Football is supposed to be fun. I think we forget that sometimes, which is both a blessing and a curse.
It's only because football is so perfect a crucible that we're able to throw ourselves into it as we do. It's an escape from reality and it's suitable enough for its purpose that we can tear into it face-first and let it take over our brains.
But there's a downside too. Because winning isn't just enjoyable but addictive, we take the game very, very seriously. We get frustrated and angry. How we handle that says a lot about our levels of maturity when trusted with powerful emotions.
Losing sight of the fun, though? That's silly.
If you can only be angry, why bother? If only getting everything your own way is satisfactory, how can you enjoy the highs to their maximum extent?
Far be it from me to tell people how to enjoy something, but there's more pleasure to take from football than a lot of supposed fanatics will ever realise.
Anyway…
How long can football stay in fashion?
Unlike a lot of the football supporters I know, I have no idea what was the first match I watched on television or even the first match I attended in person. I don’t remember going to a game aware it was my first and I can’t place an earliest memory now, more than three decades later.
It simply isn’t there. No nostalgic flash across the hippocampus. No potential candidates for the dubious accolade. There’s just a sort of mush in which five years of formative football have congealed into what I think of as the early days.
What that means is that I was taken to football very young, which in turn means that I remember – just – a time when football wasn't fashionable and actually going to matches was sometimes considered a little weird.
It's hard to imagine now but it's not all that long ago that football was grubby. Not state ownership grubby or corrupt governing bodies grubby or financial doping grubby, but actually grubby.
Even Premier League grounds were ramshackle in the first half of the 1990s and those lower down were so run-down that they seemed to transcend ugliness and acquire an earthy romanticism, bathed in that strange beautiful orange glow that only the streets around football grounds have on a Tuesday evening.
I didn't realise until much later that I was getting into football right in the eye of stormy change. It wasn't cool, yet, but it was growing in popularity and the polish of the Premier League was gradually being applied. Football was in the midst of history, for better and worse, and its public perception was shifting too.
Football's place in society in the early 1990s wasn't a positive one. The breakaway league was bouncing from stadium to satellite to television set in the afterglow of World Cup Italia '90 but outsiders still considered it a dirty and dangerous pastime.
It's not difficult to understand where that sentiment originated. The Hillsborough Disaster was a tragedy for all of football and all of football had to take on the chin that it would add to the game's negative reputation.
It's thanks to the dedication and determination of Hillsborough survivors, families and campaigners since 1989 that the disaster is, broadly, not used to criticise football or football supporters to this day.
Nevertheless, the 1980s left football supporter culture on its arse. Sure, there are those of us who liked that it was rough around the edges, even a little perilous. We like an edge, a frisson in the air. But few of us actually want to beat people up or be beaten up ourselves, yet racism and hooliganism defined football in the eyes of outsiders.
Thatcher. Moynihan. The National Front. ID cards. Fences, electrified and otherwise. These are the bastard outcomes of football's perception immediately prior to the dawn of the Premier League, each and every one defeated by supporters. Turns out the football generation before mine wasn't so bad after all.
Yet the place occupied in the national psyche by those very supporters had been manipulated by the poisonous and deliberate slander of the Conservative government and its rancid red-top state media. Even with the Premier League in place it would take a home tournament and the adoption of the recommendations of the Taylor Report to make football feel accessible.
1996 was a cultural moment unlike any other. The confluence of EURO '96, Britpop and surging New Labour is overstated but in the simplified understanding of an eleven-year-old boy obsessed with football and infatuated with music, the felt phenomenon was lightning in a bottle.
English football and my experience of it have grown together. I'm lucky to be the age I am and grateful to have been thrust into the football world when I was, perfectly positioned to ride the wave and let the surface-level sociology of it wash over me while being blissfully unaware of how simplistic those interpretations were.
Football’s cycle of cool is seldom about the football. On either side of the turn of the 1980s, casuals brought men’s fashion into football. Frequently connected to hooligan firms and intrinsically linked with working class male culture in England, casuals served to anchor the game in the social world around it at a time when both sorely needed to have a look at themselves.
Casual culture itself might have ebbed away but it still has wellsprings among football supporters and its impact can be seen at the match today, almost with ubiquity. Keen observers of the narrative timeline will note that casuals didn’t make football fashionable on the outside. There’s only so much a Lacoste polo and Ralph Lauren harrington can do.
But that collision of football and fashion underpins the sport’s cool in the modern day. Scroll through the leading lifestyle blogs and it won’t be long before you find one of two versions of football’s undeniable x-factor.
Whether it’s the traditional sportswear manufacturers collaborating with fashion houses and boutique designers of impossible cool, or said designers simply taking the game as their raw materials, football-inspired street style is everywhere and it has been for some time.
Football itself has kept pace. Capitalising on its position at the forefront of culture when the world rocked on its axis and distances shrank, football’s enduring global appeal was supercharged by easy access. If football is nothing but a sport with some stories attached, modern communications technology was made for it and rampant commercial zeal ensured the opportunity wasn’t missed.
But there’s an historical context too. Had football not developed in the way it did in the second half of the last century, the Premier League wouldn’t have happened and the Extremely Online fanatics of Twitter would now be sending each other badly spelled death threats about tennis.
What ended with the Premier League ticking into the millennium as a sporting cosmopolitan bazaar for the world to enjoy began with the abolition of the maximum wage for players in 1961 and England winning the World Cup five and a half years later.
Society has long held wealthy young men in either contempt or esteem depending on a suite of factors we shan’t go into, but there’s no doubt that other young men – or a large proportion of them, at least – consider them aspirational. That’s been building in football now for sixty years.
There’s an argument that what we’ve experienced in football supporter culture over those six decades are waves of fashion and football, lapping at one another with the wild electricity of youth culture. If that’s the case, if football’s fashionable appeal is somehow cyclical, it should be sloping back off into the shadows any day now.
There are harbingers and they rest, as ever, at the whim of the next generation. As such they’re ungraspable to me, but as a sociological observer it seems that esports players and streaming celebrities, though they piggyback on “proper” football for now, are one such threat.
All else being equal that shouldn’t be a problem. People can enjoy many passions in life and it’s even better when they’re complementary, so EA FC streaming should go hand in hand quite happily with Fantasy Premier League, Football Manager, watching the Premier League on television, and going to the match.
Therein lies the powderkeg. If young fans are priced out of going to the football in person they can never become supporters. Their passions will become not complementary but competitive, and it’s the old-fashioned one that will miss out.
Football will continue. Football shirts on Hypebeast might not. PSG might even go back to being a football club.
Football will always be attractive to an enormous number of people irrespective of their generation. It’s too intoxicating not to be. But that doesn’t mean it’ll always be fashionable nor in fashion.
Consumer culture and youth culture don’t stand still and football, though it’s kept up with remarkable consistency for a very long time now, could eventually drift away from the limelight.
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“Perhaps Fifa could have done something but Infantino, in his clownish populism, is not merely incapable, but complicit in the colonisation of the game by a state with a deplorable human rights record motivated not by doing what is right for the game, but by self-interest.”
Jonathan Wilson concludes his piece about Gianno Infantino’s role in the growing power of Saudi Arabia in football.
Salty beef extracts
How Portsmouth fought back from the brink to reclaim what was lost (i)
Taking my daughter to football has enhanced my life as a matchgoing fan (When Saturday Comes)
Football regulator: Independence critical to success (The FSA)
St. Pauli supporter clubs clash over Palestine solidarity (Morning Star)
Canadian Football: Understanding the Past (Football Paradise)
Dessert
The adidas x Bugatti Limited Edition X Crazyfast football boot looks like…well, this. Perhaps football will stay fashionable for the foreseeable future after all.
By the way…
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