During the summer of 1996, it seemed virtually impossible to walk around any town in England without at some point hearing a mantra-like chorus: “It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming/Football’s coming home, it’s coming home.” Whether this was a faint radio, kids chanting in the street or middle-aged people humming the tune: the official song of Euro ’96 in England captured and influenced the mood of the tournament as few other football songs before or since. The music was composed by The Lightning Seeds, and the lyrics, under the official title “Three Lions” (in allusion to the crest on the English team shirt), were written by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. Although it took the English some time to develop enthusiasm for the tournament and their team, the public mood soon began to change and a surprisingly colourful competition was set up by the host nation, with “Three Lions” as a vital element of this process (Thrills 1998: 19).
The song’s chorus offered a credo which many English fans could embrace: despite decades of limited success in international tournaments (with nothing but the 1966 World Cup as a major trophy), no one was going to take away the country’s rightful claim to have given the game of football to the world. Although versions of football were played in other parts of the pre-modern world, it is undisputed that the modern game started when a group of public school footballers agreed on the first set of rules in a London pub in 1863 (Goldblatt 2006: 31). The lyrics to “Three Lions” ironically acknowledged the lack of achievement (“Thirty years of hurt/Never stopped me dreaming”) and wallowed in the nostalgia of 1966, referencing players like Bobby Moore or Nobby Stiles, but they also evoked the picture of a proud nation—proud of its role as the mother of football, and proud of its self-conscious way of laughing about England’s often substandard performance at international tournaments.
Even though England lost their semi-final against Germany, Euro ’96 was interpreted as a major success (Varley 2000: 169). Baddiel and Skinner’s song became not only the anthem of the tournament but came to signify the overarching feeling of that summer, and it seemed to voice a newly found sense of national identity which hid its conservatism behind the armour of post-modern humour. This sense of English identity was, as so often, confused with British identity, and it moreover narrated Englishness in an exclusive fashion. Dominant representations of Euro ’96, with “Three Lions” at its vanguard, were “part of a wider reassertion of a narrow and closed white male English identity” (Carrington 1998: 101). Both the evocation of a ‘spirit of ’66’ and the actual representation of England ’96 hardly allowed for female or black people. The music video accompanying the song showed only the black faces of two Brazilian players “thwarted by Gordon Banks and Bobby Moore” (Carrington 1998: 114). While English football has always been intimidatingly white and male, an increasing percentage of women had become interested in the game by 1996, and there were a number of black players on the national team. Nonetheless, the visual narrative of the music video excluded these, “ensuring the white male continuity of footballing glories” (Carrington 1998: 114).
Despite these selective and reductionist views on the core of Englishness, the mere fact that a song about football could capture an idea of England that both the establishment and fans in the stadium could subscribe to was remarkable: both the Labour Party and the Conservatives referenced the song in their respective campaigns for the 1997 general elections. This, after all, was the game which only ten years before had been regarded as a pariah of English society. Hooligan-ridden and with three major stadium catastrophes that had cost almost 200 lives, the 1980s had been a horrible decade for English football, and the Thatcher government despised the game. An editorial in the Sunday Times called football a “slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people” and accused football fans of “deter[ring] decent folk from turning up” (1985: 16a). It seems almost inconceivable that this slum sport should symbolise the essence of a proud version of Englishness, just a few years later.
The relationship between supporters and society, despite football’s general popularity, had been troubled from the beginning. Too suspicious was the enthusiasm which many fans brought to the act of watching the sport, and a strong class bias was involved in the labelling of supporters of the people’s game. Therefore, fans encountered many problems when pursuing their hobby: “poor provisions for supporters attending matches; the generally primitive and inhospitable state of many football grounds; the almost complete absence on the part of the FA [Football Association] or the newly formed Football League to take the interests of spectators and their safety into serious account” (R. Taylor 1992: 179). This neglect that football fans were met with in the early years of professional football continued, and the increased perception of violence around football after World War II did not help this. It was in this climate of mutual suspicion and derision that football fans were labelled ‘slum people’ in 1985, in marked opposition to the ‘decent folk’ allegedly deterred from turning up.
Yet, in less than thirty years, English football “has raised itself from the ashes of Bradford, the ruins of Heysel and the wreckage of Hillsborough. It has climbed from the financial mire to become a global ‘brand’ with support at unprecedented levels at home and abroad” (Berlin 2013: 121). It is this process which lies at the heart of this book. After the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, the so-called Taylor Report made a number of far-reaching suggestions how football could be reformed; the most crucial change was the transformation of all English grounds in the first and second division into all-seater stadia, which is arguably “the single most significant change in British football’s infrastructure, culture and economic model since the coming of professionalism” (Goldblatt 2015: 14). In 1990, the British public witnessed an alternative to the bleak vision of football at home in the medial representation of the World Cup in Italy. And subsequently, the first division of English football broke away from the rest of the league system and launched the new Premier League, accompanied by a lucrative television deal. These interrelated phenomena turned English top-level football into one of the most attractive products of the entertainment industry, with new audience structures and unforeseeable sums invested by transnational corporations. Football violence and decrepit stadia seem to be a thing of the past, but so are fan practices that belonged to the abolished standing terraces, as well as many traditional fans who feel priced out of the game.
The altered status of football in society is also reflected in the booming genre of football books and films, both fictional and non-fictional. The odd football novel or film could be found in former decades as well, but critic and writer D.J. Taylor could claim well into the 1990s to not have “come across more than half-a-dozen novels that managed to be ‘about’ soccer while still retaining some faint validity as works of art” (1997: 80). In the last twenty-five years, this market has changed beyond recognition, and ‘New Football Writing’ has been coined as a category under which various text forms could be subsumed (A. King 2002: 176). These texts have become an essential part of football culture, and this study discusses fictional representations of football and its fan cultures in the period after the watershed changes of the early 1990s.
Professional football has become not just a reflection of cultural values and society’s structures, but is embedded in the political, economic and social networks of our time. It has epitomised the ways that sports can be regarded as constitutive of social identities and as a fundamental column of late capitalism. Ellis Cashmore’s provocative suggestion that “11 supremely fit and trained men [trying] to move a ball in one direction while another 11 supremely fit and trained men try to move it in the opposite direction serves no obvious function” (2010: 2) is fundamentally true, but when this competition moves around billions of pounds each year, when this game has caused tragic stadium disasters that have killed hundreds of supporters, and when this pastime lays bare deep rifts through the core of society, football has come to mean more than just two teams with a ball in the middle. The story of “Three Lions” and the English national team is just one example of how “sport as a cultural form based on competition is uniquely open to political and ideological manipulation” (Boyle and Haynes 2009: 147).
The ideological struggles that affect football fans have changed significantly over the decades. Garry Crawford sums up that
One example shall suffice: while more than 70,000 people will watch Manchester United’s next home match at Old Trafford, millions of people will be watching live on television—most of them nowhere near the northwest of England but in South East Asia. The Premier League and its leading clubs have become global brands, marketed by transnational broadcasting networks and changing the consumption of the game all over the globe. As anecdotal evidence, Cornel Sandvoss cites an interview with a celebrity model who called Manchester United a team from London. Sandvoss suggests that the model’s reply is not far off the mark: “In its televisual omnipresence and its large fan base, a club such as Manchester United is indeed a team from London, as much as from anywhere else” (2003: 47).the contemporary relationship between sport and its followers has been most notably affected by the interrelated processes of increased involvement of big businesses in the running and organization of sport, the importance and influence of the mass media, processes of globalization, and more generally the changing nature of audiences in late-capitalist society. (2004: 7)
This example shows that football fandom has undergone decisive changes over the past twenty-five years. Historically, fandom has mostly been judged from two opposite angles. Adorno and Horkheimer (1969) and the...