Socclry: Deconstructing English Football’s Popularity
“Almost every fixed inventory will betray us. Is the novel a ‘bourgeois’ form? The answer can only be historically provisional: When?”
(Hall 1983, p. 484)
For Stuart Hall, popular culture is a temporal object whose signs and signifiers betray an underlying class struggle. As such, incorporating value into existing popular cultures, or else marginalizing other cultural forms, is not simply a matter of taste, but a discursive negotiation displacing cultural practices from “the center of popular life” (Hall 1983, pp. 477-478). Hall’s thinking lends itself to analysis of contemporary phenomena, and while he concerns himself with a macro-level theoretical understanding of the ebb and flow of “popular,” micro-level case studies illustrate his theory’s functioning in the real world. With that in mind, it is topical to discuss the association football ticket protests that have taken place in Germany and England this month, as well as broader ramifications of the sport’s cultural elevation.
On February 6, 2016, 10,000 Liverpool Football Club (Liverpool FC) fans left the club’s Anfield stadium with a quarter of their match against Sunderland remaining. Their protest took place 77 minutes into the game, a reference to the new £77 ticket prices for the 2016/17 season. Three days later, Borrussia Dortmund’s fans arrived at their stadium late, rejecting the Mercedes and BMW occupied autobahn to use the free rail travel that accompanies a soccer ticket in Germany, and bombarded their team’s field with tennis balls in protest of a ticket price increased to roughly half of the one facing Liverpool’s fans (€40).
That both protests were perpetrated in the name of affordability masks the fact that both historically successful clubs attract sufficient support to sustain increased ticket prices; Germany’s economic strength coupled with its football teams’ comparatively low entry price highlights the extent to which this is true. For fans of both clubs, then, the issue was not necessarily the price itself, but what the cost signified about the changing audience demographics of a traditionally working-class sport. This becomes especially apparent when considering that the language the fans use in their public discourse is not concerned with wealth, but with class.
Underlying the Liverpool fans’ protest was a skepticism toward changing class relations in football. In contrast with the true supporters who left the stadium, the new, affluent, and predominantly middle-class audience were portrayed as lacking the passion of the sport’s traditional supporters, with their subdued performances undermining the fans’ role as a ‘twelfth man’ for their team. In this case, tradition’s discursive value was reflected in the sporting narrative. “I’ve never seen a crowd finish a football team like that,” wrote the Guardian, describing Liverpool FC’s collapse after the fans’ walkout. “The dissenting mass totally sucked the life out of their team … the win was stolen” (The Guardian, 2016).
Such narratives are not new. In the United Kingdom, the term “prawn sandwiches” has evolved as a shorthand to symbolize the shifting terrain of football fandom following a 2000 BBC interview with Manchester United’s Roy Keane, who chastised the changed practices of the team’s new fans attending its Salford stadium, considering them an inferior form of supporter:
“[In Manchester] they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don’t realise what’s going on out on the pitch”
(News.bbc.co.uk, 2000)
Within soccer, then, class has become a battleground upon which the desires of capital compete with the historic integrity of a working class sport. The term “prawn sandwiches” naturally does not represent a dietary concern, but operates on a symbolic level—the food fans consume during football matches in England is historically the meat pie, and this deviation implies a changing social culture among fans. Football’s cultural elevation brings with it a struggle for identity in the face of its new, middle-class audience.
Yet even this, to some extent, is a red herring. In the process of being appropriated to new positions on the “cultural escalator,” culture itself does not need to change to have changed. Stuart Hall succinctly argues that it is the articulation of culture’s traditional elements, rather than the elements themselves, which becomes the site of subtle negotiation of its symbols’ social values: “Tradition is a vital element in culture, but it has little to do with the mere persistence of old forms” (Hall 1983, p. 485). It should therefore be clear that while football’s culture is not static, and while it is perfectly capable of undergoing a transformation reflecting its shifting relation to society, the sport’s evolution is not a remarkable position from which to apply a theoretical analysis. As such, the concern of both Hall and this essay is to address the class struggle operating within (and acting upon) popular culture, rather than simply to describe the transfiguration of culture itself.
For many Europeans, a sport’s identity has historically been linked to the class who watch or participate in it (Brookes 2002, p. 88). Some sports have started from an elevated cultural position and slipped down the ladder, such as the public school and colonial pursuits of rugby and cricket. Others began as weekend pursuits of the working men, and found themselves elevated by increased cultural capital. Despite its contemporary link to cutting edge technology far beyond the means of the average worker, European cycling continues to place its symbolic heartlands in cobbled Flandrian roads, scarred by the trenches of World War I, where manual laborers raced on farm tracks using the same utilitarian vehicles that brought them to work. (Dauncey and Hare 2003, pp. 4-5)
England’s football swaps the farm roads for industrial towns, building on a set of regional, and fundamentally working-class, rivalries. That this fandom is increasingly the pursuit of white collar, geographically mobile fans signifies the shifting cultural value attached to the sport. The transience of popular culture’s connection to individual classes is therefore not simply theoretical, but a phenomenon playing out in the lived experiences of English sports fans. Soccer’s symbols are universal, yet their articulations are contested to renegotiate and distort what it means to be a fan, and which practices that entails.
FC United of Manchester is one such example of an alternative articulation of English football’s traditional elements. Building from Keane’s discontent at ‘prawn sandwich’ culture at Manchester United, FC United is a semi-professional football club established to tackle the growing dissonance between Manchester United’s traditional working-class fans and the club’s modern day identity (Keegan 2014). While much of its language is about valuing organic sport over business, its practical concerns are with localism and preserving the working-class support that sustained the club it stands as an alternative to. The club’s crest is newly designed, yet retains the most historically class-related element of the Manchester United club crest: the trade ship representing the landlocked city’s success in building a ship canal, freeing its industry from dependence on a then-affluent Liverpool’s port.
However, the class struggle within football is not one-directional. When lawyer Clive O’Connell criticized Liverpool’s fans on television, he did so from the most affluent part of the country. With a homogenized upper-middle class accent that betrayed little about his geographic location but a significant amount about his upbringing, he referred to Liverpool’s fans as “scum” who would, despite their victory over Chelsea, still have to return to “their horrible Merseyside homes” (Barlow, 2015). For Hall, the class struggle is constituted implicitly through culture (Hall 1983, p. 487), but in this case it was able to be expressed explicitly, even drawing on concepts of private property and home ownership.
Yet southern fans already sing “You’ll Never Get a Job” at Liverpool matches. The controversy of O’Connell’s language stemmed not from its content, but from its capacity to traverse class boundaries. Ultimately, it was not the attack on the working class that was the point of contention, but that such visceral language represented an old world of football, one incompatible with the reconfigured values of Premier League soccer. His crime was as much in resorting to a working class football culture as it was in his expression of class and geography-based prejudices. The new consumer was operating on the level of the old.
The English Premier League in the 21st century is a living example of Hall’s historical process of cultural struggle, and a cultural break that encompasses his five major forms: incorporation, distortion, resistance, negotiation, and recuperation. English football fandom is therefore a useful case study in exploring the ways in which class dominance shifts within popular culture. One must, however, remain cautious in analyzing such phenomena, especially when considering that cultural change operates subtly in the discursive realm. That the stadium is becoming economically hostile to the working class is an accepted fact, but its increasing cultural hostility is less acknowledged. Certain traditional practices have been eliminated from the all-seater Premier League stadium (regulated to exacting standards across Europe according to UEFA’s guidelines), transforming it into the site of a consumer experience that offers digestible interpretations of the historical meanings that sustained the sport during the 20th century. Football’s value became enhanced, with the spectacle of matchday attendance superseding the historical rivalries between residents of England’s industrial towns. No example speaks more strongly of the transformed practices resulting from football’s incorporation into the middle-class cultural field than those two words: prawn sandwiches.
Bibliography
Barlow, E. (2015). Sacked: Mr Angry Chelsea fan who branded Liverpool supporters ‘Scouse scum’. Liverpool Echo.
Brookes, R. (2002). Representing sport. London: Arnold.
Dauncey, H. and Hare, G. (2003). A Pre-Modern Contest in a Post-Modern Context. In: H. Dauncey and G. Hare, ed., The Tour de France, 1903-2003 – A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values. London: F. Cass.
Hall, S. (1983). Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’. In: Storey, J, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (1994). Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Keegan, M. (2014). FC United of Manchester: punk football v prawn sandwiches. BBC Sport.
News.bbc.co.uk, (2000). Angry Keane slates Man Utd fans.
The Guardian, (2016). Why I walked: Liverpool fan explains protest during Sunderland draw.