Tim Crabbe

A Sporting Chance?: using sport to tackle drug use and crime

The article critically evaluates the rationale for using sport-focused interventions in response to drug use and criminal behaviour amongst young people. In addition to reviewing the literature it questions the understandings of sport which typically underpin such interventions. Rather than focusing on contrasts between sport and deviant behaviour, the article draws attention to the commonality of sporting and criminal/drug use experiences. Through reference to research conducted around the work of Leyton Orient Community Sports Programme on a Tower Hamlets Drug Challenge Fund Project, a case is made for the use of sport within the framework of holistic community development interventions in preference to punitive diversionary measures.

‘The Public Gets what the Public Wants’: England Football Fans, ‘Truth’ Claims and Mediated Realities

For at least two decades prior to the 2002 World Cup Finals there had been a widespread tendency for England fans to be castigated by the full spectrum of media vehicles as the embodiment of an unrepentant nationalistic ‘Englishness’. These supporters have systematically been negatively associated with aggressive masculinity, drunkenness, open displays of nationalism, xenophobia and racism. Rather than assessing the extent to which these representations distort ‘the truth’ about ‘England fans’, drawing on popular cultural theory this article is concerned with the ways in which ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1980), deployed in contingent and situation-specific ways, have been constituted through an interplay between media reporting and wider cultural practice. The article utilizes media content analysis, interview material and participant observations collected before, during and after England’s games against Germany in Charleroi on 17 June 2000, in Munich on 1 September 2001 and during the finals of the 2002 World Cup staged in Japan and Korea. This material is underpinned by the researcher’s ongoing ethnographies among supporters of the England national team.

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’.

Fishing for community: England fans at the 2006 FIFA World Cup

This essay intends to provide an illustrative application of contemporary theorizations of community in the context of England football fans presence in Germany for the 2006 FIFA World Cup finals. Drawing upon Maffesoli’s concept of the neo‐tribe, and Scott Lash’s sense of the postmodern reflexive community, the travelling groups of England fans are presented as a series of fleeting, performative ‘communities’. The sense of temporality and consumerist desire for belonging which is revealed builds on Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of the ‘cloakroom community’ which provides a metaphor for the gatherings conjured by consumer society, and associated events such as the FIFA World Cup finals.

Getting to Know You: Using Sport to Engage and Build Relationships with Socially Marginalized Young People

Core aspirations concerning the capacity of sport to deliver a range of social objectives in a community development context worldwide, are shared by the architects of domestic (UK) development initiatives and by those engaged in the policy process who wish to use sport within international development assistance programmes. This chapter is concerned with the extent to which lessons learned in the domestic (UK) arena, are applicable to the wider development community. To do this, it will focus on the findings of ongoing research from the UK Home Office funded Positive Futures Case Study Research Project which is focused on case study projects using sports based activities to engage ‘hard to reach’ and socially marginalized young people. It will consider the relationship between project activity and ‘the Positive Futures approach’ articulated in the Cul-de-sacs and gateways strategy document, which outlines what might be seen as a discrete and alternative perspective that breaks with more conventional sporting and youth justice models of development:1 The Positive Futures programme has been built up around young people’s involvement in sporting activity but it is not concerned with the celebration, development or promotion of sport as an end in itself. Nor does it merely attempt to use sport as a simple ‘diversion’ or alternative to time spent engaging in drug use and crime. Positive Futures is a relationship strategy based on the principle that engagement through sport and the building of mutual respect and trust can provide cultural ‘gateways’ to alternative lifestyles (United Kingdom Government, Home Office, 2003: 8)

Leeds on trial: soap opera, performativity and the racialization of sports-related violence

ABSTRACT Several recent court cases involving the ‘off-field’ activities of professional sportsmen have revealed the ways in which the public performance, media representation and regulation of ‘crime’ is played out in the public imagination. Blackshaw and Crabbe explore how notions of ‘race’ are performatively staged and consumed through the spectacles of celebrity, and discuss the significance of the CCTV evidence used in such cases. In doing so they highlight the ways in which ‘race’ operates discursively to undermine the position of the racialized Other.

Bingers: The performativity and consumption of “deviant” leisure

Abstract Despite earlier pronunciations of the death of the sociology of deviance (Sumner, 1994), it would seem that its ghost lives on in the realms of leisure and popular culture. Leisure has always been an ambivalent sphere of social life: an expedient of both freedom and liberation and an instrument of repression. Whatever its public and moral hegemony then, leisure activities have always offered spaces for the pursuit of the “deviant,” from ritualised rule‐breaking to the more abhorrent forms of crime against the vulnerable. As such, while this paper does not suggest a return to a general concept to encompass the myriad practices that might be considered “deviant” within the realm of leisure today, it does seek to reinvent the concept as a beginning enterprise on the basis of a determination to refuse the more comfortable role of bystander. Through a critical theoretical appraisal and application to the practices surrounding city centre “binge drinking” it introduces the potential for considering contemporary forms of “deviant” leisure through the concepts of consumption and performativity.

‘Holding their own’: Australian football, British culture and globalization

This study looks historically at the Australian presence in English football culture. In essence, it describes a transition from Aussie‐footballer‐as‐rarity to the contemporary situation in which Australians line up as simply one unremarkable nationality among the many represented in British football’s contingent of migrant workers. To illustrate this transition there is a discussion of the case study of Craig Johnston, who, by definition, was an extraordinary presence in the English First Division between 1978 and 1988. The study then analyses the representation of Australian football in the British sports press and of the British‐ (and Europe‐ ) based ‘Socceroos’ in the Australian media. These representations are considered alongside the testimony of Aaron Downes, who, at the time of writing, captains Chesterfield in the English Coca Cola Football League Two representing one of hundreds of non‐elite migrant Australian football workers contracted to clubs across Europe.