‘Managing the Media’: The Changing Relationship Between Football Managers and the Media

This article examines how the relationship between the media and football managers has evolved over the twentieth century. In particular, it argues that before the late 1960s, the print media largely shaped perceptions of managers but after this period, television became the dominant medium in framing their image. In a wider context, this relationship has reflected changes in the media as well as mirroring football's association with it. The transformation of football managers into celebrities, for example, has reflected the so-called ‘tabloidization’ process of the media. Not only have tabloid newspapers gone ‘downmarket’ but also both quality broadsheet papers and television broadcasters have ‘dumbed down’. The article highlights not only how the changing role of the manager has been partly due to changes in the media industry but also the impact managers themselves have had on media developments.     

‘Definitely not Cricket’ the Times and the Football World Cup 1930–1970

In July 1967, 15 million people were glued to their TV sets to watch one of the most audacious BBC outside broadcasts – the climbing of the Old Man of Hoy. A 450-foot crumbling sea stack situated in the Orkneys was conquered by six climbers in a broadcast that has been dubbed the first ‘reality television’ programme. It connected an armchair audience with the elite of a sport subculture intent on conquering one of Britain's most spectacular geological treasures. This paper, which draws on original archive material, autobiographical accounts and press reports, examines the climb and situates the broadcast historically within the evolution of televised climbing in Britain, and considers the continuing and evolving relationship between climbers and the media.     

‘Sweet analytics’: Athleticism and Elementary-School Football Associations

J.A. Mangan and Colm Hickey, in articles in 1999 and 2008, argued that the motivation of teachers promoting elementary-school football in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was mainly athleticism. In 2000, 2005 and 2009, I expressed my reservations about their claims. Most recently, articles by Gerry P.T. Finn in Soccer & Society in 2010 and by Hickey and Finn separately in the International Journal of the History of Sport in 2011 have argued against my reservations and offered what they consider further evidence for athleticism in elementary-school football. In response, the present article examines the evidence for the claims of athleticism in elementary-school football and concludes that it was only through failing to engage with the vast majority of sources of this kind of football, in particular the records of Schoolboy Football Associations and the sporting and local press, that the claims of Mangan, Hickey and Finn for the extent of the influence of athleticism in elementary-school football could be sustained.     

Football participation legacy and Australia’s qualification for the 2006 Football World Cup

This paper examines the impact of qualification for the 2006 World Cup on football participation in Australia. Australia’s qualification for the 2006 World Cup created widespread media coverage across the country, and this was amplified by the fact that it was only the second time the nation had qualified for the event. Contrary to a number of studies that have examined sport participation legacy and major events, this research presents data that suggest an overall positive trend in Australian football participation post Australia’s successful World Cup qualification. Three of the four demographic categories examined in the study had witnessed increased football participation across the examined period.     

Football at the ‘End of the Line’: Economic Decline,Cross-Subsidies and Football League Membership in the NW Steel District of England

Sporting leagues are generally based on collectivist principles, as the members need one another to produce their product. For much of its existence, the Football League has functioned as a cartel, operating income-sharing arrangements and controlling its membership. In the period from 1959 to 1986, a limited number of clubs left the League through the re-election process, in modest recognition of geographical logic, as clubs from growth areas to the south typically replaced clubs from more traditional economic areas that were often over-represented in the Football League. Clubs are widely seen to be utility-maximisers seeking success. Success in a sporting league is defined in a precise and relativist way and this article focuses on two of the least successful clubs to have played in the Football League, Barrow AFC and Workington FC, whose failure to obtain repeated re-election in the 1970s removed the only Football League clubs in a distinct economic zone, the north-west coastal steel district. This article examines the re-election mechanism and the particular economic factors that affected these two clubs, ranging from the decline of their main local industry to changes in the levels of and responsibilities attaching to rising cross-subsidy payments in the Football League.     

For a ‘United’ Kingdom and a ‘Greater’ Britain: the British Olympic Association and the limitations and contestations of ‘Britishness’

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Home-Nations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales joined forces in competing in the Olympic Games under the banner of ‘Great Britain’ (or deviations thereof). The Olympics served as an important symbolic site for fostering and promoting a broader ‘British’ national identity. In practice, however, the prevalence and persistence of competing national identities and allegiances roiled early attempts to create a unified British Olympic team. These counter-prevailing forces of nationalism further served to undermine the British Olympic Association's ambitious attempt to unite the British Empire in a ‘Greater Britain’ team for the 1916 Berlin Olympic Games. As this work will reveal, ‘Britishness’ was a layered, contested and racially homogenous term that was interpreted and applied differently across various parts of the British Isles and its Empire.     

Not All ‘the Evils of Capitalism’: Match-Fixing and the Governance of Chinese Professional Football, 1994–2016

Abstract

Match-fixing has been a key term in Chinese professional football since its inception in the early 1990s. In the light of notorious match-fixing scandals, criticism has arisen that the professionalization of football and the inflow of the free market system mirror the evils of capitalism in post-reform Chinese society. This paper, however, aims to offer an alternative perspective on the inherent governing deficiencies of Chinese professional football, to elaborate on the causes of these match-fixing incidents. By analyzing the status of each corruption-involved actor within the governance structure of Chinese professional football, the paper argues that the following factors collectively account for a large part of the historical and institutional causation of the rampant match-fixing scandals in Chinese professional football: the underplayed role of sport law; the overplayed role of Chinese Football Association officials; the ambiguous ownership and decision-making processes of the clubs; and, the powerless and unprotected role of the referees, the players, and the coaches.     

Carnival supporters,hooligans, and the ‘Against Modern Football’ movement: life within the ultras subculture in the Croatian context

Abstract

This paper is based on sociological research on Torcida, football supporters of Hajduk Football Club from Split (Croatia). We used ethnographic methodology throughout 37 months of fieldwork (from July 2012 to August 2015) and conducted 23 in-depth interviews with hardcore members of Torcida. Although our research included the distinction between carnival supporters and hooligans, these elements are much more interconnected within the hard core of Torcida than they are separate. Because of various social efforts (sometimes coordinated with other Ultras groups) against the local and global football establishment – especially against the Croatian Football Federation and UEFA – we consider Torcida part of a wide, heterogeneous social movement against modern football. This corresponds to the self-reflection and self-perception of the core group of Torcida. Ultras subculture in the Croatian context represents a key (although not the only) social actor in bearing the AMF movement.     

‘Knight of the Whistle’: W.P. Harper and the Impact of the Media on an Association Football Referee

Media interest in the association code of football is an accepted part of the modern form of the game. The impact of this increased attention from the media can be traced both through an understanding of the developing media/sport relationship during the 1920s and 1930s and specific examples of this burgeoning relationship through the career of W.P. Harper, a prominent referee, who recorded and maintained some of the press coverage he received during his career. This paper explores the embryonic impact of the media on referees, utilizing W.P. Harper as an example, charting incidents during his career and the associated media coverage that these high profile examples received. The consideration afforded to the early role of the media, and the direct impact on referees, assists in a greater understanding of the development of this relationship and therefore an increased comprehension of the role of the media in Association Football in the game today.     

The Origins of Football Debate: The ‘Grander Design and the Involvement of the Lower Classes’, 1818–1840

This article presents extensive new material in ‘the origins of football debate’ by using the British Library's digitisation project of nineteenth-century newspapers. In so doing, it responds to claims from Graham Curry and Eric Dunning that previous works of the ‘revisionist historians’ John Goulstone, Adrian Harvey and Peter Swain are misleading and have led to hasty conclusions. It evidences a football culture beyond the domain of the public schools and highlights the shift in the locus of games from urban areas to paddocks and fields complying with the Highways and Police Acts. This compliance reduced the number of prosecutions covered in newspaper reports of the day but other games, in which misdemeanours took place, are recorded, suggesting that a broad football culture did still exist in this period. The article rejects Curry and Dunning's thesis surrounding a mid-century ‘civilising spurt’ in sport in favour of explanations surrounding the structural changes taking place in the nineteenth century, including increasing industrialisation, urbanisation, population growth, and migrationary movements. It also emphasises the emergence of a horizontally stratified class-based society and an attack on football games from an emerging social and industrial elite who were looking after their property and commercial interests.     

European governance: ‘Football or Champions League?’

This essay presents the evolution of European governance in a parallel symbiosis with football. It describes the EU, this sui generis ‘team’, giving examples, images, dates and events from the world of football. It seeks to contribute to the debate on the changing profile of EU institutions through the looking glass of football ones, as a ‘team’ in the framework of governance and international relations. In particular, it uses the specific institutional example of the Champions League as a source of analogies and regularities for the on-going European experiment. It examines how far EU and football continue to encompass the same joy of accomplishment after the dramatic change in their institutional and political rules of play in an age ruled by the relentless and insatiable pursuit of profit. The paper argues that European governance needs to redefine its integration’s priorities, restoring dedication to and passion for the European project.     

Football,sport and the development of young people’s life skills

The development of life skills has been associated with participation in sport, football and other physical activities. A factor in enabling this ambition to be realized is the actions and behaviours of sports coaches. Drawing on the concept of positive youth development through sport, the first part of this paper considers the types of environments coaches need to create in order for players to develop life skills. The second part of this paper discusses formal coach education and its role in developing coaches’ knowledge of life skills development. The third and final section of this paper offers an alternative explanation of how people’s exposure to certain social contexts results in the development of life skills. A review of literature in these areas reveals that the role sport and football has played in players’ development of life skills is unclear and in need of future research attention.     

‘Being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’: the dancing body-subject and inhabited transcendence

Sports studies is currently dominated by the intellectualist approach to understanding skill and expertise, meaning that questions about the phenomenological nature of skilled performance in sport have generally been overshadowed by the emphasis on the cognitive. By contrast, this article responds to calls for a phenomenology of sporting embodiment by opening up a philosophical exploration of the nature of athletic being-in-the-world. In particular, the paper explores the conceptualisation of immanence and transcendence in relation to the embodied practice of dance, engaging with Merleau-Ponty’s important insight that the body can be a source of transcendence. I also draw on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with professional contemporary dancers to explore dancers’ concepts of ‘being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’, and to suggest that during the actual embodied practice of dance, dancers do not experience transcendence and immanence as they are conceptualised in philosophy. Rather, I argue, dancers experience a third mode of being that is somehow in-between these two binary terms. I have called this ‘inhabited transcendence’.     

‘From Time Immemorial’: The Alnwick Shrovetide Football Match and the Continuous Remaking of Tradition 1828–1890

There is a widespread belief in the Northumberland county town of Alnwick that its Shrovetide football match dates from ‘time immemorial’. In fact, it dates from the mid-eighteenth century. Moreover, it has changed constantly over its 260 year history, in a paradigm case of the invention, and continual reinvention, of tradition, and would almost certainly not have survived to the present had it not done so. The article uses a mass of Victorian newspaper sources to illustrate how media perceptions and evaluations of the match changed over the nineteenth century, and how, in particular, both the match itself and perceptions of it were transformed by the emergence of ‘modern’ rugby and soccer in Northumberland from the 1880s onward. The article concludes with some reflections on popular perceptions of the match in contemporary Alnwick. It suggests that those perceptions perfectly exemplify the post-modern devaluation of history through its reduction to a kind of hackneyed pastiche.     

Ancient Greek ‘Amateurism’, the NCAA and the Courts

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has recently been the target of many lawsuits challenging its definition and regulation of amateurism, which it holds as providing unique moral and social benefits for both its scholar-athletes and society at large. This conception of amateurism is inherited from nineteenth-century models of ancient Greek athletics via figures such as John Mahaffy and E.N. Gardiner. This influence is evident in legal cases involving the NCAA or athletics in general, and hence amateurism is cited by judges and others as a long-standing Western cultural tradition which encourages moral and social development. This is problematic, however, as not only is it historically questionable, but also the citation of cultural heritage in legal dicta has seen legal criticism or reversal.     

Behind the Iron Curtain: Football as a Site of Contestation in the East German Sports ‘Miracle’

Sport is employed as a lens through which one can understand better the social and political inner workings of dictatorship. This paper treats sport as a cultural institution within GDR (German Democratic Republic) society and sets out to complement the two broad paradigms used to study East Germany: the first, a broad approach under the umbrella of ‘Cold War histories’ and ‘totalitarianism theory’, usually focusing on the few; the second, a so-called ‘histories of everyday life’ approach generally focusing on the many. Using an in-depth case study of the sport of football, the paper introduces a new paradigm: the ‘contested dictatorship’ approach. This approach rejects the broad totalitarian notion of dictatorship as applied to East Germany and shares many of the underlying assumptions of the ‘everyday history’ approach, in particular by allowing a far greater role for agency with much more room for manoeuvre for actors and institutions within the structures of an authoritarian state than ‘totalitarian’ understandings usually permit. Drawing on empirical archival material, the paper reveals the endemic rivalries between key personalities (and even large industrial enterprises expressing regional identities) in a struggle for influence over the game; rivalries between fans of GDR football teams; fan culture and hooligan behaviour as forms of self-determination; and how these issues contributed to the poor performance of football relative to other sports.     

‘Carry On’: The Response of the Victorian Football League to the Challenges of World War II

The Victorian Football League (VFL) was formed following an acrimonious split with the Victorian Football Association at the end of the 1896 season. Despite being based around clubs located only in Melbourne and Geelong, the VFL soon became Australia's premier football competition. Although much has been written about League players who served in the armed forces during the two world wars, less attention has been given to identifying the issues and challenges that football competitions, and the VFL in particular, had to address if they were to continue to function during times of military conflict. Trials faced by organisers of the code were logistical, political and moral. Player and administrator shortages and a restricted number of venues to play at, were the most obvious challenges. The Australian government assumed control of manpower and resources in January 1942 and placed many restrictions on discretional activities of the population. In this context, a general feeling was that there was little room for organised major sporting competitions because they could detract from the war focus. The way society reacted to the constraints shaped football's direction, and the VFL had to interpret government policy and read the mood of the public before deciding whether to continue playing. In the end, the League, despite criticism from some quarters for continuing its competition, sided with the prevailing view that the public needed a diversion to allow them some relaxation from the pressure of war. This article discusses how the VFL responded to a number of key issues during the critical period between 1942 and 1944.