, and that relations between geographical communities and football clubs have been disrupted by recent social and cultural change, or, more perniciously, the commercialization of the game. Unsurprisingly, this approach to understanding football supporter communities is also very powerful amongst supporters themselves, especially at clubs such as Manchester United that have developed large ‘out of town’, and even global, followings.¹².

There is much to be drawn from the work of Andrews, Fawbert and others. They are at least cognizant of the fact that relationships between football clubs and communities are not straightforward, and that the very concept of ‘community’ is contested. However, they are not particularly historically sensitive and, therefore, tend to overestimate the recentness of the disruption of ‘traditional’ geographical football communities. From at least the 1930s, and almost certainly before, football supporter communities were not drawn exclusively from the immediate neigh-bourhoods of football clubs.¹³ They were made up of people from relatively wide geographical areas and, therefore, can be said to be specific, relatively autonomous communities that were based around a choice to engage in a single cultural/sporting interest. The constitution of football supporter communities along these non-geographic lines became even more dramatic in the post-war period.

Certainly in England but also in a number of other heavily industrialized countries, from the late 1950s, a serious bifurcation can be said to have occurred between many football clubs and their local, geographical neighbourhoods that resulted in a number of tensions between neigh-bourhood and supporter communities (although these groups are clearly not always mutually exclusive). This was the consequence of a series of social changes in post-war England including ‘slum-clearance’ programmes in major cities; the changing ethnic profile of certain neighbour-hoods within cities brought about by immigration from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean; the exclusion of new ‘ethnic communities’ from football because of cultures of racism both within and without the game;¹⁴ football clubs being increasingly regarded as ‘nuisances’ from the late 1950s because of hooliganism and associated problems; and the growth of ‘out of town’ supporters at successful football clubs who did not live in the city (or even the region) of the clubs they supported. This final change was underpinned by the increasing availability and ownership of motor cars and televisions, both of which made it easier for people to support teams to which they had no obvious historical, geographical or familial connections.¹⁵ These changes resulted, to a greater or lesser degree, in developments that made communities around football clubs even more specific to their particular cultural contexts. There was then little sense in which football communities could be regarded as geographical inevitabilities as some people (although by no means all) increasingly chose ‘their clubs’ (or rejected them) on grounds other than geographical heritage.

The key point to draw from this debate is that the theorization of community around football (and other sports) has largely started from the assumption that professional sports clubs emerged to satisfy a functional need for social bonding for their supporters: a need that was created by industrialization and associated phenomena such as urba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• 1. Introduction: football and community – practical and theoretical considerations
• Politics, theory and practice
• Nations and ethnicities
• Community and the instrumental use of football
• Postmodern community and future directions
• Index