Football used to be just football - a simple, skilful and tribal game played in an organised yet riotous fashion. It was played by and for working [class] men and, in the days of distinct gender roles, offered an opportunity for men to get away from the missus, have a few jars with their mates and shout away the week's tensions to their heart's content. Wives and girlfriends accepted this, often with a sigh of relief, and got on with the ritual of housework or Saturday shopping. Call it unevolved, blokes getting away with murder (as per), but that's how it was.
How it is, is somewhat different. Now you can take your pick of poetic sobriquets which have usurped old football. 'The people's game’, ‘The beautiful game' (coined in the Seventies by King Pele), 'The game of two halves' and the now unflinchingly ubiquitous 'Footie'. So though you can't teach an old dog new tricks, nor your grandmother the offside rule, as has been demonstrated in the last decade, it is possible to change not only the image but the substance of a game played by 22 men on a patch of grass.
In case you hadn't noticed, football has become social and political currency whose hyper-inflated value has not escaped the eyes and pockets of investors, politicians and - perhaps most significant of all - advertising executives.
Put a football on it, in it or behind it and 'it', be it a car, hamburger, shaver, condom, will sell. Or so the thinking goes. Building on the rave atmosphere of Euro 96, marketing strategists have created a party animal cranked up on coke.
In Fanatics! Power, Identity and Fandom in Football, a new collection of learned essays published by Routledge, £14.99 - itself a testament to the gentrification and inherent intellectualisation of the game - Simon Lee has written an entire chapter on the political economy of English football in the 1990s'. Dense, yes but also highly readable, and it forms one of the book's many strong arguments against the much-advertised and hugely popular idea of football being a game of 'the people'. Depends which people you mean.
Among other musings, Lee ponders the fact that: 'From the fans' perspective ... being an English football supporter in the 1990s has become an increasingly expensive, passive and individualistic experience.' In other words, if ticket prices don't get you, Sky subscriptions will. Further, Lee writes, 'the commercialisation of English football has not created but has merely served to accentuate and legitimise the inequalities that now exist between the richer Premier League clubs and the rest.'
Or to, put it another way, as Will Hutton did in The State We're In, English football now mirrors those symptoms of inequality and greed which seem to be characteristic of society in general. So it has come to pass that a hefty proportion of World Cups tickets which, by the way, the general public doesn't have a prayer of getting, have been shunted discreetly into corporate hospitality allocations.
That distinction reflects the recent divide that has appeared between the old/ real and new fan. New Fan, like New Man, New Lad and - save us from him Soft Lad (the dweeb with ironically bad spectacles formerly known as Prat), is a post-Hillsborough construct. With his season ticket, retro team shirt and faux Cockney accent nicely in hand, he has bought into the revamped football culture dished up to anyone with the appetite. New Fan can be seen on television in celebrity garms, spouting second-hand opinions, or in pubs deconstructing tactics in a totally fabulous way, or in table-footie bars in a regressed, cappuccino’d-up state.
But in true post-modern style, there has been a backlash against the new pseuds. Adhering to the relentlessly strict rules of the concept of cool, football's equivalent of jazz heads go out of their way - understated of course - to justify their membership of the 'real' supporters' club. To that end no microscopic historical detail is too small to add to their mental scrapbooks. Nick Hornby told their story and even if he didn't, there were enough similarities to hang their allegiance on.
'But Ben Carrington, a contributor to Fanatics!, makes an interesting point in his essay 'Football's coming home. But whose home? And do we want it?'-'New Laddism is ... about trying to redefine the limits of white English masculinity even though it is rarely labelled as such...' Yet those limits by definition exclude everyone else, As France 98 looms closer, lads, and fans new and old, WW gather for a nationalistic party. But the picture of the nation at football, not war, will be marred by a distinct lack of colour.
In less than a decade, according to Simon Lee, more than £400 million has been kicked into football's overhaul, doing up the decor to show off the silverware. Yet only three months ago - on Bloody Saturday, March 28 as reported by Kevin Mitchell in this newspaper - a football fan was murdered in a mass brawl and three fans tried to assault a referee during a Premiership fixture.
'Perhaps the age of cynicism left us with wounds that will take more than political platitudes to heal,' wrote Mitchell. Sadly, he's right. In the face of ugly truths, Blair's government felt compelled to set up the Football Task Force to monitor among other worrying aspects, the insistence of racists spoiling the view. A report published this year, Ethnicity and Victimisation, found what anyone with eyes and a television can see that black people are more than three times likely as whites to avoid going to football matches because of the very real fear of violence.
All this at a time when black representation on the pitch is higher than it has ever been and football has been embraced as the people's game.
New deal, new fan, but old, unreconstructed terms. Whaddaya get? Pure Fantasy.
