ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the idealist notion of football hooliganism as resistance and demonstrates how some far right groups like the English defence league (EDL) and Welsh defence league (WDL) grew out of football hooliganism and the way in which football culture in Europe has been linked to fascism and racism in recent times. It focuses the development of post-subculture as a concept for understanding recent changes in the nature of football fandom and the limitations of using it in a rapidly changing culture which is 'claustropolitan' rather than cosmopolitan and in which 'harm' is having to be radically reconceptualised. A 'critical cultural criminology' has more recently been proposed, in an attempt to preserve the best of 'subcultural studies' such as the work of the centre for contemporary cultural studies (CCCS) 'Birmingham school' which had been somewhat lost in the wake of 'the post-subcultural turn'.
