By Brett Matthew Bebber

Britain enjoys a rich historical tradition of popular protest and collective action. Due to their public and publicized nature, sporting events have been recognized increasingly as venues in which broader cultural and political meanings are enacted and debated in the postwar period. This project examines how social anxieties about immigration, unemployment, and government repression were represented and contested through violence and eventually racist aggression at football matches. From 1968 to the mid-1970s, violence among fans and with police became expected on a weekly basis within and outside British football stadiums as new forms of spectator allegiance and sports consumption emerged. British football became a contested cultural and institutional site of racisms, violence, masculinities, and national mythologies. Rather than examining football per se, the principal aim of this project is to investigate how this distinct cultural milieu became a site for the British government to enact violence against working-class citizens by manipulating moral anxieties, physical environments, police tactics, and legal prosecution.

Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona, 2008. 474p.