Collective Action and Football Fandom

A Relational Sociological Approach

Jamie Cleland, Mark Doidge, Peter Millward, Paul Widdop

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319731414
• Print ISBN:
  9783319731407
• Subtopic: Sociology

This book draws upon a relational sociological paradigm to explore the processes of collective action in football fandom across Europe and the UK. Through a range of case studies, the authors address pertinent themes in football fandom, including anti-discrimination, 'home,' ticketing, name changes, 'ownership,' and broader leftist politics. Each of these case studies engages with the theoretical framework of cultural relational sociology, highlighting the different social and cultural changes English and European football has undergone, often over a very short period of time. 

© The Author(s) 2018

Jamie Cleland, Mark Doidge, Peter Millward and Paul WiddopCollective Action and Football FandomPalgrave Studies in Relational Sociologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73141-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Relational Sociology, Collective Action, and Football Fandom

Jamie Cleland¹ , Mark Doidge², Peter Millward³ and Paul Widdop⁴

(1)

University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

(2)

School of Sport and Service Management, University of Brighton, Eastbourne, UK

(3)

School of Humanities & Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

(4)

Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

End Abstract

Introduction

Despite the grey skies it was the height of summer 2017 and, across many countries in Europe, it was association football’s (hereafter football) ‘close season’. There would be no competitive football matches in the UK for a full month and around a month had passed since the last ones took place—but this was ‘fan activist’ season. The week before, Pride in Football had run their ‘Call It Out’ conference—a meeting of supporters from across Europe engaged in challenging sexuality-themed prejudices at all levels of the sport. The following week, Football Supporters Europe (FSE; see Chap. 7) would run their fans’ congress in the traditional rival cities of Gent and Lokeren in Belgium. Here, supporters from across the continent would get together to debate issues ranging from the ways in which they can help refugees to alternative approaches to the use of pyrotechnics at football matches. But today it was the annual ‘Supporters Summit’—a meeting of football fan activists organized jointly by the national organizations of the Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF; see Chap. 6) and Supporters Direct (see Chap. 5)—held at the Football Association’s (FA) St George’s Park facilities. The opening panel turned to ‘Clubs in Crisis’ hearing the voices of supporters from Coventry City (see Chap. 4), Leyton Orient , and Blackpool. These fans talked about how the practices of their club’s ‘owners’ (of business and financial rights) had negatively affected their team ‘on’ and ‘off’ the field of play, along with the actions they had undertaken to bring about a change to circumstances. Later panel discussions would include leading on themes including ‘safe standing’ (lobbying to reverse a government and FA decision that supporters had to sit rather than stand at matches, see Turner (2017) for more details) and affordable match ticket admission prices (see Chap. 6). Fans from around 90 clubs sat in the audience and engaged in debate. Many more joined in and continued this debate on social media platforms such as Twitter. FSF chair, Malcolm Clarke , spread shared feelings of hope among fans by declaring that the ‘supporters’ movement had never been in such good shape’ (field notes, 1 July 2017). The following day members of his organization unanimously voted to collectively lobby football clubs and news outlets to stop engaging with and selling the UK’s largest selling newspaper, The Sun, principally in the light of the lies it had been found to have told about the conduct of Liverpool supporters in 1989 at the Hillsborough disaster from which 96 football fans unlawfully died, mainly as a result of poor policing and a stadium that was unsafe (Scraton 2016).

The 2016/17 season that had been one in which supporters’ protests were highly visible in men’s football in England and Wales. ‘Wenger Out!’ was the ubiquitous slogan of a section of Arsenal fans around the world. Signs adorned with this mantra were held aloft at matches, flown behind planes, and even appeared in St Peter’s Square during the Pope’s Easter address. Fans across the world regularly vent their frustrations at football managers like Arsène Wenger when results decline; yet football fans are increasingly campaigning around other issues affecting their clubs. In particular, as per discussions at the Supporters Summit, many of these campaigns are directed at owners who rarely consider the opinions of fans when making decisions. The end of the season in England especially highlighted a number of these criticisms. Blackpool fans boycotted the League Two playoff final against Exeter City in protest at the claim that the club’s owners, the Oyston family, were extracting money from the club. Exeter City, in contrast, is the only football club in the Football League that is wholly owned by its fans. In the same league, Leyton Orient fans frequently protested against owner Francesco Becchetti in a season that resulted in the East London club being relegated out of the Football League for the first time in 112 years. Nearby, Charlton Athletic fans have had a long-standing dispute with the club’s Belgian owner, Roland Duchâtelet . Elsewhere, fans of Blackburn Rovers , Carlisle United , Nottingham Forest , and others have protested against owners who they view as draining economic resources from football clubs, rather than supporting football success. During the same season, success was felt at clubs where fans have taken active involvement in protesting owners, campaigning around stadiums and rescuing clubs from financial problems. Brighton and Hove Albion, Newcastle United, Millwall, Portsmouth , and Plymouth Argyle all have had active involvement from fans in recent years. This book highlights this important phenomenon and seeks to explore these bouts of fans’ collective action using an approach we call ‘cultural relational sociology’. This approach draws upon the wide-ranging relational sociological approach but particularly borrows from Nick Crossley’s Towards Relational Sociology (2011), which he neatly concludes with the following statement:

Connections matter. Indeed for sociologists they are or should be ‘what it is all about’. This is often recognized in relation to the microcosm but is no less important in relation to the macrocosm. Social life doesn’t cease being about what actors achieve in interaction, whatever scale we choose to analyse it and whatever abstractions we bring to bear. From children in the playground to the ‘world economic order’, societies are networks of interacting and co-constituting actors, orientating to conventions , exchanging resources and more generally ‘being social’. (Crossley 2011: 206)

Football fandom is an excellent way of assessing the networks of interactions. Football fans are heterogeneous and come from a wide range of backgrounds and interests. They share a love of the game and their clubs, and as we shall see, this is increasingly becoming an area of political mobilization. The social worlds of football comprise a diverse network of players, coaches, owners, fans, administrators, journalists, and more that have a variety of interests in the sport. In this way we can start to see how fans interact and intersect across groups. We follow Crossley and Edwards (2016) in adopting a relaxed position on the methods we utilize providing they capture the connections between social actors. As Crossley states ‘[c]onnections matter’ because they are stamped across all domains and scales of social life and for sociologists ‘should be “what it is all about”’.

This chapter is split into three distinct parts, utilizing the literature base to introduce and begin to unpack the three fundamental dimensions of our project: first relational sociology, second collective action and social movements, and, third, football fandom before adding a fourth dimension in discussing the methods we utilize in our empirical work. We start these discussions by outlining our understanding of relational sociology, by describing its common ontological roots and variations of its use before describing how it might operate using two conceptual levels which are, first, the central concepts in the approach and, second, the dimensions of relations, networks, and interactions.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Relational Sociology, Collective Action, and Football Fandom
• 2. The Touchstones for Understanding Football Fans’ Collective Actions: A Primer in Cultural Relational Sociology
• 3. Friendships, Community Ties, and Non-league Fandom: Opting ‘Out’ from the Commercialization of the Premier League and ‘In’ to Leftist Political Scenes
• 4. ‘Bringing City Home’: Coventry City, Sisu Capital, and the Ricoh Arena
• 5. Supporters’ Trusts as Collective Action: Swansea City in Focus
• 6. Ticket Prices Campaigns, Urban Space, and Twitter: Social Networks and Storied Connections
• 7. Football Supporters Across Europe: Cooperation and Solidarities in Networks of Fan Movements
• 8. Conclusion: Connections More Than Matter!—Relational Understandings of Football Fans’ Collective Actions
• Back Matter