Football, the People’s Shame : How to Revolutionise a National Sport

Asks what has happened to English football and how we can launch a revolution amongst English fandom in order not just to take back control of the game, but invent new ways our society and economy can work in the interest of the people again. Despite thirty plus years of rampant commercialization and marketization, football and football clubs remain central to many communities: sources of solidarity, civic engagement and national and international pride. This book explores the history of the people’s game, looks at how it has become less and less the province of the people and more and more the plaything of oligarchs, billionaires and commercial interests, and explains why and how we need to take it back. Football’s importance not just to local communities but to local and national economies is used as the jumping-off point to argue for a new economic model for the sport, one based on the idea of the public-commons partnership. These partnerships and the reorganising of production around them offer a theoretically grounded and fully worked through alternative to current models and propose an entirely different set of relationships between citizens, the state and each other, one more in keeping with the principles that underly the traditions from which football and its deeply felt and lived allegiances belong. As neoliberalism continues to exploit English fandom’s love for the game, loading up clubs with debt, hiking ticket and shirt prices, blasting them with adverts and exposing them to unscrupulous gambling companies, Football, the People’s Shame seeks to be a clarion call to the fans to break out of their passivity and fatalism and begin to demand something new, offering a workable set of progressive alternatives while also daring to dream big about a complete transformation of the current depressing reality. Football is more than just a sport. It’s a way of life, a vital social, political and economic dynamo and fan’s deep and abiding passion for the game can and should become the engine through which society is reorganised.