Football & its fans: Memories, Matches & Meanings Dr David McGillivray

1. Football & its fans: Memories, Matches & Meanings Dr David McGillivray

2. Historical perspective • Football fandom provided (men) with affiliations to place, people and industry • The game of the working man inseparable from the rhythms of everyday life: • Work • Family • Friendship • Play • Football fundamentally a collective social experience • Continuity a key feature of the passing of time/rite of passage from one generation to the next

5. Meanings, Matches and Memories • Football was (and is) the stuff of informal public debate - it gave meaning and structure to people’s lives • Historical matches, giant-killing feats and important victories were celebrated widely at the time and remembered long afterwards • Individual and collective memories structured around football • Physical attendance at a football match always a collective experience with powerful roots in the sensory dimensions of the stadium: the sounds of the crowd, the smells of the half-time food and drink, even architectural oddities of the ground

7. The times they are a changin’ • Since the 1980s, football has been transformed • All seater stadia • Out-of-town stadium developments • Irregular scheduling • Media saturation • ‘Shareholders’ rather than supporters • Widening gap between players and fans • Football increasingly an individualised, consumer-led experience

9. Football Reminiscence • Changes reinforce the importance of maintaining collective memories through heritage artifacts: • Photography • Film & documentary (e.g. the Football Years) • Memorabilia (badges, programmes, newspapers, scarves etc) • Recreating the environment of the past as a means of establishing continuity in the present