Abstract
This review essay looks anew at the connection between ‘deviant’ football hooligan literature and contemporary football hooligan subcultures. It considers some implications for the study of male dominated hooligan subcultures and the methodologies to be employed. The essay draws on new research work into the ‘low’ sport journalism genre of British football hooliganism literature, involving a comprehensive collection and reading of myriad football hooligan fan memoirs as well as interviews with participants. It shows that although hooligan subcultures disappeared from the mainstream media gaze for a time during the 1990s, partly as a result of legislation introduced to curb football gang violence, militaristic police operations and draconian prison sentences in the courts but also partly because of cultural change, there remain traces of these subcultures today. The argument also incorporates the notion that the methodological work which should be undertaken is a study of the simulacrum of hooliganism, the expanding body of football hooligan literature in all of its forms manifesting itself in literary novels and the explosion of ‘gangster’ memoirs of older football hooligans, which might eventually lead us to better, more informed ethnographies of football hooligan subcultures. The essay further engages with debates in socio-legal studies, sociology, cultural studies and criminology on football hooliganism and modernity and provides a unique bibliography of the field.
Highlights
As opposed to the relative dearth of recent criminological, sociological or cultural studies accounts of football hooligan subcultures, low culture amateur journalistic accounts continue to proliferate
‘rough’ popular memory studies around sport (Brabazon, 2006). They are, if appropriately employed, able to add to the pre-existing body of knowledge produced in the late 1970s and 1980s
‘Facts’ about these events, and conversations during them, are seemingly treated in a cavalier way and in a completely unchronological order, though many of these texts are adorned with photographs and newscuttings kept contemporaneously by the authors in their hyper-diarising of their hooligan activities and media notoriety
Summary
As opposed to the relative dearth of recent criminological, sociological or cultural studies accounts of football hooligan subcultures, low culture amateur journalistic accounts continue to proliferate. Dougie Brimson was responsible for the script for a football hooligan gang feature film directed by Lexi Alexander and starring Elijah Wood, originally called The Yank but renamed Green Street (after the film’s fictional football firm the Green Street Elite) when released in 2005
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