As football clubs have become luxury investments, their decisions increasingly mirror those of any other business organisation. Football supporters have been encouraged to express their club loyalty by ‘thinking business’ - acting as consumers and generating money deemed necessary for their clubs to compete at the highest levels. In critical studies, supporters have been portrayed as passive or reluctant consumers who, imprisoned by enduring club loyalties, embody a fatalistic attitude to their own exploitation. As this book aims to show, however, such expressions of loyalty are far from hegemonic and often interface haphazardly with traditional ideas about what constitutes the ‘loyal fan’. While there is little doubt that professional football is experiencing commodification, the reality is that football clubs are not simply businesses, nor can they ever aspire to be organisations driven solely by expanding or protecting economic value. Rather, clubs hover uncertainly between being businesses and community assets. Football Supporters and the Commercialisation of Football explores the implications of this uncertainty for understanding supporter resistance to, and compromise with, commodification. Every club and its supporters exist in their own unique national and local contexts. In this respect, this book offers a Euro-wide comparison of supporter reactions to commercialisation and provides unique insight into how football supporters actively mediate regional, local and national contexts, as they intersect with the universalistic presumptions of commerce. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

This book offers an original Marxist critique of the European football business. It argues that the Marxist account of the difference between profits and surplus value is crucial to an understanding of the fluid and contradictory nature of the commodification of football. Section one analyses the nature of modern professional football and section two highlights attempts, via government agency and football clubs, to corral fans into ever greater identification with business logic aimed at breaking traditional social relations. Section three draws on a number of cases studies across Europe, to analyse how some fans are attempting to mount a counter ideological response to the assault of neo-liberalism on the game.

This book explores the tradition of left wing political thinking in the culture of fans of professional football in Europe. It sets out to chronicle and celebrate the fraternal, communal and radical tradition of football - seen to best effect in demands for democratic fan ownership and control of clubs, in fan campaigns against racist and fascist mobilisation of football supporters, and in a firm commitment to anti-corporatism. Drawing on the rich and varied traditions of fan cultures across Europe, the book examines how football, as a cultural form, carries with it the possibility of promoting the voices of the disenfranchised and the marginalised, and so the basis for nurturing solidarity against oppression, alienation and exploitation current in modern capitalist society. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

This volume presents research on policy responses to racism in sporting codes, predominantly Australian Rules football, in a global context. While the three guest editors are based in Australia, and their work pertains to the uniquely domestic game of Australian Rules football, the outcomes, research vectors and key issues from this research are part of a much larger on-going international conversation that is equally relevant when considering, for instance, racism in English Premier League football, first class cricket and basketball. The book is an outcome of an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project titled Assessing the Australian Football League’s Racial and Religious Vilification Laws to Promote Community Harmony, Multiculturalism and Reconciliation, which investigated social participation and the impact of the Australian Football League’s anti-racial vilification policy since its introduction in 1995. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This volume draws together scholarship across a number of disciplines – history, sociology, media and cultural studies, political science, Slavonic Studies – to examine the significance of the sport of football within Southeastern Europe, with an especial focus on countries of the former Yugoslavia. The volume is timely as there is growing recognition inside and beyond the academy that football is a key cultural site in which the tensions within the region have and continue to be reflected. Important issues such as resurgent nationalism, ethno/religious identity construction, and collective masculine identity are played out in relation to the sport of football. The papers within the volume explore these and other themes in detailed case studies that will be of interest to academics and policy makers concerned with wanting to know more about how football should be considered within agendas focused on reconciliation and a socially inclusive future. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

The intention of the book is to highlight the development of a type of football organisation that falls outside of the well documented elite professional game, the most recognizable face of the sport. Specifically, the focus here will fall upon community based football clubs which have grown out of the grassroots game. Well known examples of these clubs in Britain are the Bristol organisation, Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls, and the Leeds based Republica Internationale – both of these clubs have forged links with similarly motivated organisations in other countries who regularly come together in tournaments to express solidarity. Collectively, these clubs have sometimes been referred to as forming a ‘DIY culture’ in football. Their defining characteristics being variously described as anti-commercial, democratically constituted, advocating social responsibility and inclusiveness, and holding an outlook of solidarity that, in some cases, involves political education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.