Football has become the establishment. Thirty years since the publication of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, the gentrification of professional football in England is no longer confined to the executive suites. Where once the middle-class enthusiast—like Hornby—was an exotic presence, now the entire culture of the game is awash with the instincts of the bien pensants.
Whatever demotic power football had in the 1970s and 80s has completely dissipated. Like Glastonbury Festival or the Labour Party, Premier League football has mostly decoupled from the affiliations, tastes, and preferences of the everyman. It used to be that working-class fans ignored, defied, or resisted the authorities. Now official club supporters’ groups can be found clamouring for greater government regulation.
You might argue that this is a good thing. Football is less a specific culture, with its partiality, its parochialisms, and its ugly blind spots. Instead, the Premier League is a money-making machine, a juggernaut of soft power, and an adeptly managed global media phenomenon. UK PLC would be much diminished without it. But we should also be clear about what has been lost.
It is this conviction that some things are not for sale, a commitment to community building, that Peter McCormack has been trying to revive since he took over at Real Bedford FC last year.
