A commentary on ‘<i>Little Hooliganz: The Inside Story of Glamorous Lads, Football Hooligans and Post-Subculturalism</i>’ by Professor Steve Redhead

Abstract

Issue 8(2) of this Journal included the article, ‘Little Hooliganz: The Inside Story of Glamorous Lads, Football Hooligans and Post-Subculturalism’ by Prof Steve Redhead. The author is professor of Sport and Media Cultures at the Chelsea School, Brighton University, and has been carrying out research on football fan sub-cultures, including but not limited to the issue of ‘football hooliganism’, for over 20 years. He describes his work on hooliganism as part of the ‘cluster’ of postmodern sub-cultural theory, which has been under-represented since extensive academic study on the issue of football crowd disorder began in the late 1970s. Redhead considers that the phenomenon of contemporary football crowd disorder has been diminishing significantly since the early 1990s (1993: 2) and he shares the views held by academics such as Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti that much of the attention given to the phenomenon, and indeed the actual social construction of it, is the result of a media-fuelled moral panic: ‘[football hooliganism] remains more or less an historical (and hysterical) mass media construction’ (1993: 3).