‘The New Craze’: Football and Society in North-East Wales, c.1870-90

Though the payment of footballers had been legalised in 1885, professional football was still disapproved of in Middlesbrough. It the most watched sport in the town by the mid-1880s and more pressure was placed on the town’s leading team to success. It was felt however that amateur principles should not be sacrificed in order to achieve success. Amid arguments over the merits of the importation and payment of footballers, Middlesbrough FC split resulting in the creation of the professional team Ironopolis. The example of Ironopolis acts as an ideal case study for examining late Victorian attitudes towards professional sport, and this paper will attempt to account for the failure of professional football in this instance, given the success of it elsewhere in the country. This paper will examine those who were involved in both football clubs, particularly the shareholders of Ironopolis. It is apparent that the town was not large enough to support two football teams; evidence from the local press would suggest that spectators did not have a particular preference for either team, watching instead whichever team was able to promise the higher standard of football each week. This paper will explore the reasons put forward both for and against professionalism by those involved directly in the game and local journalists, and why the first attempt at professional football ultimately failed in Middlesbrough.

International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2019

In terms of the extant literature to date on sport and fandom in the divided society of Northern Ireland, academic attention has focused almost exclusively on its apparently contentious nature. However, until now, there has been a dearth of actual empirical data to inform such analyses. This article is designed to help rectify this deficit by drawing upon interviews with Northern Ireland football supporters and Irish Football Association staff to explore their co-creation of the Football for All campaign, which aimed to challenge sectarian fan behaviour within the national stadium. This resulted in the previously variegated Northern Ireland fan base becoming the Green and White Army, an informal collective identity for supporters. In continually (re)producing the Green and White Army as a ‘social system’, it is argued that fans are knowledgeable actors who continually draw upon what Giddens refers to as practical and discursive consciousness. Informed by Giddens’ structuration theor...

Soccer & Society, 2019

American football. Sports have socio-historical links to specific nation-states, thus encoding them with culturally specific values. Despite a movement towards cultural convergence, especially of popular culture, aspects of sport have remained resistant to dominant globalization trends. My thesis reveals that the globalization of American football to Britain has been a process which makes concessions to the local, while still retaining many of its global characteristics. Through an ethnographic study of one team, I spent an entire season becoming an "insider" and understanding the British American football culture from the perspective of the participants themselves. Analysis of data collected through participant observation and interviews revealed a number of themes which defined British American football as a hybrid and distinctive sport. First, that British American football was distinctive within the domestic British sports space because of its unique combination of American characteristics. Second, that "glocalization" influences the structuring of British American football under the amateur code, in order for the sport to better fit within the British sporting habitus. Finally, that the two branches of American football in Britain, the NFL and the British grassroots, were found to be involved in a disparate relationship which involved each branch concentrating on their own separate agendas for the sport. In conclusion, the American football played in Britain is British American football and this study importantly demonstrates that while a sport can retain its roots in terms of its physical appearance and playing structure, in order for it to infiltrate a foreign sports space, concessions must be made to the local sporting culture. The single most important thread that ran throughout this thesis was that American football could, and has, taken on multiple meanings, which were dependent upon the national context in which it was being played. It emphasizes the idea of globalization as glocalization; that the local is important in the global aspirations of the sport of American football. British American football has placed a uniquely British stamp on an otherwise purely American pastime.

The Local Historian 43,2, pp.96-106, 2012

Good-quality local histories of British sporting life are still relatively few in number. This is the more surprising, given sport can and should be the stuff of serious history, and there are powerful rationales to encourage more work. Modern sport is a global phenomenon, a multi-billion pound industry, and most historians accept that for a number of modern competitive sports and games Britain played 'an undoubted role as an originator, leader and teacher' in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It took an initial lead in introducing new models of sport, and organising, regulating and standardizing them. 1 Most emphatically, it has majorly shaped the modern sporting world. Sport has long been a mainstream British cultural interest, probably the single most significant leisure activity outside those connected with basic drives if playing, watching events live or on TV and betting are all taken into account, and has been and increasingly is a major source of employment. The enjoyment, excitement, adrenaline rush and community involvement it can at times offer are all appealing. And its history has ensured that its social and cultural forms and impacts vary from place to place and from sport to sport.