by flipflop » Thu Mar 08, 2012 10:27 am
Actually, in the UK especially, and in many other countries as well, football is more than merely the game itself. There's a whole world of culture built around it that no other sport has. At home it has pervaded every level of society that even knobheads like David Cameron and Prince William profess support of a football team (both Aston Villa by the way). Fashion, music, film, literature have all been influenced by not just the game itself, but by terrace culture - the ritual of When Saturday Comes - a drink, a pie, and a football match (and if you were naughty a bit of a rumble with your opposite numbers), it even resembled a religious procession, where the terrace was your pew and the pitch was your altar.
Up until around 1990/92 the game here was watched almost exclusively (and very cheaply) by working class males. Football was seen by the liberal elite as an embarassing pastime of the great unwashed, not cool at all. Grounds were rough, smelt of piss, pipe & cigarette smoke, fried potatoes and mob violence. It was tribal, and when the working class gets too vocal, tribal, and looks like it's enjoying itself too much, the middle class get shit-scared. The gentrification of the game really began when billions of pounds poured into the top of the game with BSKYB's 1992 TV deal and the breakaway Premier League.
Stadia became all-seater, sedate, female and child friendly (middle class children I hasten to add, as poor kids used to be passed over the turnstiles for free and squeezed onto parts of the terraces where they could see the match). These new fans, ready with loads of hard cash, didn't want to see/hear rough men drinking, swearing and having the odd fight at the football. CCTV, ejections, and finally incredibly over the top prison sentences and bannings from football occured. Football was appropriated in large part by the middle class, who now wanted the environs of supporting a club changed to suit them. They naturally had/have more financial clout than the scum, so change it did. The immediate affect of this occupation is less exciting atmosphere, and legions of proto-nazi stewards in hi-vis jackets hassling any residue of boorish behaviour inside grounds. Football grounds went from being cauldrons of noise, excitement, and yes, menace - to virtual libraries overnight.
It has also got to the point that inside the grounds at Arsenal, Chelsea, Man Utd the crowds are aging and less dynamic. Teenagers can't afford £2K for a season ticket at the Emirates, so the game is in danger of completely alienating the very people who made it what it is - the working class fan.
But, and I have complete faith in this, when the bubble bursts, and the game becomes 99% sterile as opposed to the 50% level we're now at, a new/old game will emerge. Already we have clubs springing up in the non-leagues, the amateur and part-time game, owned exclusively by fans, most of whom are stolidly working class. Their constitutions do not allow for their club being owned by anyone else but the fans as a whole, and any fan can buy into that, and crucially - vote the board & chair in. When the ticket prices get too much even for the middle class wankers now infesting the game, this new idea will not only take off, but take over. We might even see the return of the terrace at the highest level, the same terracing that was wrongly blamed for the deaths at Hillsborough, and the doing away of terracing was one of the big deal clinchers for the middle class interlopers - that last bastion of territory for the working man inside his local football club. AFC (A Fans Club) Wimbledon are already in the football league, and along with the rapidly rising Football Club United of Manchester (FCUM) are blazing the pioneer trail for a fan-friendly football of the future.
Cheers
Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country - Bertrand Russell
