Football & its fans: Memories, Matches & Meanings

Dr David McGillivray

Historical perspective• Football fandom provided (men) with affiliations to

place, people and industry• The game of the working man inseparable from the

rhythms of everyday life:– Work– Family– Friendship– Play

• Football fundamentally a collective social experience• Continuity a key feature of the passing of time/rite of

passage from one generation to the next

Meanings, Matches and Memories• Football was (and is) the stuff of informal public debate - it

gave meaning and structure to people’s lives• Historical matches, giant-killing feats and important

victories were celebrated widely at the time and remembered long afterwards

• Individual and collective memories structured around football

• Physical attendance at a football match always a collective experience with powerful roots in the sensory dimensions of the stadium: the sounds of the crowd, the smells of the half-time food and drink, even architectural oddities of the ground

The times they are a changin’• Since the 1980s, football has been transformed– All seater stadia– Out-of-town stadium developments– Irregular scheduling– Media saturation– ‘Shareholders’ rather than supporters– Widening gap between players and fans

• Football increasingly an individualised, consumer-led experience

Football Reminiscence• Changes reinforce the importance of

maintaining collective memories through heritage artifacts:– Photography– Film & documentary (e.g. the Football Years)– Memorabilia (badges, programmes, newspapers,

scarves etc)• Recreating the environment of the past as a

means of establishing continuity in the present