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Fear and Loathing in
World Football
Gary Armstrong
Richard Giulianotti
BERG
Fear and Loathing in World Football
Global Sport Cultures
Eds. Gary Armstrong, Brunel University, Richard Giulianotti, University of Aberdeen,
and David Andrews, The University of Memphis
From the Olympics and the World Cup to eXtreme sports and kabbadi, the social
significance of sport at both global and local levels has become increasingly clear in
recent years. The contested nature of identity is widely addressed in the social sciences,
but sport as a particularly revealing site of such contestation, in both industrializing
and post-industrial nations, has been less fruitfully explored. Further, sport and sporting
corporations are increasingly powerful players in the world economy. Sport is now
central to the social and technological development of mass media, notably in
telecommunications and digital television. It is also a crucial medium through which
specific populations and political elites communicate and interact with each other on
a global stage.
Berg Publishers are pleased to announce a new book series that will examine and
evaluate the role of sport in the contemporary world. Truly global in scope, the series
seeks to adopt a grounded, constructively critical stance towards prior work within
sport studies and to answer such questions as:
• How are sports experienced and practiced at the everyday level within local settings?
• How do specific cultures construct and negotiate forms of social stratification (such
as gender, class, ethnicity) within sporting contexts?
• What is the impact of mediation and corporate globalization upon local sports
cultures?
Determinedly interdisciplinary, the series will nevertheless privilege anthropological,
historical and sociological approaches, but will consider submissions from cultural
studies, economics, geography, human kinetics, international relations, law, philosophy

and political science. The series is particularly committed to research that draws upon
primary source materials or ethnographic fieldwork.
Fear and Loathing in
World Football
Edited by
Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti
GLOBAL SPORT CULTURES
Oxford • New York
First published in 2001 by
Berg
Editorial Offices:
150 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JJ, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 1003-4812 USA
© Gary Amstrong and Richard Giulianotti 2001
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloguing-in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1 85973 458 8 (Cloth)
ISBN 1 85973 463 4 (Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Kings Lynn.
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on the Contributors xi
Introduction Fear and Loathing: Introducing Global Football

Oppositions 1
Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti
Part I The Break-Up of Britain: Power
and Defiance in Football
1 Can’t Live With Them. Can’t Live Without Them:
Reflections on Manchester United
Carlton Brick 9
2 Cruel Britannia? Glasgow Rangers, Scotland and
‘Hot’ Football Rivalries
Richard Giulianotti and Michael Gerrard 23
3 Real and Imagined: Reflections on Football Rivalry
in Northern Ireland
Alan Bairner and Peter Shirlow 43
4 The Lion Roars: Myth, Identity and Millwall
Fandom
Garry Robson 61
Part II Fighting for Causes: Core
Identities and Football Oppositions
5 ‘Those Bloody Croatians’: Croatian Soccer Teams,
Ethnicity and Violence in Australia, 1950–99
Roy Hay 77
6 Football, Ethnicity and Identity in Mauritius: Soccer
in a Rainbow Nation
Tim Edensor and Frederic Augustin 91
v
7 ‘Team Loyalty Splits the City into Two’: Football,
Ethnicity and Rivalry in Calcutta
Paul Dimeo 105
8 Basque Football Rivalries in the Twentieth Century
John Walton 119

Part III Fragmentary Nationality: Civic
Identities and Football Oppositions
9 Players, Patrons and Politicians: Oppositional
Cultures in Maltese Football
Gary Armstrong and Jon P. Mitchell 137
10 Viking and Farmer Armies: The Stavanger-Bryne
Norwegian Football Rivalry
Hans Hognestad 159
11 Competition and Cooperation: Football Rivalries
in Yemen
Thomas B. Stevenson and Abdul Karim Alaug 173
12 ‘The Colours Make Me Sick’: America FC and
Upward Mobility in Mexico
Roger Magazine 187
13 Three Confrontations and a Coda: Juventus of
Turin and Italy
Patrick Hazard and David Gould 199
Part IV The Others Abroad: Modernity
and Identity in Club Rivalries
14 Olympic Mvolyé: The Cameroonian Team that
Could Not Win
Bea Vidacs 223
15 Treacheries and Traditions in Argentinian Football
Styles: The Story of Estudiantes de La Plata
Pablo Alabarces, Ramiro Coelho and Juan Sanguinetti 237
16 Ferencváros, Hungary and the European Champions
League: The Symbolic Construction of Marginality
and Exclusion
János Bali 251
Contents

vi
7 ‘Team Loyalty Splits the City into Two’: Football,
Ethnicity and Rivalry in Calcutta
Paul Dimeo 105
8 Basque Football Rivalries in the Twentieth Century
John Walton 119
Part III Fragmentary Nationality: Civic
Identities and Football Oppositions
9 Players, Patrons and Politicians: Oppositional
Cultures in Maltese Football
Gary Armstrong and Jon P. Mitchell 137
10 Viking and Farmer Armies: The Stavanger-Bryne
Norwegian Football Rivalry
Hans Hognestad 159
11 Competition and Cooperation: Football Rivalries
in Yemen
Thomas B. Stevenson and Abdul Karim Alaug 173
12 ‘The Colours Make Me Sick’: America FC and
Upward Mobility in Mexico
Roger Magazine 187
13 Three Confrontations and a Coda: Juventus of
Turin and Italy
Patrick Hazard and David Gould 199
Part IV The Others Abroad: Modernity
and Identity in Club Rivalries
14 Olympic Mvolyé: The Cameroonian Team that
Could Not Win
Bea Vidacs 223
15 Treacheries and Traditions in Argentinian Football
Styles: The Story of Estudiantes de La Plata

Pablo Alabarces, Ramiro Coelho and Juan Sanguinetti 237
16 Ferencváros, Hungary and the European Champions
League: The Symbolic Construction of Marginality
and Exclusion
János Bali 251
Contents
vi
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Acknowledgements
Invaluable assistance in the completion of this book has been provided by the
following people to whom we are greatly indebted: Gerry Finn, Andrew Blakie,
Tony Mangan, Eduardo Archetti, Matti Goksoyr, Rosemary Harris and David
Russell. Sincere thanks for their secretarial skills are due to Sally Scott, Alison
Moir and Karen Kinnaird. For a meticulous proof reading we thank Keith
Povey. Our thanks are especially due to those who commissioned and assisted
in the production of this work at Berg publishing, particularly Kathryn Earle,
Katie Joice, Sara Everett, and Paul Millicheap. Last but not least we thank
our partners Hani Armstrong and Donna McGilvray for their patience and
support throughout the duration of this work.
ix
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Notes on Contributors
Pablo Alabarces is Professor and Researcher at the University of Buernos Aires,
Argentina. He is co-author of Cuestión de Pelotas (1996) and editor of Deporte
y Sociedad (1998) and Peligro de Gol (2000). He is coordinating a working
group of Latin American social scientists on sport and society.
Abdul Karim Alaug, a long-time al-Fatuah member and supporter, holds an
M.A. in anthropology from Brown University. His thesis focused on the
acculturation of Yemeni immigrants in Detroit, Michigan. He is completing
Women’s Organization in the Republic of Yemen for the doctoral degree in

Women in Development at Tilburg University (Netherlands). He is on the
faculty of the Empirical Research and Women’s Studies Center, Sana’a
University.
Gary Armstrong lectures in the Department of Sport Sciences at Brunel
University, England. He has written Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score
(1998), Blade Runners: Lives in Football (1998), and has co-edited (with
Richard Giulianotti) Entering The Field: New Perspectives on World Football
(1997) and Football Cultures and Identities (1999).
Frederic Augustin is a social worker and a former social science student at
the University of Mauritius.
Alan Bairner is a Professor in Sports Studies at the University of Ulster at
Jordanstown. He has written widely on sport, politics and society. He is co-
author of Sport, Sectarianism and Society in a Divided Ireland (1993), and
joint editor of Sport in Divided Societies (1997). His latest book is titled Sport,
Nationalism and Globalization: European and North American Perspectives
(2000). He follows the fortunes of Cliftonville FC.
Janos Bali lectures in Ethnological Studies at Budapest University, in the
Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology. He is particularly
interested in the role that sport, and particularly football, plays in the symbolic
construction of national identity. His other interests are Middle-East and
European Peasantry and the transition from the traditional peasant economy
xi
into profit-orientated repoduction. He is currently working on his thesis titled,
‘From Peasants into Agrarian Enterpreneurs: An Economic Anthropological
Case Study in a North-Hungarian Raspberry-Producing Village’.
Carlton Brick is currently completing his doctorate on the discursive politics
of contemporary football fandom at the University of Surrey, Roehampton.
He has published widely on such issues as commodification and regulation
within football. He is also a founding member of the football supporters civil
rights campaign, Libero and is editor of the football fanzine, Offence. He

currently lives in East London and, of course, supports Manchester United.
Ramiro Coelho is a research assistant at the University of Buenos Aires. He is
currently undertaking an ethnographic study of the ‘barras bravas’ fandom
phonomena in Buenos Aires football. Graduating in Communication Studies
he subsequently worked in adult education.
Paul Dimeo lectures in Sport Studies at University College, Northampton.
His doctoral research at the University of Strathclyde explored questions of
racism, identity and ethnicity in Scottish football. Since then he has been
researching various aspects of football in South Asia. He is currently co-editing
(with Jim Mills) a special issue of the journal, Soccer and Society, to be published
in 2001, also to be published as a book entitled, Soccer and South Asia: Empire,
Nation, Diaspora.
Tim Edensor lectures in Cultural Studies at Staffordshire University. He has
written Tourists at the Taj (1998). Recent work includes articles on walking in
the countryside and in the city, and an edited book, Reclaiming Stoke-on-Trent:
Leisure, Space and Identity in the Potteries (2000). He is currently working on
a book titled National Identities and Popular Culture.
Mike Gerrard is a teaching assistant in the Department of Sociology at the
University of Aberdeen, Scotland. As an undergraduate and postgraduate
student he was based in the Department of Cultural History at the University
of Aberdeen. His doctorate which was completed and awarded in 1998
examined religious movements.
Richard Giulianotti is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of
Aberdeen. He is author of Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (1999),
and co-editor of several books with Gary Armstrong including Entering the
Field. New Perspectives in World Football (1997), and Football Cultures and
Identities (1999). He is currently working on a monograph on sport, and a
collection on football in Africa.
Notes on Contributors
xii

David Gould is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the
University of Reading. His work is concerned with the nature of the relation-
ship between organized sport and the Fascist government during Mussolini’s
period of rule in Italy. Several research trips to Italy have enabled him to
follow present-day Italian football.
Roy Hay teaches sports history at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.
He is the author of books on social policy and has written articles on the
social history of soccer. He is currently working with Dr Bill Murray on a
history of Australian soccer. He is President of the Australian Society for Sports
History and of the Victorian branch of the Australian Soccer Media
Association.
Patrick Hazard, a graduate of social anthropology at University College
London, is conducting postgraduate research into migrant identities in Turin,
Italy.
Hans Hognestad is an anthropologist who conducted ethnographic field work
with the supporters of Heart of Midlothian FC between 1992 and 1995. He
spent three years subsequently working for UNESCO as a cultural attaché.
He currently works as a lecturer at the Norwegian University for Physical
Education and Sport.
Roger Magazine is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social
and Political Sciences at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City,
Mexico. A former Fulbright scholar, he received his doctorate in anthropology
from Johns Hopkins University, USA in 1999. His dissertation was entitled
Stateless Contexts: Street Children and Soccer Fans in Mexico City.
Jon P. Mitchell trained in Social Anthropology at Sussex and Edinburgh
Universities and since 1997 has been lecturer in Social Anthropology in the
School of Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex. His doctoral
research was based in Malta, and covered issues of national and local identity,
ritual and religion, history, memory and the public sphere. Since then he has
published on issues as diverse as football, tourism and masculinity. He jointly

edited (with Paul Clough, University of Malta) Powers of Good and Evil:
Commodity, Morality and Popular Belief (2000), which explores the relationship
between economic and religious change. His monograph Ambivalent
Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere will be published in summer
2001.
Notes on Contributors
xiii
Garry Robson is a research fellow in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at the University of East London. He received his PhD in
sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1998. He is
the author of No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care: The Myth and Reality of Millwall
Fandom (2000). He is currently working on a book on middle-class gentri-
fication and the future of London.
Juan Sanguinetti is a research assistant at the University of Buenos Aires.
Graduating in Communications , subsequent post–graduate research examined
the nature of social assistance in poor neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires. His
current employment involves ethnographic research into the ‘barras bravas’
of the Buenos Aires football clubs .
Peter Shirlow is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of
Ulster at Coleraine. His work on the political economy of Ireland has been
published in the journals; Antipode, Capital and Class, Political Geography,
Space and Polity, Area and Recluse. He is editor of Development Ireland (1995)
and Who Are the ‘People’? (1997). He follows the fortunes of Linfield FC.
Thomas B. Stevenson holds a PhD in anthropology from Wayne State
University. He first went to Yemen in 1978 and has completed five fieldwork
projects, the latest in 1998. The author of Social Change in a Yemeni Highlands
Tow n (1985) and Studies on Yemen: 1975–1990 (1994), he has published on
sports, migration and family. He teaches at Ohio University’s regional
university and is an honorary member of al-Sha’b Ibb.
Bea Vidacs will complete her PhD in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate

Center in summer 2001. She carried out nineteen months of field research in
Cameroon on the social and political significance of football; her research
addresses both the issues of construction of national and ethnic identities
and sport’s role in legitimizing or challenging these conditions as they manifest
themselves in the lives of Cameroonian football people.
John K. Walton is Professor of Social History at the University of Central
Lancashire, Preston, UK. His interest in Basque football has grown out of an
initial project on tourism and identities in San Sebastian and the Basque
Country. He has also worked on, among other things; Lancashire, the social
history of fish and chips and English seaside resorts, especially Blackpool.
His most recent books are Blackpool, (1998), and The British Seaside: Holidays
and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (2000).
Notes on Contributors
xiv
Introduction
1
Introduction Fear and Loathing:
Introducing Global Football
Oppositions
Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti
The history of football is the story of rivalry and opposition. Indeed, the
binary nature of football, involving rival teams and opposing identities,
precedes the modern game of ‘association football’ (or ‘soccer’) and its
codification in 1865. During the Middle Ages, the various European forms
of ‘football’ were often violent affairs involving rival social groups (Magoun,
1938). Often, these games would be part of a folk carnival and so would
dramatize opposing social identities, such as those between married and single
men, masters versus apprentices, students against other youths, village against
village, or young women against older women. Football games were brought
into the English public schools during the mid-nineteenth century, serving

to inculcate an idealized vision of muscular, Christian masculinity (Holt,
1989). In the process, the sporting contests dramatized rivalries between
aggregates of young men, while dissipating the energetic conflicts between
staff and pupils (Mangan, 1986; Russell, 1997).
With the establishment of football’s modern rules, the game had a more
rationalized, universalist framework. Accordingly, the game provided a ready
background for the expression of deeper social and cultural antagonisms that
were existent anywhere on earth. In Britain, rivalries between the old
aristocratic football teams were quickly displaced by those between clubs
formed in the new industrial conurbations. Typically, the strongest club
rivalries grew up between neighbouring localities, due to larger crowds of
opposing, working-class, male fans. These occasions were inevitably exploited
by early football entrepreneurs, giving rise to a system of local, regional and
national leagues (Mason, 1980). Public attention shifted increasingly beyond
single games, towards winning tournaments during the course of the football
season. Wealthier clubs exercised the privilege of their resources, thereby
antagonizing the weaker opponents. The modern sport of football also came
Introduction
2
to dramatize senses of national difference and cultural opposition, as ‘inter-
national’ fixtures were played, beginning with the annual fixture between
Scotland and England in 1872. A similar process occurred overseas, as the
game spread through Europe, South America and other British trading centres.
A strong rivalry continued to exist between local teams and the various
patrician British clubs that had introduced and cultivated football in new
lands.
The football world continues to be strongly flavoured by these senses of
difference and rivalry. In their most extreme manifestation, the enactment of
these rivalries through football can be linked closely to inter-communal
violence, such as between Serbs and Croatians (in the former Yugoslavia or

among émigrés in Australia), Catholics and Protestants (in Northern Ireland
or Scotland), or Hondurans and Salvadoreans (as in the ‘soccer war’ of 1969).
1
In more prosaic form, the non-violent expression of ‘hot’ rivalry and
opposition enlivens the football spectacle for both the participants (fans,
players and match officials) and the fascinated, external observer. Hence, we
have witnessed in recent years the rise of the sporting tourist, or to borrow
from Baudelaire, the football flâneur, who combines a cosmopolitan stroll
through European grounds and fixtures with a hint of the bohemian, in toying
momentarily with the authenticity of local club cultures. Such cultural tourism
is made attractive through the screen images afforded by the transnational
transmission of football, and the financing of such coverage, which in turn
relies on the safe but ecstatic representation of the game’s public gatherings.
Football’s intense matches remain highly conducive to the game’s controlling
forces and their principle concern – the accumulation of capital – whether
through gate receipts or, more importantly, television revenues.
This book is about the deep-seated senses of rivalry and opposition that
emerge through football, primarily at club level. The collection builds upon
the peregrinations of the journalist Simon Kuper (1994) to provide the first
sustained, academic enquiry into the nature of football’s rivalries and
oppositions, specifically at club level. The book features sixteen chapters that
explore the social and historical construction of football identities that pivot
upon senses of opposition and difference. The contributions are drawn from
throughout the football world, and centre specifically on the game in the UK
(England, Scotland, Northern Ireland), the European continent (Italy,
Hungary, the Basque region, Norway, Malta), Africa (Cameroon, Mauritius),
1. The two-week war was placed in some kind of perspective by the acerbic essayist P.J. O’Rourke
(1989: 143) who noted that it had been predated by no fewer than 42 conflicts between Honduras and
El Salvador since the mid-nineteenth century. See also Kapusinski (1992) for a journalist’s account of the
war.

Introduction
3
the Middle East (Yemen), Central Asia (India), Latin America (Argentina,
Mexico) and Australia. All of our contributors have undertaken substantial
research into the football cultures on which they write. The articles draw upon
anthropological, sociological and historical perspectives that are rooted in a
qualitative methodological approach. The chapters are organized into four
parts.
In Part I, entitled ‘The Break-Up of Britain: Power and Defiance in Football
Opposition’, we examine four forms of cultural rivalry and opposition which
surround football clubs in the UK. We begin with three chapters on UK
football’s richest national clubs. Carlton Brick provides a critical study of
Manchester United, the world’s richest club, drawing particular attention to
the intense animosity that the club now generates from rival English clubs,
but also detailing the divisions between local United fans and the ‘middle-
class day trippers’ who are drawn primarily to the team’s winning profile.
Richard Giulianotti and Mike Gerrard examine the historical rivalries
surrounding Glasgow Rangers, Scotland’s richest club. Rangers’ traditional
anti-Catholicism, as expressed through the Old Firm rivalry with Glasgow
Celtic, has tended to remain as intense rivalries have emerged with other
Scottish clubs, notably Aberdeen. Latterly, Rangers’ domestic dominance and
financial potential has been thrown into stark relief by a struggle to compete
with Europe’s top clubs. This discussion of anti-Catholicism is extended
through the chapter by Alan Bairner and Peter Shirlow, in their study of
Linfield. As Northern Ireland’s wealthiest club, Linfield have drawn strongly
on their ties to anti-Catholic and Loyalist communities, yet Linfield’s claim
to pre-eminence as the Unionist club in the province generates animosity
from rivals in both Protestant and Catholic communities. Nevertheless, within
the Protestant community, there remains an over-arching antagonism to an
imagined ‘other’: the defunct Catholic club, Belfast Celtic. Finally, Gary

Robson’s chapter on the small Millwall club from south-east London confirms
that club rivalries are not all outgrowths of resistance to financially dominant
forces. Since at least the early post-war period, Millwall have been typified as
a club surrounded by a violent, regressively masculine, racist and neo-fascist
fan culture. Robson’s research, combining strong ethnography with rigorous
anthropological insights, provides a potent challenge to these stereotypical
assumptions.
From UK football we turn to Part II, entitled ‘Fighting for Causes: Core
Identities and Football Oppositions’. Here, we examine four non-Anglo-Saxon
rivalries that develop issues initially raised within the Rangers and Linfield
cases, and which centre upon sub-national and religious antagonisms. In all
of these cases, violence has been one key resource in negotiating relations
Introduction
4
between the minority groups and the majority communities. Roy Hay discusses
the importance of football clubs to the settlement of Croatian immigrants in
Australia throughout the postwar period. These Croatian football clubs helped
their members to integrate into Australian society, but also marked out and
reproduced senses of Croat national identity prior to the formation of the
Croatian nation-state. In the small island of Mauritius, as Tim Edensor and
Frederic Augustin indicate, football is a key venue in which the ethnic tensions
of this ‘rainbow nation’ may erupt. Edensor and Augustin discuss the violent
circumstances surrounding the suspension of football in Mauritius in 1999;
they take a critical, long-term view of how global football culture (such as
support for English club teams) might serve to bring rival communities
together, albeit temporarily. Paul Dimeo introduces his research findings from
the football culture in India. Dimeo examines the communal politics that
underpin football rivalries in Calcutta, notably involving Mohammedan
Sporting Club and the Hindu East Bengal club arguing that football in the
sub-continent thus possesses rather paradoxical properties, by serving to unify

people while also dividing them. John Walton examines the complex dynamics
surrounding the rivalries of Basque football clubs and, in doing so, challenges
our popular assumptions about the homogeneity of Basque national identity,
at least as far as these fractious forces are manifested via football.
In Part III, entitled ‘Fragmentary Nationality: Civic Identities and Football
Oppositions’, we present five chapters that tease out the complexity of regional
differences and political contests between club sides within the context of
specific nation-states. Gary Armstrong and Jon Mitchell explore the football
rivalries in Malta, noting that the reference points for such oppositions centre
on local senses of patronage and class identity, though more recent antagonisms
have emerged to reflect the modernization of the island. The interplay of
traditional and modern social forces strongly informs three further chapters.
In Norway, as Hans Hognestad notes, the rivalry of Viking Stavanger and the
small Bryne club enacts a wider cultural tension between urban centres and
rural locales. The latter, bucolic identity has been a dominant strand in
Norwegian national identity, but Hognestad muses on its future in the context
of the world’s premier urban game. The next three chapters examine how
football rivalries can be strongly influenced by formal politics. In Yemen,
Thomas B. Stevenson and Abdul Karim Alaug discuss the rivalries involving
clubs from the cities of Sana’a, Aden and Ibb. The authors note that inter-
urban rivalries and violence have intensified in recent years, while a greater
political symbolism is added to these contests through the widespread club
affiliations of politicians and dignitaries. In Mexico, Roger Magazine discusses
the widespread cultural opposition that the powerful América F.C. generates
Introduction
5
among opposing supporters. Magazine notes that Mexicans view the club’s
supporters with real scepticism; Americanistas are deemed to be merely
displaying their ambition for upward mobility within a clientelistic society.
Finally, Patrick Hazard and David Gould examine the position of the Juventus

club in Italian football. They locate the rivalries surrounding the club at four
levels: local derbies with Torino, relations with southern teams, rivalries rooted
in local honour, and the emerging confrontation with Milan and its owner,
Silvio Berlusconi, that is rooted in the televisual commodification of football.
Hazard and Gould are critical of prior analyses of Italian football and society,
which fail to consider the ideological complexities of fan symbolism.
In Part IV, ‘The Others Abroad: Modernity and Identity in Club Rivalries’,
we conclude with case studies of football rivalries that are defined by relations
abroad. In each of our three settings, the host nation undergoes strong cultural
anxieties in its attempts to succeed while under perceived pressure to modernize
its traditional beliefs and practices. Bea Vidacs discusses the case of Olympic
Mvolyé in Cameroon – a club which, though relatively powerful and strongly
unpopular with rival fans, appears to be unable to realise its potential. Vidacs
situates her analysis within the broader historical and political contexts of
imperialism, Westernization, traditional belief systems and science. Olympic
are thus seen as particularly undermined by African uncertainty as to whether
the ‘white man’s magic’ is more potent and successful in football, than the
indigenous variety. In Argentina, Pablo Alabarces, Ramiro Coelho and Juan
Sanguinetti examine the historical clash between the traditional ‘Latin’ style
of Argentinian sides, and the modern ‘European’ style embodied by the
defensive, physical and highly successful club team of Estudiantes de La Plata,
during the late 1960s. This opposition of styles came to be a metaphor for
the Europe-style modernization of Argentinian football and the wider society;
while the ‘other’ model proved temporarily successful in football at least, it
was despised as a foreign cultural system. Finally, the chapter by Janos Bali
discusses the Ferencváros–Ajax Amsterdam fixture in 1995 and the Dutch
accusations of Hungarian racism and incivility towards their players. The
furore, involving Hungary’s most popular club, was understood locally in terms
of the nation’s uneasy, lowly position in Europe. And, as Bali points out, the
Hungarians did point out the hypocritical aspect of these criticisms, given

the record of the Dutch in their treatment of non-Western peoples and
cultures.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Part I
The Break-Up of Britain:
Power and Defiance in
Football
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
1
Can’t Live With Them. Can’t Live
Without Them: Reflections on
Manchester United
Carlton Brick
‘. . . if we didn’t exist then they would have to invent us.’
(United We Stand, issue 77, January 1999)
This chapter is concerned with a phenomenon widely referred to as the ‘ABU’
(Anyone But United), forms of which have emerged as significant features of
the consumption of contemporary English club football. I suggest that the
‘othering’ of Manchester United Football Club within the popular football
imagination functions as means by which cultures of fandom seek to under-
stand negotiate and relocate themselves within increasingly complex global
contexts that now shape the domestic English game. Processes of ‘othering’
are a deeply embedded and, some would argue, an inevitable consequence of
sport, particularly those of a highly competitive nature such as professional
football (Brick, 2000). Within the context of English football this process is
made all the more real by the historical and cultural centrality of the game as
a producer of deeply intense and deeply felt identities at both national and
local levels. It would be naive and inappropriate to argue that the ‘othering’
of a club such as Manchester United by rival supporters is a wholly new
phenomenon. Nevertheless, the ‘othering’ of United has acquired a significance

that transgresses the narrow jealousies and binary oppositions of what could
be termed ‘traditional’ domestic fan rivalry. In particular, I outline and assess
how significant formations of Manchester United fans have incorporated
aspects of the ‘othering’ of their club. In turn, they use this to express the
‘superiority’ of their club, and themselves, over domestic rivals.
1
9
1. This chapter draws on research with Manchester and non-Manchester-based groupings of United
fans.
Carlton Brick
10
Going ‘Glocal’ In Manchester 16
2
It is generally assumed that football and the football club provide a significant
focal point upon which local identities can be constructed and expressed.
Local ties are generally held to be integral to the function and expression of
football fandom, providing the elements of ‘authentic’ allegiance, passion and
rivalry. But the recent period has witnessed a profound problematization of
these relationships and their assumed meanings. Giulianotti suggests that the
process of problematization is exacerbated by football’s increased tendency
towards global complexity, whereby: ‘Old boundaries between the local, the
regional, the national and the global are routinely penetrated or collapsed’
(1999: 24).
The footballing renaissance that has occurred at Manchester United over
the last decade or so has coincided with the marked penetration of the
structures and cultures of English football by global processes. The Premier
League has become home to an ever-increasing number of overseas players,
Chelsea becoming the first ‘English’ club to field a side comprised entirely of
‘non-British’ players in domestic competition, during the 1999–2000 season.
England’s ‘traditional’ cup and league competitions have undergone rapid

transformation, having in effect been subsumed by the historical evolution of
increasingly interconnected and interdependent networks of European and
global competition. No longer simply trophies ‘in their own right’, the FA
Cup, the Premier League, and to a lesser extent the League Cup, (known
variously as the Milk Cup, the Coca Cola Cup, the Littlewoods Cup, the
Rumbelows Cup, and the Worthington Cup according to its most recent
sponsor) have become increasingly important to clubs as gateways to these
expanding European and global networks.
The fracture of ‘traditional’ and localized patterns of supporter allegiance
has been quite protracted since at least the 1960s. By the mid-1960s English
league attendances had fallen to 27.6 million, compared to an all-time high
of 41 million at the end of the 1940s (Walvin, 1975). This fall was not evenly
distributed, though, as the period witnesses a polarization of support away
from local towards bigger ‘national’ club sides. The relative affluence of the
postwar period and the development of integrated and affordable transport
networks facilitated greater geographical mobility and accessibility to ‘non-
local’ teams. The increase in television ownership and the increasing centrality
of sports coverage within broadcast schedules heightened this already manifest
tendency away from the ‘local’. As such, by the end of the 1960s, clubs such
2. M16 is the postal code for Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground.