TABLES: Table 1. The F.A. Premier League: 1993-4 Season Shirt Sponsors 80 Table 2. The Fans. 339 Table 3. The Chairmen 341 Table 4. Miscellaneous Football Elites 342 Table 5. Media and Television Elites 343 PREFACE After the disasters of Bradford and Heysel in May 1985, there was a commonly articulated view that football had had its day as the 'national game' and was a moribund sport ; the game was played poorly in front of dwindling crowds of increasingly violent and often racist males in unsafe and unsanitary grounds. By May 1995, despite a season which had been tarnished by the general wave of media- 2 discovered 'sleaze' football had undergone a quite startling transformation; crowds have increased and their social constitution has altered to include more women . while many grounds have been entirely re-built so that the best grounds in England now compare with any in Europe. In short there has been a seachange in the popular perception and the cultural position of the game. Although football required reformation in the mid-1980s, the jeremiads of 1985 were somewhat exaggerated; the game still commanded an attendance of 16.5 million (The Football Trust 199 1:9), which was vastly more than the attendances at any other sporting event, and attracted the largest television figures of any sport. The transformation of football in the decade between 1985 and 1995 was certainly radical then but it was not the miraculous return which the prophets of doom would imply; the game still had wide public appeal. Nevertheless, despite the enduring appeal of football to many (men), despite its problems, the speed and extent of this transformation of football was extraordinary; not even those individuals who continued to support football throughout the 1980s could have foreseen the metamorphosis of the game. The unusual rapidity and extent of the changes to football in this decade suggest that a sociological examination of their causes and consequences would be worthwhile. This thesis attempts exactly this; to analyse the cultural causes and consequences of football's revolution between 1985 and 1995, although the analysis extends back to 1960 in order to contextualise the crisis of the mid-1980s. The transformation of football in the decade between 1985 and 1995, has comprised two, interrelated developments. On the one hand, the Premier League, as a political economic institution which redistributed revenue to the biggest clubs, emerged ; this League was finally established after extensive negotiations during the summer of 1991 and was formally inaugurated on 10th October 1991. It consisted of all twenty-two clubs of the old First Division, who wanted to leave the Football League and its obligations to the lower leagues. On the other hand, the consumption of football was transformed during the 1990s, with the development of all-seater stadia, the increase in ticket prices, the introduction of new marketing techniques and the new coverage of the game on television. This thesis tries to account for football's revolutionary decade by analysing the development of the Premier League, as a political economic institution, and the new consumption of football in the 1990s. The Premier League and the new consumption of football are intimately related because the development of the breakaway League has facilitated the transformation of the consumption of football by altering the political economic structure of the game. In short, the Premier League has increased the revenue of the biggest clubs, thereby enabling them to make the necessary investments in their grounds, by which the new consumption of the game has been chiefly effected. The thesis lays out the theoretical and historical frameworks in the first two chapters which will inform the analysis throughout. Part II, 'The Prehistory of the Premier League', lays out the organic conditions which gave rise to the revolutionary decade and to the discourses which informed the solutions to football's crisis. The rest of the thesis, Part ifi, 'Discourses of Reform', and Part IV, 'The New Consumption of Football' is an examination of the conjunctural moment between 1985 and 1995, when the reform of football was self-consciously debated and implemented. The thesis argues that the arguments and projects in the conjunctural moment from 1985 were crucially informed by the trajectory of organic developments which privileged certain solutions to football's crisis as appropriate. PART ONE TJIEORETICAL AN) HISTORICAL FRAMEWORKS CHAPTER 1 FOOTBALL, RITUAL AND HISTORICAL CHANGE 1. Football as a Ritual Irving Scholar, the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club from 1982 to 1990, found the significance with which this small North London business was invested extraordinary (Scholar 1992:296, also Horrie 1992:vi). The overwhelming importance which is attached to professional football clubs, in spite of their financial modesty (in comparison with the vast multinational empires of the post-Fordist world), lends the football club what Barthes might call a 'mythic quality' (1972:19). The significance of football lies not in its financial value-but rather in the fact that large numbers of (mainly male) individuals in English society regard it as important. The game operates as a central arena of identity and a major mediating resource in the social relations between men. Football, then, is a ritual. It is regularised activity which performs as an arena in which the meanings and concepts of a particular section of the class and gender order of English society are expressed and negotiated. If football is a ritual, then this examination of its transformation in the 1990s should derive its method from the anthropological analysis of ritual. To that end, Geertzs seminal analysis of Balinese cock fighting (1973) provides a theoretical approach to the study of ritual which might be useflully applied 4 -- to the case of English football. Geertz's account of Balinese cock fighting is both a piece of anthropological analysis and a statement of method. Geertz argues that anthropology must aim at reaching the 'deep play' of other cultures. That is, the anthropologist must attempt to gain some understanding of the way that other cultures interpret themselves. For Geertz, a society is not a mechanistic instrument of consent and compliance but rather culture comprises a much looser set of understandings, values and meanings. The task of the anthropologist is infiltrate the self-understandings of other cultures to demonstrate the ways in which individuals in that culture interpret their situation in order to negotiate their relations with other members of that culture. Geertz suggests that these self-understandings, which individuals interpret in their eveiyday life, are inscribed in a culture's texts - by which he means various social practices. This view of culture implies an anthropological method which differs quite radically from Geertz's functionalist and structuralist predecessors: The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong. (1973:452) For Geertz, the task of the anthropologist is not simply to outline the structure of kinship or the structure of the 'savage mind' which the natives invariably reproduce in their social practice. Rather, the anthropologist has to attempt to discern the way in which natives actively interpret the meanings and values which their culture provides in their creation of identity. From this hermeneutic position, Geertz argues against the functionalist view that ritual merely involves the inculcation of values onto malleable native minds, and suggests instead that through the ritual of the cock-fight, Balinese men express their own self-understandings to themselves. 5 Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive; it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves. (1973:448) For Geertz, not only is the active participation of the Balinese necessary in creating themselves as Balinese but the story, which they tell themselves, is not consensual but rather that story involves both the expression of the strict hierarchy in Balinese society and a commentary upon it. it [the cock fight] provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment. (1973 :448) Geertz argues that the cock-fight does not create status distinctions in a simplistic functionalist way but that through the expression of self.understandings status is brought under consideration for debate and re-negotiation. In his assault on deterministic functionalist explanations, Geertz, perhaps, overstates his interpretive case. It is quite conceivable to imagine that status distinctions could be created through ritual but in the interpretive manner which Geertz specifies rather than by functionalist inculcation. For instance, the rich in Balinese society are able to express their status through cock-fighting because the rich are involved in the 'deep play' of the large bets, which they stake, rather than the small side bets of the poor. Through this 'deep play', the rich demonstrate their status but that demonstration, as Geertz points out, is not automatic ; the poor have to interpret that demonstration and in their interpretation will question and negotiate the status of the rich. Contra Geertz, the functionalists are not wrong to suggest that status discrimination is created through the ritual but their explanation of how that discrimination is created is too deterministic. The metasocial commentary about individuals' understanding of themselves and their relations with 6 others which Geertz suggests is articulated through ritual closely parallels the framework which I want to adopt in the analysis of football. Furthermore, Geertz's argument is particularly relevant to the analysis of football as a ritual because his hermeneutic method substantially anticipates the contemporary literature on consumption. The contemporary debates on consumption foreground two essential themes ; firstly, that through consumption, individuals recreate their identities and their understandings of social relations and that, secondly, with the advent of post-Fordism, consumption (in the form of the purchase and use of commodities) has attained a position of cultural priority over production. Although I will discuss post-Fordism at length in the following chapter, consumption theory's historical claim is not relevant to this discussion of ritual. In the recent literature, the argument that through consumption individuals express their self-understandings and interpretations of the world has been most successfully proposed by Bourdieu (1984), although much of his argument is anticipated in Veblen's famous essay on the leisure Glasses (1970). Bourdieu argues that each class has a habitus, which operates like a Kantian transcendental category. A habitus is the set of concepts which frame experience and make experience possible. The habitus is the means by which we look on the world and it dictates what we see. Bourdieu argues that the habitus of each class determines that class's tastes and one of the principal roles of the habitus is to create a set of tastes which distinguish individuals of one class from those of another. The Kantian status of the habitus is problematic but Bourdieu's argument that through consumption, individuals attempt to differentiate themselves from certain groups and align themselves with others has been widely articulated in the literature on consumption (see Tomlinson (ed.)1990:30, Miller 1987). It is at this point that consumption theory and hermeneutics, as it is expressed by theorists such as Geertz, begin to merge because both approaches foreground the way individuals manipulate cultural resources to express their own understandings, their position in society and their relations to others. By drawing on Geertz, this thesis situates itself within the contemporary literature on consumption for that literature is finally hermeneutic. In the ritual of football, individuals express their notion of themselves and of their culture in their practice of fandom (i.e. their consumption of the game). Through that practice, social relations and the understanding of the society of which they are part are created and articulated. Thus, football becomes 'central to how we see ourselves as a nation' (Tomlinson and Whannel (eds.)1986: 120, see also Bromberger 1993:90-1, Williams and Wagg 1991:83) However, the community which is imagined (Anderson 1990) in the football ritual is neither static, consensual nor coextensive with society for, not only are the social relations which are expressed in football contested but these social relations are situated within a particular social milieu. English professional football appeals to and expresses the meanings of a specific and historically given class and gender order. Geertz's hermeneutics and the contemporary theory of consumption provide us with an adequate theoretical framework for the analysis of the new consumption of football. Yet, this analysis of the consumption of football which follows substantially involves issues of contestation and debate over the interpretation of social relations between classes. Therefore, it seems essential that some consideration be given to the writings of Marx since they constitute the single most important sociological source for the issue of class relations. 2. Marx, Gramsci and Hegemony Marx adopts a more radical position than Geertz with regard to the issue of social hierarchy, arguing that the ruling class requires not merely that their hierarchy is expressed and commented upon in social discourse but rather, that the ruling class will insist that its values be communicated through 'the mental means of production'. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the mental means of production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (1977: 64) If the implications of Marx's famous statement here are applied to the discussion of ritual above, then the ritual becomes not an arena in which any individuals in society can freely express their view on that society or its inequalities but rather that those who rule the society will have a privileged position in relation to this ritualistic 'means of mental production'. These privileged individuals will attempt to impose their vision of society and their self-understandings on any ritual which is part of the mental means of production. Marx's argument is, in point of fact, even stronger than this for he insists that not only are the ruling class able to dominate the meaningfiilness of rituals but that they are obliged to do so if they are to rule ; the dominant class is 'the ruling intellectual force' and it owns the 'means of mental production'. Marx's argument that the ruling class must communicate their ideas to their subordinates if they are to perpetuate their rule has been taken up and most filly developed in the work of Gramsci. Gramsci argued that the ruling bourgeoisie maintained themselves by means of the state with its coercive mechanism but also 9