This Sporting Life: The Realism of The Football Factory

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyze some aspects of the genesis and cultural production of The Football Factory by John King, a best selling ‘cult fiction’ book in the mid‐1990s, and the making of the novel into a feature film released for the cinema and on DVD 10 years later. The media moral panic surrounding the film is contextualized and the book and film situated in contemporary popular literature and culture. The film was lambasted by critics partly because it used ‘real’ football hooligans and was held up as refusing to condemn the violent sexist amorality of its characters. Just as Trainspotting, the film and book, was read as promoting a culture of heroin use, The Football Factory thus entered sporting media culture as a cause of the return of football hooliganism. The special edition DVD, which boasts many of the hyper moral panic press commentaries on the film as part of its own advertising campaign, is seen here as a ‘dub’ version of the book and film which, like dub productions in popular music, creates a series of different perspectives and readings to the official reception of book and film. Further, the paper compares the work of John King and other British contemporary fiction writers like Irvine Welsh (and film‐makers like Nick Love) in the 1990s and 2000s to the New Wave writers and film‐makers of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. In both eras the culture of hard masculinity is the subject of the writing and movies and the genre concerned is ‘social realism’, but the problematic investigated here is more complex than these terms imply. The realism of The Football Factory, like all previous versions, such as the New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, is a constructed modernity and plays with notions of ‘the real’.