Gavin Mellor

Introduction: football and community – practical and theoretical considerations

From introduction - During the past 15 years, interest in association football across many areas of the world has risen to a new level. This is manifest in the blanket media coverage that seemingly accompanies every aspect of the elite levels of the game, the increased attendances which have been enjoyed in many countries, and the ritualised identifications with football that have come to permeate wider contemporary social formations. Professional football clubs have been regarded as sites for the expression of common identity for much of the game’s history, and it could be argued that recent developments in and around football have seen this process emphasized with renewed vigour. Football clubs now, as much as ever, embody many of the collective symbols, identifications and processes of connectivity which have long been associated with the notion of ‘community’.

‘The Janus‐faced sport’: English football, community and the legacy of the ‘third way’

This essay reflects on what has happened to the concept of ‘community’ in English football since the election of the New Labour government in Britain. It seeks to understand present governance arrangements around the game in terms of the legacy of ‘the third‐way’: the political philosophy adopted by New Labour when it came to power in the late 1990s. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the Labour government’s avowed commitment to ensuring economic freedom and prosperity on the one hand and equality of opportunity and social justice on the other has resulted in English football adopting a relatively unregulated corporate social responsibility approach to meeting community ‘obligations’. The essay argues that the result has been the emergence of a ‘Janus‐faced’ sport which, to some degree, separates out ‘community concerns’ from more everyday business operations and practices.

The genesis of Manchester United as a national and international 'super-club', 1958-68.

By common consent, Manchester United are the best supported and most wealthy football club in the world today. An analysis of the clubs development indicates that, contrary to popular beliefs, the Munich disaster was not the main reason for Uniteds evolution into a ‘super‐club’. Rather, it is shown that the clubs European Cup successes of the late 1960s, coinciding as they did with major British social, economic and cultural change, are the key to understanding Uniteds present‐day popularity. It is concluded that, had Uniteds success not occurred in the late 1960s, they would not possess their special status in world football today.

The 1953 FA Cup Final: Modernity and Tradition in British Culture

The 1953 FA Cup final was more than just a memorable game of football. It was the first cup final to reach a mass television audience. It was a match where a national hero, Stanley Matthews, finally won a winners medal for a competition that itself was a national institution. It was also a match that was intertwined with the ideas of modernity and tradition that ran through British culture in the early 1950s. The new Queen, present at the game, represented optimism in the future, an optimism closely linked with a technological progress that was epitomised by television. The celebrations of both the cup final and the coronation fed a sense of consensus and unity in the nation. Yet, as the loyalty towards the monarchy and the celebration of a respectable working-class hero like Matthews showed, British culture also remained profoundly attached to older traditions. Such discourses were mediated and actively promoted, although in varying fashions, by the local and national press. The game is thus a guide to the importance of historians understanding the press, not just as a repository of the past but also as an agent that helped to shape that past.

9 ‘The Flowers of Manchester’: The Munich Disaster and the Discursive Creation of Manchester United Football Club

On 6 February 1958, an airliner carrying Manchester United players and officials home from a European Cup quarter-final match against Red Star Belgrade crashed after re-fuelling in the German city of Munich. The incident resulted in the deaths of 23 passengers, including eight of the famous ‘Busby Babes’ Manchester United team. From the moment that the crash occurred, the British press reported it as a ‘disaster’ of national and even international significance. The Times newspaper called the air crash ‘the blackest hand yet set upon sport in these islands’, whilst the Daily Mail referred to it as ‘a black day for Manchester, for football, and for the British people’. International political leaders also shared in this interpretation of the crash. President Tito of Yugoslavia sent Harold MacMillan, the British Prime Minister, condolences over what he described as ‘a heavy blow to British sport and to the British people’. Messages of support to those involved were also received from, amongst others, the Argentine Football Association, the French Football Association, the German Football Association, the Indonesian Football Association, the Roman Association of Sporting Journalists in Italy, staff of the Corriere dello Sport in Italy, Dukla Prague Football Club, and Real Madrid Football Club. Even Queen Elizabeth II and the Pope felt moved to send their condolences and support to the Lord Mayor of Manchester and to the people of the city. The depth of feeling elicited by the Munich air crash was in part a result of the high esteem in which Manchester United were held in English and European football in the years before 1958. In 1957, the club reached the semi-finals of the European Cup at the first attempt, only to be knocked out by eventual winners Real Madrid. A year later, of course, they reached the semi-finals again, but lost heavily to AC Milan with a depleted post-Munich team. As an indication of Manchester

Introduction: Football Disasters: A Conceptual Frame

Taylor and Francis Ltd FSAS_INTRO.sgm 10.1080/ Socce Society 466-0970 (p int)/1743-9590 (online) Original Article 2 04 & Franci Ltd 50 00 Summer 2004 Disaster is an overused word in football. Goals scored against a team, heavy defeats and relegations are all regularly described as ‘disasters’ by fans, journalists, players and the game’s administrators. Within the contemporary context of football, where playing success is paramount and supporters have significant emotional investments in the outcomes of matches, a team being knocked out of a tournament or relegated to a lower league may well be classified in line with the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of a disaster as an incident of ‘great or sudden misfortune’. Yet, to a detached observer, when compared to episodes associated with football that have led to people losing their lives, events on the pitch must seem entirely trivial. Moreover, even when deaths occur in the context of football, some may question the appropriateness of using the label ‘disaster’ to describe incidents, such as those outlined in this book, that involve relatively small numbers of fatalities. This is particularly likely when football-related deaths are compared with events such as the terrorist attacks on New York on 11 September 2001 or the Bam earthquake in December 2003, both of which resulted in catastrophic loss of life. There are clear difficulties associated with establishing what actually constitutes a ‘disaster’ within football-related contexts and beyond. In purely quantitative, ‘measurable’ terms (numbers of dead, physical damage, economic cost, etcetera) the incidents described in this book are manifestly different from the large-scale natural or man-made disasters that periodically blight particular regions of the world. Nonetheless, the same descriptor is routinely applied. This conceptual problem has featured prominently in the development of disaster studies as a field of academic enquiry. By acknowledging that there are significant quantitative differences between events that are popularly depicted as disasters, much of the early work in this field attempted to provide a fixed quantitative measure that could define which incidents qualify as disasters and which do not. This proved to be a difficult task. As Alexander notes, ‘these [definitions] proved unworkably simplistic, as too many elements are involved to enable one to define the phenomenon purely on the basis of, for example, numbers of people killed...or monetary losses’. More recent attempts to resolve this conceptual problem have tended to define disasters in qualitative rather than