You’ll Never Walk Alone: Snapshots of British Football, Love, Loss, Pride, Shame, Hope, Inclusion and A Song

This reflections explores some of the highs and lows of songs sung on the terraces at British football clubs. In particular I draw on some of my childhood experience to explore how songs can breathe hope and inclusion.

Moderns

Chapter 8 examines the zeal for Association Football as the game moderns play. It starts by leaving the playing fields of Eton to describe an altogether different sort of sporting life on the streets of industrial Britain. Jack London remarked in People of the Abyss (1902) that a whole new sub race had grown up there, ‘the pavement people’ he called them, and although he doesn’t mention it, they were playing football far more than they were suffering from racial degeneration. For many working-class boys, football was a passion, their first craze, like rock n’ roll it was a way of feeling free in another otherwise hostile environment. Football for the workers was released by the factory acts in 1853 and by the 1880s it was an integral part of ‘the weekend’—a consumer economy that ushered in a new kind of urban life. Boys played football almost anytime anywhere. The chapter asks why the girls wouldn’t, or couldn’t. In the 1960s Arthur Hopcraft said football was ‘inherent in the people’ and so it was. Along with cinema, dancing, and popular music, it created new liberties and belongings. England won the World Cup in 1966. This was the pinnacle of footballing achievement by a class and a country that had given the world its favourite sport. Very soon after however, British football was in the doldrums, and it was violence that seemed inherent now.

Cartoons

Throughout the 20th century, cartoons relentlessly appeared in all sorts of newspapers, evidence of the immense cultural impact of illustrative satire long before the era of television. Many events were recorded in print, such as the Great War, the 1916 Easter Rising, women’s suffrage, the Second World War, and the Cold War. This chapter uses Gombrich’s ‘6 point filter’ for cartoon analysis to present both case studies and longer- term trends. Case studies include pioneering Irish satire in The Lepracaun, and British football cartoons used to present the perspectives of the working - class British soldier from 1914 to 1918. The authors analyse several trends over time, including increased ‘creative acerbity’, for instance during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, through to a greater personalisation of issues and use of a celebrity approach, often as propaganda during the Cold War and Vietnam. Findings from the analysis of over a thousand images point to an increase in derivative amateur cartoons, which is construed as a democratic tool for expression.

Bullfights Redux: Business, Politics, and the Failure of Transnational Cultural Transfer in 1920s Budapest

Spanish bullfights have been organized twice in Hungary: in 1904 and 1924. Unlike in 1904, when the bullfights arrived in Budapest from Paris and were held with the city's urban tourism promotion interests in mind, the 1924 corrida was connected to the internationalization of Spanish bullfights through their support by fascist Italy, causing a domestic political imbroglio in Hungary due to competing political and business interests at home. At the same time, the bullfights represented another novelty in the field of transnational popular entertainment, whose different waves had continuously reached Budapest since the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the 1924 event, the article argues that the bullfights organized in Budapest that year need to be understood from the perspective of interactions between postwar European authoritarian cultural politics, the domestic political scene in Hungary, and Spanish attempts to turn the bullfights into a transnational spectacle rivaling the popularity of British football. Although the bullfights did not take root in Hungary, their organization in Budapest represents an important chapter in the global advance of twentieth-century popular culture, a historically informed understanding of the formation of which requires consideration not just of successful but also failed processes of cultural transfer.

Referee height influences decision making in British football leagues.

Male height is positively associated with social dominance, and more agonistic/competitive behaviours. However, the ‘Napoleon complex’ or ‘small man syndrome’ suggests that smaller males are more assertive and punitive to compensate for lack of height and social dominance. Here we assess possible relationships between height and punitive behaviours in a real-world setting. Using a non-experimental correlational design, we analysed data on 61 male association football referees from four professional leagues in England, and explored relationships between their height and punitive behaviours.