‘Protect Me From What I Want’: Football Fandom, Celebrity Cultures and ‘New’ Football in England

Abstract

This essay reconsiders aspects of the cultural and commercial ‘reinvention’ of English football since the late 1980s. It examines cultural readings of the sport, changes in fandom and in the regulation of fans, both internationally and in domestic contexts, and also the rise of ‘new’ football in the guise, since 1992, of the television‐funded FA Premier League. It also looks at ways in which late‐modern football and ‘celebrity’ culture have become inextricably entwined in England in recent years. The essay then moves on to consider critically a number of alleged ‘new’ crises in the English game, which revolve around the emergence of new inequalities, a connected relative demise in uncertainty of outcome in football in the wake of a strong new European club market for the sport, and challenges to ‘traditional’ modernist sporting ties of place and kinship. The essay concludes by examining issues of English football and social exclusion and new ways of framing aspects of the current ‘crises’.