The Sociology of English Football in the 1990s: Fandom, Business and Future Research1

Responding to recent attempts to redirect academic analysis of English football within the context of its business-driven transformation in the 1990s. this article argues that two areas in particular have not retained sufficient importance on academic agenda, namely social exclu-sion, and its effects on fandom, and supporter responses to football’s transformation. Future research areas that arise from the game’s current business and encompass the economic and the cultural are suggested. Throughout the 1990s there has been a rapid and enormous transformation in English football, with the top two divisions in particular increasingly penetrated by business processes and entrepreneurs, dominated by global capital and structured to suit the interests of business owners and TV stations. Within this context of a sport in major flux, this article responds to changes in the agenda of football sociology proposed by H.F. Moorhouse (1998). Moorhouse (1998) seeks to re-direct sociological interest in professional football and redefine the academic agenda, proposals that highlight some gaps in the current sociological study of football. These problems are not found solely in the account offered by Moorhouse (1998), but are shared by journalists and many within the game itself: his agenda thus exemplifies many of the restricted discourses that de-legitimise discussion of certain questions and so create these gaps. The objective here is to identify these gaps, respond to Moorhouse’s (1998) agenda and suggest some implications for future research. While English football has been professionalised for more than a century, during the 1990s, football has become, for the first time, an industry similar to other capitalist markets, particularly at the top end (Szymanski & Kuypers 1999; Morrow, 1999). Discourses of football now routinely talk of customers and entertainment, the game attracts investment from global capital, and officials have introduced professional financial, marketing, legal, administra-tive and sponsorship expertise, legitimated personal profit on a huge scale (Conn, 1997) and become a driving force behind the biggest satellite TV station in Europe, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky. This transformation has been analysed i