http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/c...able-case-for-sociological-study-9920729.html
Article in the Standard
If you hop on this evening’s fast train from Clapham Junction to Brighton, you can catch Brighton & Hove Albion playing Millwall FC in the SkyBet Championship, the second division of English football.
When you get there, you may see a group of sixth-formers taking notes.
These bright young things will be from Varndean College in Brighton. Previously, Varndean’s sporting claim to fame was that Des Lynam attended the school as a young man — some time in the 19th century, I think. But this week the college surpassed even that, as Varndean’s sociology department became nationally famous for advertising a students’ trip to tonight’s football match with a slightly patronising poster.
The tone was sort of: “Roll up, kids! Roll up! Watch the funny working-class people shout at their funny little sport! Then learn how to make owlish statements about their behaviour!”
“You will see… Gender performance — the New Lad and Hyper Masculinity… and women challenging gender norms,” it said, also promising “working-class culture and habitus… Issues around Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity”. That bit presumably refers to the songs sometimes sung by visiting fans to Falmer Stadium, which suggest that the home supporters are uniformly homosexual and wonder: “Does your boyfriend know you’re here?”
The poster also invited students to “observe and even talk to football fans from Brighton and the notorious Millwall FC” and consume “a delicious pie” and “a nice warm beefy Bovril”. In other words, the trip was being sold as class tourism — human shark cage diving with clipboards.
Still, as far as I can see, that is where whatever small grain of offensiveness in the poster ends. Others disagree. It has been suggested in response that football is not, in fact, a working-class sport, that Millwall’s fans are not “notorious” and that a football game is somehow an inappropriate case study for students wishing to grow up to be goatee-stroking sociologists.
All of these suggestions are obviously stupid and wrong.
Premier League research suggests that 76 per cent of people who go to watch football are men, and that 83 per cent of those men are of a social demographic defined as being below ABC1. In other words, 63 per cent of the people you can expect to encounter at the average English football game will possess a penis and drop their aitches. It is a working-class sport, and although it is generally accepted that football’s audience and ethics are slowly being hijacked by wine-drinking middle-class jessies like me, the takeover is far from complete.
As for Millwall: well, things have changed at The New Den, but the man on the Clapham omnibus would still associate Millwall FC with the antics of their most infamous hooligan firm, the Bushwackers, who are scary *******s, for want of a better phrase. The club don’t thank you for pointing it out, but they have been involved in some of the most infamous football violence in living memory.
The nadir was the 1985 Kenilworth Road riot in Luton, when Millwall fans from an overcrowded away end invaded the pitch and the police were pelted with concrete blocks. That was 30 years ago, granted, but since then Millwall’s fans have rioted on dozens of occasions. Indeed, in the words of the veteran hooligan Ginger Bob, there have been episodes since 1985 that were “worse than Luton”.
After a loss against Birmingham in 2002 an enormous brawl left nearly 50 policemen injured. Millwall hoolies tore up Budapest before a European match in 2004. They went on the rampage around Upton Park alongside their West Ham brethren in 2009. And just 18 months ago there was a large fight between different factions of Millwall supporters inside Wembley Stadium during an FA Cup match.
After each incident the club has made valiant attempts to punish offenders and reduce the trouble. But a reputation is a reputation, and Millwall’s remains “notorious”.
Finally, there is the notion that watching people watching football is an unworthy subject for sociology — an idea that the sociologist David Goldblatt has called a category error. As Goldblatt has said: “Football is an arena where the politics of the body, the politics of visibility, the sociology of performance, all come together in extraordinary, dramatic fashion.”
Now, if you said something like that at the football, many reasonable supporters would either call you a ponce or punch you. And their response would be understandable. Nevertheless, Goldblatt is on to something and, if you ask me, there should be more sociology at the football, not less. In fact, you could write not just a sixth-form essay but a whole academic tome from a sociological tour of London’s football grounds.
There would be much to say, for example, about Arsenal fans’ adoring-despairing relationship with their manager Arsène Wenger, with whom they have fallen in and out of love more frequently than Liz Taylor with Richard Burton. So, too, would a goatee-stroker have a field day analysing Chelsea’s fans and their chronic insecurity, deriving from their status as football’s quintessential nouveaux riches — a body of supporters both defiant and deeply insecure about the wealth that owner Roman Abramovich has lavished on the club.
Or go up to Spurs, and try to get your head around their cultural ownership of the term “Yid” — a term that will rightly earn you a smack in the schnozzle if you used it in Jewish areas of London outside the immediate vicinity of White Hart Lane. Why, sociologically, is it OK for thousands of Spurs fans to march along the road bellowing “Yid Army” as loudly as their lungs can muster?
We could go on. Hopefully one day an aspiring young sociologist at Varndean College will do so. I dare say the teachers and students are feeling a bit bruised about the way their Friday- night trip to the footie has been turned on them. Let them remain defiant. Clumsy their phrase-making may have been, but they are fighting the good fight.
Article in the Standard
If you hop on this evening’s fast train from Clapham Junction to Brighton, you can catch Brighton & Hove Albion playing Millwall FC in the SkyBet Championship, the second division of English football.
When you get there, you may see a group of sixth-formers taking notes.
These bright young things will be from Varndean College in Brighton. Previously, Varndean’s sporting claim to fame was that Des Lynam attended the school as a young man — some time in the 19th century, I think. But this week the college surpassed even that, as Varndean’s sociology department became nationally famous for advertising a students’ trip to tonight’s football match with a slightly patronising poster.
The tone was sort of: “Roll up, kids! Roll up! Watch the funny working-class people shout at their funny little sport! Then learn how to make owlish statements about their behaviour!”
“You will see… Gender performance — the New Lad and Hyper Masculinity… and women challenging gender norms,” it said, also promising “working-class culture and habitus… Issues around Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity”. That bit presumably refers to the songs sometimes sung by visiting fans to Falmer Stadium, which suggest that the home supporters are uniformly homosexual and wonder: “Does your boyfriend know you’re here?”
The poster also invited students to “observe and even talk to football fans from Brighton and the notorious Millwall FC” and consume “a delicious pie” and “a nice warm beefy Bovril”. In other words, the trip was being sold as class tourism — human shark cage diving with clipboards.
Still, as far as I can see, that is where whatever small grain of offensiveness in the poster ends. Others disagree. It has been suggested in response that football is not, in fact, a working-class sport, that Millwall’s fans are not “notorious” and that a football game is somehow an inappropriate case study for students wishing to grow up to be goatee-stroking sociologists.
All of these suggestions are obviously stupid and wrong.
Premier League research suggests that 76 per cent of people who go to watch football are men, and that 83 per cent of those men are of a social demographic defined as being below ABC1. In other words, 63 per cent of the people you can expect to encounter at the average English football game will possess a penis and drop their aitches. It is a working-class sport, and although it is generally accepted that football’s audience and ethics are slowly being hijacked by wine-drinking middle-class jessies like me, the takeover is far from complete.
As for Millwall: well, things have changed at The New Den, but the man on the Clapham omnibus would still associate Millwall FC with the antics of their most infamous hooligan firm, the Bushwackers, who are scary *******s, for want of a better phrase. The club don’t thank you for pointing it out, but they have been involved in some of the most infamous football violence in living memory.
The nadir was the 1985 Kenilworth Road riot in Luton, when Millwall fans from an overcrowded away end invaded the pitch and the police were pelted with concrete blocks. That was 30 years ago, granted, but since then Millwall’s fans have rioted on dozens of occasions. Indeed, in the words of the veteran hooligan Ginger Bob, there have been episodes since 1985 that were “worse than Luton”.
After a loss against Birmingham in 2002 an enormous brawl left nearly 50 policemen injured. Millwall hoolies tore up Budapest before a European match in 2004. They went on the rampage around Upton Park alongside their West Ham brethren in 2009. And just 18 months ago there was a large fight between different factions of Millwall supporters inside Wembley Stadium during an FA Cup match.
After each incident the club has made valiant attempts to punish offenders and reduce the trouble. But a reputation is a reputation, and Millwall’s remains “notorious”.
Finally, there is the notion that watching people watching football is an unworthy subject for sociology — an idea that the sociologist David Goldblatt has called a category error. As Goldblatt has said: “Football is an arena where the politics of the body, the politics of visibility, the sociology of performance, all come together in extraordinary, dramatic fashion.”
Now, if you said something like that at the football, many reasonable supporters would either call you a ponce or punch you. And their response would be understandable. Nevertheless, Goldblatt is on to something and, if you ask me, there should be more sociology at the football, not less. In fact, you could write not just a sixth-form essay but a whole academic tome from a sociological tour of London’s football grounds.
There would be much to say, for example, about Arsenal fans’ adoring-despairing relationship with their manager Arsène Wenger, with whom they have fallen in and out of love more frequently than Liz Taylor with Richard Burton. So, too, would a goatee-stroker have a field day analysing Chelsea’s fans and their chronic insecurity, deriving from their status as football’s quintessential nouveaux riches — a body of supporters both defiant and deeply insecure about the wealth that owner Roman Abramovich has lavished on the club.
Or go up to Spurs, and try to get your head around their cultural ownership of the term “Yid” — a term that will rightly earn you a smack in the schnozzle if you used it in Jewish areas of London outside the immediate vicinity of White Hart Lane. Why, sociologically, is it OK for thousands of Spurs fans to march along the road bellowing “Yid Army” as loudly as their lungs can muster?
We could go on. Hopefully one day an aspiring young sociologist at Varndean College will do so. I dare say the teachers and students are feeling a bit bruised about the way their Friday- night trip to the footie has been turned on them. Let them remain defiant. Clumsy their phrase-making may have been, but they are fighting the good fight.
