Football & its fans: Memories, Matches & Meanings

Dr David McGillivray

Historical perspective

• Football fandom provided (men) with affiliations to place, people and industry

• The game of the working man inseparable from the rhythms of everyday life:– Work

– Family

– Friendship

– Play

• Football fundamentally a collective social experience

• Continuity a key feature of the passing of time/rite of passage from one generation to the next

Meanings, Matches and Memories• Football was (and is) the stuff of informal public debate

- it gave meaning and structure to people’s lives• Historical matches, giant-killing feats and important

victories were celebrated widely at the time and remembered long afterwards

• Individual and collective memories structured around football

• Physical attendance at a football match always a collective experience with powerful roots in the sensory dimensions of the stadium: the sounds of the crowd, the smells of the half-time food and drink, even architectural oddities of the ground

The times they are a changin’

• Since the 1980s, football has been transformed– All seater stadia

– Out-of-town stadium developments

– Irregular scheduling

– Media saturation

– ‘Shareholders’ rather than supporters

– Widening gap between players and fans

• Football increasingly an individualised, consumer-led experience

Football Reminiscence

• Changes reinforce the importance of maintaining collective memories through heritage artifacts:– Photography

– Film & documentary (e.g. the Football Years)

– Memorabilia (badges, programmes, newspapers, scarves etc)

• Recreating the environment of the past as a means of establishing continuity in the present