ABSTRACT
Introduction Arthur Hopcraft’s The Football Man (1968) was a series of essays and interviews with people within the game, and was intended to construct a social history. Yet the rst paragraph of its introduction indicated falsely that football’s importance to everyone in the UK would be assessed: ‘It is inherent in the people. It is built into the urban psyche, as much a common experience to our children as are uncles and schools’ (1968: 9). The second paragraph showed more clearly who is classed as ‘people’: ‘No player, manager, director or fan who understands football, either through his intellect or his nerve-ends, ever repeats that piece of nonsense trotted out mindlessly by the fearful every now and again which pleads, “After all, it’s only a game”’ (1968: 9). The rst line reads: ‘Sport can be cruel to men’, and throughout ‘men’ and ‘people’ were used interchangeably.
