ABSTRACT
Local league football rarely attracts the national limelight. The involvement of working class men in local football clubs as supporters, administrators and players is, arguably, their most substantial contribution, in time and monetary terms, to any voluntary local organization. Local football is a significant activity, of course, for its general contribution to the fitness and health of young men, though there is no available data on the incidence and seriousness of the injuries which routinely occur in matches of this kind, especially to men who may do no other form of serious exercise. It is a social space where symbolic victories can be achieved as a means of alleviating wider community tensions or of responding to perceived community injustices. The heavily masculine discourses of local football celebrate its ‘hard cases’, but it also has a place for the ‘skill merchants’ and ‘loyal servants’; the men who are the ‘backbone’ of their clubs.
