Safety and Security Battles: Unpacking the Players and Arenas of the Safe Standing Movement in English Football (1989–2022)

This article advances recent debates on social movement (relational) fields, outcomes, and successes by suggesting that the analysis of such fields as a whole must be temporal. The relational interpersonal and intersubjective choices made by interdependent actors in social life take place in fields of interaction, but these interactions and their networks of social relations have a history. Hence, the social movement field is characterised by multiple temporal periods through which the actions of activists both shape and are shaped by the long-term socio-political environments in which they are embedded. To develop this analysis, we identify a football supporter-movement in England, ‘Safe Standing’, revealing the complex interplay of cultural and technological patterns of interaction across the compelling timeframes and orientations of a 30-year movement field. Adopting a theoretical framework which synthesises research on the strategic interactions of movement ‘players’ and ‘arenas’, and sport-focused security fields, we identify a series of compound and sub-players across the political, symbolic, mediatised, technological, and legislative arenas which constitute the security field of contention, in what is an under-researched lifeworld in sociology

Toward COVID-19 secure events: considerations for organizing the safe resumption of major sporting events

The current COVID-19 pandemic has already impacted both elite and grassroots sports in a series of ways. Whilst accepting that many answers to emerging and relevant questions cannot be provided at this stage, this commentary discusses some of the organizational prospects of “post-pandemic” sports mega-events by focusing predominantly on the topics of volunteering and security management. Importantly, these are two central facets of mega-event organization that are likely to be impacted by the current crisis in some way as the world of sports aims to resume. By considering a number of emerging questions, this commentary calls for an engagement with some of the individual and social implications related to future mega-event organizations. It sheds light on some of the potential organizational challenges and management issues related to “restarting” sports and provides some directions for future interdisciplinary work

A Security Theatre of Dreams: supporters’ responses to ‘safety’ and ‘security’ following the Old Trafford ‘fake bomb’ evacuation

On May 15, 2016, reports emerged of a “suspect package” inside Old Trafford minutes before kick-off in Manchester United’s game versus Bournemouth. The “suspect package,” causing a full-scale evacuation, and match postponement, turned out to be a “fake bomb” accidently left following a security exercise. Minimal social research investigates responses from supporters to “security” and “safety” at large sports events. Although the “suspect package,” fortunately, never “materialized,” it represents an important case in English football. Theoretically, this study adopts a frame analysis technique pioneered by Erving Goffman and it empirically examines supporters’ responses to security during the chaotic hours of the “fake bomb” incident, as articulated on an interactive message board. Overall, supporters were satisfied with police and security management’s handling of the incident, although it was questioned how the “fake bomb” was not detected. Importantly, supporters agreed that “safety comes first.

Generations, events, and social movement legacies: unpacking social change in English football (1980-2023)

This article critically employs the case of association football in England, from 1980-2023, as a social movement timescape, to examine the political consciousness and long-term mobilisations of a generation of football supporter activists, and their capacity to influence politics, and respond to new, emerging, critical junctures, through networks of trust and shared memories of historical events. This is of crucial importance to sociology because it reveals the tensions between what are considered legitimate and illegitimate social practices which characterise contemporary society’s moral economy. Focusing on temporal contestations over regulation, policing, governance and cultural rituals, the article deconstructs the role of generations in social movements, and critically synthesises relational-temporal sociology and classic and contemporary work on the sociology of generations, to show how legacy operates as a multifaceted maturing concept of power and time. In English football’s neoliberal timescape, the supporters’ movement has reached a critical juncture; the future will require a new generation of activists, to negotiate, resist and contest the new hegemonic politics of social control and supporter engagement

Theorizing surveillance and social spacing through football: The fan-opticon and beyond

This article critically examines the temporal mobilizations of a 25-year football supporter social movement against the all-seating (stadia) legislation in England and Wales, to unpack, and advance, (neo-)Foucauldian panoptic theorizations of surveillance power and counter-power. Drawing upon prior empirically informed analysis of this movement; ‘Safe Standing’, the article interrogates new policy-based outcomes, including the early adoption of ‘licensed (Safe) Standing’ technology in 2022, to argue, that whilst publicly framed as a movement victory, it simultaneously serves to prefigure a new regulatory regime in football; one which extends the regulation and surveillance of fans within the wider social and corporate lifeworld. Introducing our new concept; the ‘fan-opticon’, the article discusses how Safe Standing continues to normalize a momentum of surveillance in sport and highlights the contradictory nature of security-related projects in the twenty-first century. We conclude that the governmentality of the state through football, to be characteristic of temporally sensitive hermeneutic struggles of power and resistance, through the discipline, and self-discipline of social actors. New forms of subjectivity are remoulded in ways which extend the power of surveillance and regulation, despite multiple counter-conduct, and discursive, resistance practices