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Tactics
This guide is designed in order to help us to learn about the power play and organisational manoeuvres that have shaped the sport in its current form. Understanding football critically through the lenses of such fields as sociology, social psychology, management theory and politics can help to consider how effective the sport is in development terms, and how it might be organised and delivered differently in the future to ensure greater success.
The guide is therefore a gateway to academic analysis of the sport. It focuses on theoretical and policy analysis from social science perspectives. It does not, currently, consider natural science questions or applications. So if your interest is in physiological, biomechanical or psychological domains, this site may be of only limited use although obviously we think it's still worth reading on
The guide works by pointing you in the direction of resources in three different contexts:
- 1. Published academic texts. These are books or peer-reviewed journal articles in the public domain. In the guide we cite these as references (eg, Cikler, 1997), and you are then invited to locate and consider the original version. Full reference details together with reviews of selected texts are held in our unique Football Bibliography. This recently updated document is an expansive guide to literature on football and can be used as an efficient short-cut when pursuing a range of football themes.
- 2. The www.sportsdevelopment.org.uk library. This houses a range of key policy and evaluation documents, published by the major government and sports agencies. You can download these documents or read them from the site.
- 3. The web sites of academic research centres, football portals, magazines and fanzines dedicated to the beautiful game. While care should be taken to distinguish the appropriateness of these resources for the purposes of academic essays and critique (ie don't try to present articles from websites as academic sources), we will discover that many of the individuals involved in the field will write for both intellectual and popular audiences.
Players
Although there has long been a market for football writing, it is only relatively recently that biographies, annuals and club histories have been joined on the shelves by more serious, rigorous considerations of the sport and its impact on society. This shift can be traced, for the most part, to the crises that beset the sport in the 1980s, and to the battles over how best to run a sport that had lost its way to the extent that the government at the time, led by Margaret Thatcher, was considering direct regulation of the game.
Heysel, Bradford, Hillsborough, together with the media-enflamed panic over hooliganism, created international embarrassment for Thatcher's administration. Her reaction was to threaten the apparently insipient football authorities with a range of draconian measures, some of which had the potential to bankrupt the sport at professional level (see King, 1998). The publication of the Heysel and Taylor Reports, however, calmed these stormy waters, and opened up the opportunities for state and corporate investment.
In the wake of this came the gradual professionalisation and commercialisation of the major football organisations, for better or for worse (see Conn, 1997). At the same time, a range of new voices were heard for the first time, prepared to stand up for their versions of the national sport. Most often these were supporters, unwilling to see their clubs go to the wall or fall prey to opportunistic business interests. In the late 1980s, independent supporters groups mushroomed at the same time as fanzines began to make an impact on match days and beyond. A national organisation, the Football Supporters Association (FSA), was formed to represent the views of fans at the highest levels. Although printed fanzines are now in less obvious circulation, internet fan sites have since proliferated. An indication of the broad interests of these publications can be drawn from the independent magazine, When Saturday Comes (www.wsc.co.uk).
Up until this time, give or take the paternalistic interest of the odd Oxford anthropologist (eg Morris, 1980), the focal point for the academic analysis of football had been the University of Leicester. Here, inspired by the sociologist Eric Dunning, researchers had developed studies of spectator violence. A series of successful papers led to the formation of the Sir Norman Chester Research Centre, where Dunning and his colleagues, particularly Murphy and Williams, carved a niche in football research. The archives of the Centre are still available at the newly styled Centre for the Sociology of Sport (www.le.ac.uk/sociology/css/), which continues some football-based research today.
However, from the early 1990s onwards, football began to gain more credibility. Newly built or refurbished stadium hastened the 'gentrification' of the sport, and the increase in sports media outlets gave football and its more radical commentators opportunities to spread the word further. BBC Radio 5 led to 6.06 led to Danny Baker led to Danny Kelly and, somehow, to David Mellor. Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch led to Arthur Smith's An Evening With Gary Lineker led to films and television dramas and comedies. Replica shirts led to retro shirts led to Philosophy Football (www.philosophyfootball.com).
At the same time, interest from within academia began to simmer. Rogan Taylor, who had been the driving force behind the FSA, established a research interest at the University of Liverpool (www.liv.ac.uk/footballindustry/), while established cultural studies scholars such as Alan Tomlinson and John Sugden (now both at the Chelsea School at Brighton University) began to write about identity in the English and Northern Irish game. Other career sociologists, Gary Armstrong, Tim Crabbe and later Richard Giulianotti began to apply new techniques and bring different dimensions to empirical studies and investigations, and a body of knowledge was fast developing.
And then, of course, Football Came Home. Football's increasing popularity, brought home rather forcibly by Euro 96, confirmed to the Labour Party that the sport was worthy of government attention. In some respects, this can be seen as an appeal to populism. Tony Blair exchanging headers with Kevin Keegan or Alex Ferguson may have become a fairly consistent election tactic, but beneath the spin were genuine concerns by Labour politicians about the state of the game.
These concerns relate to five main aspects of the sport:
- The ways in which the Football Association managed and regulated the game as a whole. Many saw the FA as responsible for the cynical manipulation of the sport by commercial interests; the degrading of such iconic competitions as the FA Cup; poor financial management and the variable performance of the national team. There were also fears about the extent to which the 92-member FA Council was representative of all interests in the game.
- The ways in which clubs were owned, organised and managed. The advent of the FA Premier League heralded a shift in club ownership, with the supporters often disenfranchised and marginalised as a result. The demise of Wimbledon FC is of particular note in this context, but there is a long list of examples of football clubs being consumed by the unsavoury appetites of developers and business interests.
- The extent of corruption and insider dealing within the sport. Agents, the bung culture, bribery and betting frauds were all causes for concern, alongside the representation of professional footballers in the media as self-regarding, self-abusing sex addicts. Not a good thing.
- The extent to which all communities were represented in all aspects of participation, spectatorship and administration. The first target here was the position and inclusion of women, but this soon extended to ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
- The notion that professional clubs in particular, and football clubs in general, could and should do more for their communities. This relates to both football development (the education of predominantly young footballers) and community development (the use of football as a social intervention).
Since this time, policy and academic work on these aspects has proliferated. The first impetus for this was the commissioning by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) of the Football Task Force. The Task Force was the stimulus for further papers, texts and books, many of which called for the Football Association to improve their governance of the sport. Frustration with the intransigence of the FA in this respect led a succession of Ministers of Sport to apply pressure to the national governing body. This has only recently culminated in the FA Council sanctioning a review process led by Lord Burns, and a commitment by the FA to embrace new governance procedures and democratic representation.
Next..... The Pitch - Football governance; social inclusion; community and excellence .....
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