ABSTRACT
Separately, children and football enjoy enormously high public profiles in the United Kingdom, reflected in extensive media and academic interest. Together, however, they appear to cancel each other out. Viewed from within, children’s football is a thriving, vibrant subculture, with a committed and passionate membership. As Jim White, a sports journalist and himself a manager of a boys’ football team, has put it: ‘Boys’ football is probably the most emotionally intense form of sport known to man; a pursuit peppered with tears, tantrums, even fisticuffs. And that’s just among the parents’ (White 2002). From the outside, however, children’s football is rendered almost literally invisible, confined to pitches on the outskirts of towns, or plots of land adjoining semi-derelict playgrounds in the less salubrious urban areas, or perhaps located in those parts of a park that nobody else visits, such as a corner that slopes so badly that it cannot be used for much else, or a patch of ground that is permanently flooded from December to April. The result is that the closest that most people come to having any contact with organised children’s football is catching sight of small huddles of boys standing on street corners with their boot bags in the early hours of a Sunday morning as they wait for their lift to the game.
