Hooligan Writing and the Study of Football Fan Culture: Problems and Possibilities (Essay‪)‬

The best cinematic account of football hooliganism and its connection to British youth culture and popular music is in a film version of Kevin Sampson's debut novel Awaydays (Sampson, 1998), based around the Pack, a group of Tranmere Rovers football casuals who strutted their stuff in the late 1970s. The film was released for the cinema in 2009 with an evocative post-punk soundtrack. But, rather than cult fiction, it is football hooligan memoirs, or hit and tell (Redhead, 2004c) stories, which have to some extent displaced, for mass media moral panics, the incidents of football hooligan violence that seemed to punctuate the football match reports of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These print tales of 'low sport journalism' (Redhead, 2010), are also showcased now in all kinds of other media. In 2007 Carlton Leach (Leach, 2003, Leach, 2008) witnessed his story of the transition from Inter City Firm (ICF) football hooligan at West Ham United in the 1970s and 1980s to Essex gangster in the 1990s fictionally portrayed in Julian Gilbey's film Rise of the Footsoldier which stands as the most pervasive and extreme use of the crossover football hooligan/gangster style to date (Redhead, 2010). In 2008 another prominent former member of West Ham's Inter City Firm, Cass Pennant, saw his own story (Pennant, 2008) committed to celluloid in the film Cass. Also in 2008 a cool modernist, artistically produced edition of Dave Hewitson's classic casual memoir The Liverpool Boys Are In Town: The Birth of Terrace Culture came onto the UK streets, designed by the Eleanor Suggett Studio and published by Liverpool's Bluecoat Press. The 'hit and tell' football hooligan literature certainly sells, to an extent. Large formats A-L and M-Z of Britain's Hooligan Gangs published in 2005 sold out within a year and went into new paperback editions in the 2007-2008 British football season (Lowles and Nicholls, 2007a, 2007b). A hardback historical account of Leeds United's football hooligan gangs written by a female BBC journalist (Gall, 2007) published in December 2007 sold out by the New Year 2008 and set the fans' forums and websites buzzing with gossip and rumour as one of its top boy interviewees, Eddie Kelly, was arrested by West Yorkshire police within days of the book's release. This football hooligan literature is mostly unashamedly partisan and boastful, recounting up to forty years of aggressive male football fandom associated with a particular British league club, music and fashion obsessions and the behaviour of its mob, firm or crew. There is fierce debate amongst academics about how useful they are as narrative texts (Dart, 2008, Gibbons, Dixon and Braye, 2008, Redhead, 2004c, 2010). The texts are written in the form of fan memoir. Few of them have any pretensions to academic style or journalistic convention. The hooligan fan writings are often formularised and couched in deliberately trashy formats. Quotations and conversations are seemingly made up at will. The authors are almost always male and in their late thirties, forties or fifties, old enough to have been there, done that and bought the T shirt in the so-called Golden Age of the 1970s and early 1980s. Much of the writing is untutored, and sometimes even bordering on illiteracy. By virtue of their age and their subcultural practices, however, the 'deviant' hooligan writers have become self-styled oral historians and archivists of a period when post-industrial Britain, and its football culture, was said to be undergoing fundamental modernisation. International academic research, and social and cultural theory, can learn from these documents. But the hooligan literature writers, for the most part, baulk at expertise, criteria for measurement and learning. Indeed academia, like the media, is the enemy, seen as partly responsible for the myriad misrepresentations of football fan culture and its history which these books perceive as a fundamental problem and consequently seek to put to ri