ABSTRACT
Blackburn Olympic’s 1883 FA Cup Final victory over Old Etonians was pivotal in English football history, the moment at which a largely working-class team ended the dominance of the southern amateur gentleman. In neighbouring Accrington, however, there was little enthusiasm. The town’s newspaper contented itself largely with local matches before commenting that ‘the Olympians also won the English Cup … One has heard so much of this victory that it is a relief to leave this subject’ (Accrington Times, 7 April 1883). As this mild but studied insult demonstrates, commitment to a particular place has always been a central force within football culture, engendering and structuring some of the game’s most passionately expressed rivalries. This chapter uses the example of English professional club football from the 1880s to highlight the historical importance of local and regional identities to the sport. As the cultural geography of English football clearly exempli es, such rivalries, and territorial issues more widely, have always been avoured deeply by national contexts (Armstrong and Giulianotti, 2001). The professional game’s origins in the often dense urban networks of the English north and midlands has certainly resulted in an unusually high frequency of rivalries between teams lying in close geographical proximity. The English game is also noteworthy for lacking the depth of political hinterland encountered in, for example, Spain, where football has long articulated powerful discourses of regionalism and repressed nationalism. Support for Barcelona has often served as proxy for degrees of Catalonian national aspiration, while Athletic Bilbao and Real Sociedad, albeit in distinctive ways and while still maintaining a strong intra-regional rivalry, have proved potent symbols of Basque identity (Duke and Crolley, 1996; Walton, 2001a, 2001b). Religious divisions such as those between Catholics and Protestants that have so forcibly impacted on the game in Glasgow and Belfast have sometimes proved crucial (Murray, 2000; Bairner and Shirlow, 2001), as, elsewhere, have racial and ethnic ssures. In 1920s Lima, race and class merged to structure rivalries between the Peruvian capital’s two main clubs, Alianza Lima, rooted in communities of black and mestizo (mixed-race) workers, and Universitario de Deportes, initially the team of middle-and upper-class students of European descent (Par chi and Thieroldt, 2007: 143-4). In comparison, the weakness of England’s regionalist political project and its relatively low levels of sectarianism and racial and ethnic con ict have resulted in its territorial sporting con icts being far less in ected by such manifestations of personal and collective identity. Obviously, there are dangers in stressing the peculiarities of the English too
enthusiastically. Relatively uncomplicated place-related battles are certainly not England’s exclusive property, and, conversely, political or quasi-political expression is not entirely unknown within it. Wider con icts between North and South have often resonated within the game as have speci c political events; tensions between communities taking contrary positions during the 1984 to 1985 miners’ strike could still surface in terrace chants 20 years later (Luhrs, 2007). Nevertheless, for fans of English club football, attachments to, and con icts over, ‘place’, have generally been about precisely that.
