ABSTRACT
Taking Offence: Modern Moralities and the Perception of the Football Fan
Carlton Brick
The 1990s witnessed a dramatic ‘recentering’ of the football fan within sociopolitical discourse. The emergence of fan groups in the post-Hillsborough period has enabled fandom to acquire respectable media and political profiles. But The Football (Offences and Disorder) Act actively expands the concept of fandom as a deviant activity. A key theme in this expansion is the concept of ‘safety’. Through the concept of ‘safety’ notions of football deviancy have been expanded to include acts of speech and offensive gestures. The recasting of football deviancy is representative of an authoritarian transformation of the relationships between State power and the individual.
