Rivalries and Racisms: 'Closed' and 'Open' Islamophobic Dispositions Amongst Football Supporters

Racism in football has been the topic of much academic discussion. However, the issue of Islamophobic racism has received very little attention. This article looks at Middlesbrough FC and Newcastle United FC fan discussions around the \'Mido affair\' in August 2007 to consider the issue and uses this evidence to discuss the effectiveness of the football Faith Summit\'s policy suggestions to combat Islamophobia in football. The unfolding argument is that Middlesbrough FC and Newcastle United FC both use \'open\' and \'closed\' Islamophobic positions opportunistically to express their feelings of rivalry toward each other and the emergent policy suggestions are that the football authorities should seek to work with football fans, rather than potentially punish them, in order to reduce anti-Muslim sentiment in spectator football.Football Fandom; Islamophobia; Rivalry; Racism; E-Zine; Frame Analysis

Chasing a Tiger in a network society? Hull City’s proposed name change in the pursuit of China and East Asia’s new middle class consumers

The English Premier League possesses multiple global dimensions, including its clubs’ economic ownership, player recruitment patterns and television broadcasts of its matches. The owner of Hull City Association Football Club’s economic rights, Dr Assam Allam, announced plans to re-name the club ‘Hull City Tigers’ in an attempt to re-orientate the club towards seemingly lucrative East Asian, and specifically Chinese, markets in 2013. This article, first, draws upon Manuel Castells’ work in The Rise of the Network Society to critically discuss the logic of Hull City’s proposed reorientation to suit ‘new middle class’ consumers in China and the East Asian global region and second, uses the example to theoretically engage with Castells’ idea that ‘networks’ replace ‘hierarchies’ as social structures. This leads to the argument that while these plans might intend to strengthen the club’s financial position, they overlook a concern with local environments that Castells guides us toward. By looking toward the local consumer practices in China and the East Asian global region, Allam would find: (a) the normalisation in production and consumption of counterfeit club-branded sportswear and television broadcasts which makes increasing the club’s revenues difficult; and (b) that the region’s ‘new middle classes’ (marked by disposable income) are unlikely to foster support for Hull City, even if ‘Tigers’ is added to its name

Sport and austerity in the UK: an insight into Liverpool 2014

The UK’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in 2010, outlined £81 billion of cuts across government departments by 2014/15. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat reform was premised on the ‘Big Society’ making up for their austere cuts to the state. In this piece, we debate the impact of this on sports development, taking the case study of inner city Liverpool. This example is marked because, on the one hand, it presents cuts to municipal sports facilities which are threatened with closure as a result of shrinking local authority budgets, and on the other this role is partially taken on by an offshoot of Everton Football Club (EFC). The points we debate are: 1) is the change in responsibility from the local authority to a private enterprise, staffed by volunteers, a new turn in sport policy?; and 2) what are the consequences of this on grassroots sport participation

Collective Action and Football Fandom A Relational Sociological Approach

This book draws upon a relational sociological paradigm to explore the processes of collective action in football fandom across Europe and the UK. Through a range of case studies, the authors address pertinent themes in football fandom, ..

Is austerity the biggest threat to sport of our time?

This is a short research note prepared by Dr Dan Parnell and Dr Peter Millward, of ConnectSport, which offers an insight into a recent special issue on sport management in an era of austerity, published in the European Sport Management Quarterly journal

Social movement ruptures and legacies: unpacking the early sedimentation of the anti-European Super League movement in English football

Building on Della Porta’s work on social movement events, critical junctures, and legacies, this article studies the discursive practices, emotions and networks of the instant 48-hour mobilizations of the anti-European Super League (ESL) movement in English football in April 2021. In doing so, we show how this case reveals a new generation of conflict between the different supporter demographic and corporate constituencies that characterize elite football in England, and their politicized temporal structures. Showing how social movement ‘legacy’ operates as a multifaceted concept of power and time, we argue that the ‘puzzling out’ of a new post-ESL regulatory regime in football reveals the tensions between what are considered legitimate, and illegitimate, practices, which characterize the moral economy of the contemporary English football crowd