Hit and Tell: a Review Essay on the Soccer Hooligan Memoir

ST E V E R E D H EAD

Soccer 10.1080/1466097042000279625 FSAS5305.sgm 1466-0970 Original Taylor 2004 0 3 5 s.redhead@westnet.com. SteveRedhead 00000Autumn and &Article Francis (print)/1743-9590 Society Francis 2004 Ltd Ltd (online)

This is a review essay on the genre of British soccer hooligan books. These hit and tell confessional tales of soccer casuals fandom are told in the form of an historical memoir. Five examples of hit and tell books are reviewed and assessed against the novelistic accounts found in contemporary football fiction books by authors such as John King and Kevin Sampson and the more rigorous demands of the sociology of soccer culture. It is argued in the essay on hit and tell writing that such populist publishing can be harnessed to fill in gaps in historical and ethnographic work in the sociology of soccer fan cultures, but that what is needed in the future, above all, is better theorizing of soccer culture and its modernities.

Introduction The Euro 2004 Championships in Portugal brought more than just the shock result of the new century a Greece victory over the fancied hosts. It also brought the nomination, seemingly against all the odds, of England soccer fans as candidates for fair play awards for their off the pitch contribution to the competition. This accolade came despite massive media publicity about the deportation of some England soccer fans and numerous news clips of their bar brawls with Portuguese riot police. Once England were out of Euro 2004, beaten, albeit on penalties, by the more skilful and adventurous team of the home country, twenty something cult fiction novelist Helen Walsh1 writing in The Guardian, argued that thug life is not the English disease its a sign of the times everywhere and the time has come for our noble representatives in the media to start loving the English again.2 Further, Walsh argued, as a mixed race girl whos followed football for years, home and away, its asinine to continue to ignore the huge progress weve made. In an era of New Labour league tables and quality assurance, such claims seem, on the surface, to make logical sense. The performance-based criteria of the modern age should be recognized and produce its reward. In this version of the story of our times, modernity, or post-traditional society, has triumphed and soccer hooliganism, a part of the traditional past, is no more - or at least not a high priority law and order problem in the wake of mass media images of Al Qaeda terror and Iraqs insurgencies.

Soccer and Society, vol. 5, No. 3 Autumn 2004, pp 392403 ISSN 14660970 print/17439590 online DOI: 10.1080/1466097042000279625 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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Soccer and Its Modernities But this divided, even ambivalent, reaction, involving journalists and novelist social critics, to a major soccer competition, and the behaviour of spectators, is in fact nothing new. Arguably this contested process had begun with the reaction to England supporters at the World Cup in Japan 2002 or even before this period at Euro 2000 in Belgium and Holland or at Euro 96 in England.3 Certainly in the late 1990s, after Tony Blairs New Labour came to power in the UK, there was considerable media coverage about the improvement of the behaviour of soccer spectators, at club and national level, as Labour, and Britain, modernized and became, in Blairs vision, a new young country (again). Labour even adopted Ian Broudie (of The Lightning Seeds) and laddish comedian soccer fans, David Baddiel and Frank Skinners Euro 96 anthem Footballs Coming Home as their own political chant: Labours Coming Home! As the 1998 World Cup in France got under way, however, British media reporting changed. As with some of the subsequent overhyped coverage of Euro 2000 and Euro 2004, the media zeroed in on what they saw as the soccer thugs. The return of soccer hooliganism by (mainly) English and German fans, as well as indigenous French and other local youth, was portrayed as something out of another era, when in actuality it had simply become more marginalized at Premier League football matches in Britain in the early and mid 1990s; that is, before Blair and after Thatcher. Another novelist, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, wrote provocatively in The Independent at the time of France 98 that: the spectacle of hordes of drunken English hooligans attacking passers by, charging adversary fans with sticks, stones and knives, engaging in ferocious battles against the police, smashing shop windows and vehicles and, at times, the very stands of the stadium, has come to be an inevitable corollary of major matches played by England, and of many in the British League. And yet the fact is that for anyone who lives there, England is a country exceptionally peaceful and well mannered ... How do we explain this curious phenomenon? Let us discard from the start the ideological thesis, according to which hooligan violence is a heritage of Mrs Thatchers economic reforms, which have burdened British society with the deepest imbalances and pockets of poverty in Western Europe.4 So, we are tempted to ask, as we look back on almost a decade of modernizing (or de- Thatcherizing) Britain (and football) under Tony Blair, which is it? Are we modern or traditional? Is thuggish behaviour an English, or British, disease? Are soccer hooligans back? Did they ever go away? If so, when did these events happen? And, anyway, how do we know? If the sociology of soccer culture, and especially the sociology of soccer hooliganism, had done its job more effectively over the years, or transmitted its work better via the media, perhaps we would not

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have to ask these questions. One of the most prominent means, apart from sociological work, of producing evidence in our accelerated media culture of diverse modernities5 about this phenomenon has, over the last decade, been the soccer culture memoir. There are essentially three versions of this product of football fandom: one is journalistic, one is novelistic and one is academic. I want to concentrate in this review essay on the first of these but with reference to the other two. Hit and Tell After Nick Hornbys early 1990s bestselling memoir Fever Pitch,6 there has been a seemingly inexorable output of a new genre, what I call here hit and tell, especially devoted to revealing confessional soccer hooligan stories. The so-called hoolie shelves of bookshops are weighed down with the volumes and mainstream bookshops sell them by the truckload. Originally what was once referred to as the new football writing7 eschewed hooligan stories but as the 1990s wore on a market was created for the hit and tell accounts which were often fictionalized (certainly in form if not in content). The fiction category was literally accurate in some cases as a new breed of contemporary fiction writers, which I have elsewhere, with heavy irony, labelled the repetitive beat generation,8 proceeded to paint a more convincing picture of the history of modern British soccer fan culture and its hooliganism than had much formal ethnographic work by sociologists of soccer deviance or even undercover journalists and police. Writers with literary credentials like Roddy Doyle and D.J. Taylor were included in the anthologies, and burgeoning movement, of new football writing which was essentially seen, self-consciously, as a new bourgeois genre in literature. Soccer in Britain was, at the same time, being modernized and resold, as a commercial product, to a more middle class, family oriented audience, what sociologist of soccer Anthony King called the new consumer fans.9 Later in the decade, cult fiction writers like John King, whose realist novel The Football Factory sold hundreds of thousands of copies, would create what they definitely saw as a new working class fiction around soccer, explicitly designed to upset the middle class literary set in Britain who had embraced this strand of popular culture for a while after Italia 90 and then unceremoniously dropped it. The loose football fiction trilogy of novels by John King,10 together with Kevin Sampsons Awaydays,11 alongside sections of much of the fiction of Irvine Welsh, gave accounts of soccer fan culture and territorial male hooliganism and much else about our contemporary cultural modernities which felt truthful in a way that many media reports, academic treatises, political current affairs discussions and, indeed, bad hoolie books did not.12 The first of this football fiction trilogy, John Kings The Football Factory, was initially dramatized by Paul Hodson as a stage play and eventually made into a feature film by director Nick Love several years later. Released to much media moral panic

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shortly before Euro 2004, the film was widely criticized because commentators claimed it used real football hooligans as actors and advisers. An argument can be made that writers like Irvine Welsh and John King produced fiction output, as well as non-fiction drama for television, film and theatre, which was actually more evocative of the culture they were describing, and its history, than much of the sociology of soccer culture in the 1980s and 1990s which often employed a football fandom component to authenticate its research. These cult fiction writers also helped to clearly distinguish the hit and tell books from new football writing: Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager ... King writes powerfully with a raw realism and clear grasp of a culture which has been denied but cannot be ignored, as The Glasgow Herald reviewed one of John Kings novels.13 These novelistic accounts of British soccer hooliganism since the 1970s, interesting and, also, problematic as they are, will not take the primary focus of this review essay.14 Rather, I want to turn to the trash or pulp aesthetic of the soccer hooligan memoir, displayed in the journalistic brand of hit and tell, in order to push the sociology of soccer fan culture forward. Terrace Retro The amateur journalistic insider accounts are now proliferating at a pace and form a veritable library of hooligan stories. There are many dozens of them, with a variety of club firms or gangs involved. The best example of the hit and tell genre are the confessional writings published by Milo Books, five of which are under review here, but other publishers have also been cashing in.15 Milo, a small scale Lancashire publishing business originally located in Bury and recently moved to Lytham St Annes, is the brainchild of Peter Walsh, who has produced provocative investigative journalism on contemporary gang violence for various different media.16 One of the criticisms of the sociology of soccer fan culture, especially in the UK, over the last decade is that it has too often descended into uncritical journalism17 and has neglected sociological theory indeed it has been dubbed as uncritical and undertheorized by critics within the debates which for a while took on the unappealing status of football wars.18 Anthony Kings The End of the Terraces specifically19 singled out my own writings and those of Richard Haynes, Rogan Taylor, Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong, as well as other work in the field of sociology of soccer culture by implication. Kings charge was that there was a widespread false populism20 within contemporary sociology of football which amounted to little more than journalism. Other participants in the debates made similar observations. Four of the Milo books under review here, by Allt, Nicholls, Jones and Rivers, and Cowens are all uncritical journalism. These sorts of books are part of a cult publishing category. Hit and tell literature is unashamedly partisan and boastful, recounting 20 years, or more, of violent male football fandom associated with a

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particular British league club and its mob. They are written in the form of fan memoir. None of them have any pretensions to academic style or protocol.21 They are often formularized and written in deliberately trashy formats. Quotations and conversations are seemingly made up at will. The authors are almost always male and in their late 30s or 40s, old enough to have been there, done that and bought the T-shirt. By virtue of their age they have become selfstyled oral historians and archivists of a period when post-industrial Britain, and its soccer culture, was undergoing fundamental modernization. But these writers, for the most part, baulk at expertise, criteria for measurement and learning. Indeed academia, like the media, in many ways is the enemy, partly responsible for the myriad misrepresentations of soccer fan culture and its history which these books perceive as a fundamental problem and consequently seek to put to rights. The hit and tell books celebrate and romanticize a whole hooligan subculture. That said Phil Thorntons book, Casuals, is the best journalistic account of British youth cultural history since the 1970s that I have yet read. Labels and soccer have gone hand in hand since the late 1970s and early 1980s subcultural period, becoming mainstream sometime in the mid-1980s and an international youth style ever since. Casual history, in fact, is the missing key to the sociology of British soccer hooligan culture over the last 30 years and is the underlying link between all of these five books under review. Casual designer fashion has been intertwined with the history of football fan culture and soccer hooliganism in Britain since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and remains intertwined today.22 The shape and contours of the events of hooliganism at and around football matches over a quarter of a century connect with the rise and fall and rise (again) of soccer casuals. Phil Thornton acknowledges that casual culture has been all too often disfigured by needless, internecine violence and has always been a lifestyle that operated on the margins of criminality and gangsterism.23 Phil Thornton is in his late 30s and for at least a decade has been involved in (critical) journalistic work on music, fashion and football and the archiving of the last British youth culture, the soccer casuals. With Peter Hooton, lead singer of The Farm and editor of The End fanzine, he is part of a Merseyside writers collective called Partizan Media, its online fanzine Fried Icecream and the website Terrace Retro. Thornton has been connected to football fanzine culture for many years and contributes to the Manchester United fanzine United We Stand. Importantly, Thornton writes in an accessible journalistic style but is as well read on the background of British youth culture since the 1970s and the history of hooligan subcultures in general, as many academics. He neatly situates casuals in a subcultural timeline from the scuttlers of the late nineteenth century through teds, rockers, mods and skinheads of the 1950s and 1960s and the punks of the 1970s. Casuals, as Thornton points out, began as a post-mod, post-skinhead subculture in the 1977-8 football season in Britain, initially in the North of England on Merseyside, closely followed by Manchester, and later in London and

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Scottish cities. By the time Eugene McLaughlin and I wrote our seminal essay on what we called soccers style wars24 on the eve of the 1985-6 soccer season, the first after the Heysel and Bradford disasters, and one which took place against a backdrop of industrial civil war, several years of growth of soccer casual culture had meant that a majority of professional league soccer teams in Britain could boast their own casual firm, or very often, firms. Phil Thornton rightly cites urban casual hotspots as diverse as Nottingham, Leeds, Aberdeen, Portsmouth and Norwich in his history of the last 25 years of the scally (Merseyside) or perry boy (Manchester) lifestyle. Thorntons book, as he says himself, is no simplistic study of designer labels and football thugs.25 There is a loving attention to detail with pop musical fads, fashion labels, hair dos and their forever changing styles carefully choreographed. He argues that it, is an exploration of what shaped a predominantly white working class youth movement in an era of ferocious attacks from both a right wing government determined to smash any symbol of urban resistance and a Sohocentric media unable or unwilling to grasp what was going on.26 The casual scene that he traces and trawls, interviewing many of the key faces and revisiting most of the main events, according to Thornton has been misunderstood and misrepresented.27 Consequently, Thornton takes us on a rollercoaster tour of British youth cultural highpoints such as acid house, hip hop and drum n bass and shows how soccer casuals as a youth culture punctuated these underground histories. Thorntons claim to be able to better represent the casual (sub)culture is based on methodological grounds: first, that he was there, he was part of it, he was a participant if not a participant observer; and second, that he talked to many of the other people who also made this unique British youth cultural historical moment. The other four books cited here are hardcore hit and tell pulp books which flesh out Thorntons rich historical narrative. Nicholas Allts The Boys From The Mersey tells the story of the Anfield Road End casual firm (Annie Road in Allts scouse street slang) that he was a part of from the late 1970s. The Anfield Road end was the opposite terrace end to the famous Kop at Liverpools then prestigious Anfield stadium, much feared by teams and fans alike. Like other casual firms across the country the older more traditional (often skinhead) hooligan gangs were embedded in the more traditional ends in the midlate 1970s. The younger, embryonic casual firms took up residence in other parts of 1970s soccer grounds, partly because that is where, as younger fans, they had always stood. The Anfield Road terrace end spawned, in the 1977-8 season, the Annie Road firm or mob. Nicholas Allts book is the story of the firms travels all over Britain and continental Europe. It begins with the familiar hit and tell masculine bravado boast: we were the boys, we were always the boys and anyone worth his salt and honest enough to admit it knew that we were the boys.28 Its claim that this casual crew was the first, as with many in each of these books, is always contentious, but the Liverpool teams forays into Europe meant untold and rarely policed opportunites for scallies jibbing (riding trains without paying) and robbing their way across the new Europe and importing

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back into England tons of expensive casual menswear, jewellery and sportswear from the looted emporiums of the continent. The Everton memoir in this collection of books under review is Andy Nicholls Scally. The book is a self-confessed memoir of a Category C Football Hooligan and the casual firms that Nicholls, an Everton fan in his early 40s, ran with from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Category C in the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service (Football Section) means violent supporter or organizer of violence. Snorty Forty was one of the monikers adopted by Nicholls and his fighting mates, one of whom tells the story of the notorious County Road Cutters (Cutters was a label taken up because of the predilection of this particular Merseyside firm to use stanley knives in hooligan encounters). Nicholls book proclaims that for 25 years he was one of the most active hooligans in the country, a leading figure among the violent followers of Everton FC. Like many other authors of the hit and tell genre, Andy Nicholls states that he has turned his back on his violent past, but in both the World Cup 2002 in Japan and Korea, and Euro 2004 in Portugal, UK statutory orders under the Football Offences and Disorder Act 2000 were issued against Nicholls to stop him travelling to the tournaments. Like many of these hit and tell authors, Nicholls is proud of his numerous battles with the criminal justice and penal systems. Indeed, the notice of his travel ban for the 2002 World Cup forms part of the hardback cover of this confessional book, adorning his words like a badge of honour. As in the other histories of the casual crews though, club rather than country is what matters. Nicholls displays a rare passion and knowledge of modern Everton FC history. Few of the people seriously involved in casual firms up and down the nation since the late 1970s have had much concern with the England national team; the same goes for casual firms around Hibernian and Aberdeen amongst others, for example, regarding the Scottish national team. This particular club versus country conflict mirrors a deep-seated aspect of fast changing modern soccer fandom more generally and is more often than not resolved in favour of club. Territory, represented by the local football club, was and is, acutely regional for the casual crews. The Celtic example from this set of hooligan books is David Jones and Tony Rivers Soul Crew, the story of Welsh lower league team Cardiff Citys casual firm from the early 1980s to the present. As the book recounts, the Soul Crew was given world-wide publicity by the media after a game at Ninian Park, Cardiff, between Cardiff City of Division 2 of the English League and Premier League team Leeds United in the third round of the FA Cup played in January 2002, but had in fact been in existence for 20 years. Although the book claims that the bouts of hooliganism between the two sets of supporters in January 2002 was nothing out of the ordinary, television cameras shot enough footage for world 24 hour television bulletins to feast on for days. Cardiff Citys Soul Crew in the twenty-first century were quickly as notorious as Millwalls Bushwackers in the 1970s and Chelseas Headhunters in the 1980s thanks to the lightning fast looping of global television and the tabloid press in our accelerated modernity. The fact that the Soul Crew

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were, and are, outside the Premier League symbolizes the continuing trend of the 1990s when lower league casual firms took over much of the earlier notoriety of big clubs as the policing and CCTV surveillance at Premier League grounds (from 1992 onwards) took its toll on the big city mobs. The final book under review here is the story of Sheffield Uniteds Blades in the form of Steve Cowens Blades Business Crew. The BBC (Blades Business Crew acronym) story is introduced by long-time Sheffield United fan Paul Heaton, singer in the 1980s indie band The Housemartins and later the successful pop band The Beautiful South. Heaton, as well as his strident foreword, is granted a photo and several lyric attributions in Steve Cowens self-styled confessional football hooligan memoir which begins in the early 1980s with the familiar rapid spread of casual culture around soccer away from the main centres of Merseyside, Manchester and London. As with most of the other hit and tell books on the market, Cowens account is vitriolic about the sociologists, anthropologists and other so called experts who have had their say and havent a clue.29 Instead he claims to have presented the narrative as honestly as possible and as accurately as memory allows and to know intimately the Sheffield United fan culture he represented as a top boy for over 20 years.30 The league tables that really matter to Cowens and his fellow club historians are not the ones showing the position of their teams (or the best schools or universities); the rivalry between the soccer casual firms is what matters. So in Cowens case it is Sheffield Wednesday hooligan fans that come in for most disdain. In a section on the AZ of violence, Cowens lists his all time top soccer hooligan crews. Media favourites Cardiffs Soul Crew, West Ham Uniteds Inter-City Firm, Chelseas Headhunters and Millwalls Bushwackers feature prominently, but so, too, do Manchester Citys early 1980s mob Mayne Line Crew (named after Maynes coaches in Manchester, not Maine Road) and Evertons Snorty Forty (featured in Andy Nicholls book). The hit and tell books all reference each other (as academics do) but what matters here is respect for the crews who did not cut and run when attacked or provoked, or who took the ends or, later, parts of stands, of the home casual crews. The Field of Sociology of Soccer Fan Culture After reading these five hit and tell books, it is possible to argue that we are better off with the real uncritical journalism of the street than the allegedly pseudo uncritical journalism of the sociologists of soccer culture, including myself. However there is a desperate need for better sociological theorizing in our academic enterprise of creating a satisfactory sociology of football, and for methodological solutions to the continuing problems of ethnographic work on soccer hooliganism and indeed soccer culture in general. This need still remains despite the possibility of using material from populist publishing projects which might seem, in normal circumstances, to be off limits. Hit and tell books certainly epitomize the undertheorized and uncritical criticisms levelled at some

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sociology of soccer fan culture work, however evocative they are of what I have elsewhere called low modernism and low modernity.31 But some of them, at least, help to repair gaps in historical and ethnographic knowledge. It is hard, though, to romanticize these hit and tell stories. They are often nasty, brutish and not particularly short. This question of theory, and the need for it to be critical and apt, brings us back to the field. Sociology of British soccer culture, as represented by sociological researchers in the UK32 and their many international colleagues, has, rightly in my view, become an exercise in anthropology.33 It has its successes and its failures but it needs to pursue its stated goals with renewed vigour in the future. We are presented with an ever expanding number of international soccer fan cultures, especially based around nation states but also around club and city, which can be sociologically known. It is here that, perhaps, some of the sociology of soccer culture critics strictures34 about undertheorized and uncritical thinking in the British examples might have a point. But it is not undertheorizing or uncritical thinking per se that is the major problem. I have pointed to some of the unorthodox uses we might make of uncritical journalism in this review essay. The problem, rather, is developing the most appropriate conceptual apparatus. That is what matters above all. So, too, does being prepared to adapt such apparatus to shifts over time. We can see this in the persistence of debates over soccer and (post)modernity. Post-modern as a term for many sociologists of soccer culture,35 for example, remains an era or epoch after modernity, which in itself is after tradition. I am inclined, instead, to theorize the post as always already within modernity. There is just modernity, nothing afterwards. This distinction matters because what the sociology of soccer culture offers is very detailed, intricate pictures of more or less differentiated soccer cultures on a global scale. But this is a rapidly shrinking, mediatized globe, the accelerated modern world where classic sociological theory is not always very helpful any more. We need to renew our thinking about soccer and modernity more generally. In my own rethinking of this matter I want to argue that it is modernities,36 and their contemporary overlapping, rather than transitions from modernity to post-modernity (or for that matter, to trawl contemporary sociology more generally, solid modernity to liquid modernity, or first modernity to second modernity, or early modernity to late modernity) that we should address. The low modernity of the soccer casuals, then, in this version of the history of soccer modernities, sits alongside, not simply after or before, the new labour modernity of England football fans with their flags of St George, replica shirts and their fair play awards.
NOTES 1. See Helen Walsh, Brass (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004). 2. The Guardian, 3 July 2004.

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3. See Mark Perryman (ed.), Going Oriental: Football After World Cup 2002 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2002), Mark Perryman (ed.), Hooligan Wars: Causes and Effects of Football Violence (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001) and Mark Perryman (ed.), The Ingerland Factor: Home Truths From Football (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999). Perryman, co-founder of Philosophy Football, sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction, has been an activist and leading participant in the movement to give Englands national football fans a better image for the last decade. 4. The Independent, 8 June 1998. 5. See Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist For An Accelerated Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, and Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004) on accelerated culture and accelerated modernity. Also, see Steve Redhead (ed.), The Paul Virilio Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, and New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 6. Fever Pitch: A Fans Life (London: Gollancz, 1992) is often mistakenly referred to, or classified, as a novel when it is in fact a memoir. 7. Nick Hornby (ed.), My Favourite Year: A Collection of New Football Writing (London: Witherby, 1993). For an assessment of the new football writing from the perspective of the sociology of soccer culture see Anthony King, The End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s (London: Leicester University Press, 1998), Chapter 13. 8. See Steve Redhead, Repetitive Beat Generation (Edinburgh: Rebel Inc, 2000), passim, but especially my interviews with Irvine Welsh, John King, Kevin Williamson and Gordon Legge, and my editorial introduction The Repetitive Beat Generation Live. 9. Anthony King, The End of the Terraces, Chapter 14. 10. John King, The Football Factory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) was the best selling first novel. The second and third books in the trilogy were Headhunters (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) and England Away (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998). John King went on to plan a second loose fiction trilogy, on music and white male British working class identity, of which two novels have so far been published: Human Punk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000) and White Trash (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). His, unconnected, sixth novel, The Prison House (London: Jonathan Cape) was published in 2004. 11. Published by Jonathan Cape in 1998, the historical context for Awaydays is the rise of Tranmere Rovers casuals in 1979. As an avid Liverpool fan, Kevin Sampson, former manager of Merseyside band The Farm, also wrote his own retort to Nick Hornbys Fever Pitch memoir in the hilarious non-fiction account of following Liverpool FC home and away in the 1997-8 season, Extra Time: A Season In The Life Of A Football Fan (London: Yellow Press, 1998). Sampson went on to write a number of unrelated cult fiction novels for Jonathan Cape. The Farms All Together Now, remixed from the 1990 hit version, was re-released to coincide with Euro 2004. 12. Also, the best of the novelistic and journalistic hit and tell books differ qualitatively from the worst. In this latter category, see the so-called evidence of hooliganism in accounts by a number of authors whose true confessional books really do seem fictional; for instance, amongst many possible examples, Colin Ward, Well Frogged Out: The Fans True Story of France 98 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1998), and Dougie and Eddy Brimson, England, My England: The Trouble With The National Football Team (London: Headline, 1996). 13. The Glasgow Herald, 5 October 1996. 14. The novelistic and journalistic aspects of the genre are, inevitably, intertwined. Irvine Welsh, for instance, penned the introduction to Martin King and Martin Knight, The Naughty Nineties: Footballs Coming Home? (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999) and John King wrote the introduction to Martin King and Martin Knight, Hoolifan: Thirty years Of Hurt (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999). Both the above books explicitly take on, via the subtitles and the sub-text, the Broudie/Baddiel/ Skinner version of the new football fandom of the 1990s. Bizarrely, in one of the hit and tell books about each clubs supposed soccer culture faces, Irvine Welsh is interviewed as the Hibernian hoolie (hooligan) representative. Irvine Welsh is most certainly a lifelong Hibs fan and his books, films and musical ventures are packed with Hibs Boy references and barely disguised real hooligan events. He knows a lot of people who could be described as faces but even he would not make such a claim. Amongst other projects, Irvine Welsh has been working on a film about Cardiff Citys Soul Crew football firm. 15. The publishers of these books, because of their supposed hooligan content, tend to be small scale operations; see, for instance, Londons John Blake Publishing, responsible for several examples of the hit and tell genre in books such as Cass Pennants West Ham United Inter-City Firm hooligan firm memoir, Congratulations: You Have Just Met the ICF published in 2002.

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16. Amongst other investigative journalism, Peter Walsh, who is in his early 40s, wrote the groundbreaking Gang War: The Inside Story of the Manchester Gangs , self-published by Milo Books out of Lytham St Annes in 2003. He has been a professional journalist for the Manchester Evening News, The Sun and The Daily Mail amongst others. As well as being the publisher of many of the hit and tell books, he co-wrote one of the best known of them in 1997 with Mickey Francis, Guvnors: The Shocking True Story of a Soccer Hooligan Gang Leader (Bury: Milo Books) on one of the 1980s Manchester City football firms, the Guvnors. 17. Anthony King, 1998, The End of the Terraces, Chapter 1. 18. Ibid. Anthony King, in a later, paperback edition of The End of the Terraces published in 2002, withdraws some of the personalized criticism of fellow sociologists of soccer culture he made in the original manuscript, but his attribution of uncritical journalism remains a valid debating point for those involved in the field. For my own assessment of some of the football wars and academic men behaving badly debates, see Steve Redhead Post-Fandom and the Millennial Boos (Unit for Law and Popular Culture Occasional Papers, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 2000). I am grateful to Anthony King for subsequent correspondence and conversations which helped to move forward the debates in the important joint enterprise of being for the sociology of football. 19. Ibid, pp.4-15. 17. 20. Ibid., pp.1-15 21. All three dimensions (journalistic, novelistic and academic) of hit and tell are connected at some point. The most cited, and approved, academic book on soccer culture in journalistic as well as novelistic hit and tell writing is Gary Armstrong, Football Hooligans: Knowing The Score (Oxford: Berg, 1998) which is an award winning anthropology of Sheffield United Blades hooliganism over a 20 year period, often told in the style of South Yorkshire street slang. Another participant observation study, John Sugdens excellent ethnography of the hooligan blaggers of soccer culture in Britain in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, Scum Airways: Inside Footballs Underground Economy (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2002), admits a complete violation of usual academic standards and style. John Sugden also cites Martin King, Martin Knight and Peter Walsh as influences on the book and its writing. 22. The changing designer labels and fashions of soccer casuals since the late 1970s are best seen visually. For a recent photographic account, with some explanatory text, of casuals in soccer fan history over the last 20 years, see Lorne Brown and Nick Harvey, A Casual Look: A Photodiary of Football Fans 1980s to 2001 (Brighton: Football Culture UK, 2001). 23. Phil Thornton, Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion, The Story of a Terrace Cult (Lytham: Milo Books, 2003), p.10. 24. See Steve Redhead and Eugene McLaughlin, Soccers Style Wars, New Society, 16 August, 1985. 25. Thornton, Casuals, p.9. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Nicholas Allt, The Boys from the Mersey: The Story of the Annie Road End Crew, Footballs First Clobbered-Up Mob (Lytham: Milo Books, 2004), p. 9. 29. Steve Cowens, Blades Business Crew: The Shocking Diary of a Soccer Hooligan Top Boy (Bury: Milo Books, 2001), p.xx. 30. Ibid. 31. See Steve Redhead (ed.), with Derek Wynne and Justin OConnor, The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), especially my editorial introduction, and Steve Redhead, Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues: The Transformation of Soccer Culture (London: Routledge, 1997). 32. For two good examples of rigorous sociologies of soccer culture based around British soccer clubs, see John Williams, Stephen Hopkins and Cathy Long (eds) Passing Rhythms: Liverpool FC and the Transformation of Football (Oxford: Berg, 2001) and Garry Robson, No One Likes Us, We Dont Care: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom (Oxford: Berg, 2000). See my review in Sociology 35 (2001) 1004-5. 33. See, for a well thought out schema for future research in the sociology of soccer culture, Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong, Introduction: Reclaiming The Game An Introduction to the Anthropology of Football in Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong (eds), Entering The Field: New Perspectives On World Football (Oxford: Berg, 1997). 34. See Anthony King, 1998, The End of the Terraces, and the paperback edition 2002

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35. For instance, see Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). 36. See Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist For An Accelerated Culture and The Paul Virilio Reader. See also We Have Never Been Postmodern, 2005, forthcoming. BOOKS UNDER REVIEW

Nicholas Allt, The Boys from the Mersey: The Story of the Annie Road End Crew, Footballs First Clobbered-Up Mob (Lytham: Milo Books, 2004). Pp 296. 15.99 (hardback). ISBN 1-903854-24-5 Phil Thornton, Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion, The Story of a Terrace Cult (Lytham: Milo Books, 2003) Pp 287. 7.99 (paperback). ISBN 1-9038-54148 Andy Nicholls, Scally: Confessions of a Category C Hooligan (Bury: Milo Books, 2002) Pp 288. 14.99 (hardback). ISBN 1-903854-11-3 David Jones and Tony Rivers, Soul Crew: The Inside Story of Britains Most Notorious Hooligan Gang (Bury: Milo Books, 2002) Pp viii+216. 7.99 (paperback). ISBN 1-903854-08-3. Steve Cowens, Blades Business Crew: The Shocking Diary of a Soccer Hooligan Top Boy (Bury: Milo Books, 2001) Pp xxxiii+250. 7.99 (paperback). ISBN 0-9530847-8-7