Steve Redhead

We're not really here: Manchester City, mobility and placelessness

In a contemporary football landscape of locational and geographical change, the analysis of Manchester City Football Club and the relocation to the City of Manchester Stadium highlights some interesting issues surrounding the new British football stadium and a sense of place. In reaction to the placeless stadium environment, thinking around the sporting tophilia can then be developed around these new cultural spaces by looking at how the power of the fans to refigure and renegotiate their fandom has been used in a variety of ways to try to create a sense of identity within the new stadium space. A bringing of the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ appears to be central to the attempted creation of place in these new social spaces with no history or identity of their own, whilst the physical presence, organization and mobility of activated fan groups such as Bluewatch present not only the collective concern over the ability to identify with the new stadium environment, but also demonstrate the power to organize as a collective force to make an impact on how the stadium is appropriated and to change activity within. With the current drive to relocate within British professional football showing no signs of slowing down, the move to these new stadiums will continue to be a rich and fertile ground for the analysis of the sporting tophilia and indeed for the development of football fan culture itself.

Lock, stock and two smoking hooligans: low sport journalism and hit‐and‐tell literature

In a period where there is a relative dearth of criminological, sociological or cultural accounts of football hooligan subcultures, ‘low culture’ amateur journalistic accounts have proliferated. They are now extensive in number and collected together form a library of hooligan stories in the fashionable, confessional form of sports fan memoir which is termed here ‘low sport journalism’. They are distinct from, but related to, the football and youth culture fiction of writers like John King and Irvine Welsh which is adjacent to what I call ‘hit‐and‐tell’ literature. This article draws on some aspects of a continuing research project looking at the connection between deviant football hooligan literature and the history of football hooligan subcultures in Britain. Part of the ongoing research work is archival, involving a comprehensive collection and reading of 20 years of football hooligan gang memoirs. The earliest dates from 1987 and the latest was published in December 2007. The article documents the building and application of the archive, and signposts some possible routes to producing more satisfactory research into heavily male‐dominated hooligan subcultures.

Don't go back to Rockville

On the Left Bank For a While Insanity Bohemian Style Don Letts/Mick Jones ‘E = MC2’, from the album THIS IS … BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE (CBS, released 1985). This paper is part of work in progress for a book to be published next year by Manchester University Press, entitled The End of the Century Party: Youth and Pop towards 2000. The specific focus here is on subcultural theories of the 1970s and postmodern theories of the 1980s, and their general failure to account for the shifting relationships between pop culture and youth culture since the 1940s. The paper traces some of the changes in the social ‘field’ of leisure in the 1980s which make it necessary to separate ‘youth culture’ and ‘rock culture’ if we are to analyse pop and youth as we approach the year 2000.