ABSTRACT
The day I commenced the research for this book in August 1998 I arrived at the BayArena, home of German first division side Bayer Leverkusen. The name of the ground had been changed at the beginning of the season to promote the team’s sponsor and owner – the pharmaceutical multinational Bayer. I had bought a season ticket for the largest section of the recently redeveloped ground named ‘Family Street’. Nothing in the crowd savoured of the scenes of footballrelated violence and hooliganism that had come to sum up the public image of the sport in the years before and after the Heysel disaster in which 39 fans were killed in 1985.1 Even the overt display of masculinity and sexist chauvinism so often associated with football fandom seemed strangely lacking. Indeed, the spectators in ‘Family Street’ accurately reflected its name. Families, fathers with their sons and daughters, mothers and their children slowly took up their seats, protected from the warm August sunshine by the ground’s glass roofing, and avidly followed the pre-game entertainment on newly installed giant video screens. And in contrast to the 1980s, when the term ‘rushing’ referred to the practice of rival fan groups storming sections of the ground occupied by fans of the opposing team, there was very a different ‘rush’ at the BayArena. At half time hordes of fans, often driven by their children, fought their way to a newly built onsite McDonald’s restaurant. It was here, under the golden arches of McDonald’s, that my research began.
