Cultural Studies and a Genealogical Mapping of Football Studies in Britain

Abstract

　　What were the terms and conditions by which cultural studies of football emerged in Britain? And what is the current state of cultural studies that critically understands football? It is my aim here to provide a roughsketch of the reciprocal relationship between football and cultural studies by answering these questions.
　Apart from the historical interest in football as a topic of leisure studies, a serious sociological attempt to consider football began as sociology of the crowd, rather than as a genuine concern with football itself. The main concerns were with ‘deviancy’ and ‘moral panic’. At the same time that football was rediscovered as a heavily localised working class male culture, there was also the ‘hooligan’ discourse that was linked to a criminological focus. In the 1980s, a group of young male academics came to see football as a form of expressive culture. This enlightening moment occurred at a time when football was becoming much more globalized in terms of both the scale and scope of its marketing capacity. The Japanese environment and the establishment of its professional J-League have to be considered in the same way.
　This means that football in this country cannot be free from racism, which has become a negative symptom of world football and also a major target of cultural studies. Football is a genre in which popular cultural pleasure is enjoyed by those who play and those who watch alike, while it contains an unpleasant and inconvenient truth also. When examining these two fronts at the same time, cultural studies of football is required to comprehend the ongoing process of transformation by searching for ways of using novel vocabularies.