I’ll be writing some short pieces for new cultural group blog The Dabbler – the first, which tracks the declining intelligence of English football managers, is here.
James Elsewhere
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On the supposition that you don’t surf the FT:-
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/09/21/348626/something-rotten-in-british-football/#comments
I keep running slap into the FT’s paywall…
You know, I can’t help thinking how MODERN the ideas are that fans come up with when they talk about “going back to basics.” All that stuff about community with other fans, clubs as a point of conncection in a fractured society.. It didn’t look like that or feel like that when clubs were banned from Europe because of a 20 year period of escalating violence and falling attendences. And all this fractured society stuff: clearly, anything that happened in British society pre-1970 is truly dead and forgotten. Compared to wartime, or the 1870s crash, or the Great Depression, this era is a laughing paradise. And most people still grow up and live and die in the town where they are born: this was a great deal less common at the end of the nineteenth century than the common myth has it.
In short, I think they are building on sand here. It’s not that I don’t think it could work. It’s just that they think it could work because they think it’s happened before, and it hasn’t. Always was, always will be, a commercial operation of a particularly ruthless and at the same time incompetent nature.
Alphaville isn’t behind the paywall, but you know with any FT story if you know the headline you can simply paste it in Google and then click on the search result?
No! Thanks for the tip!
Mind you, Simom Kuiper (spelling?) has just transferred from Sports.
Simon Kuper/King Charles/troops>Oxford, books>Cambridge etc.! Interesting news: not many interesting sports writers out there, and his work on Ajax, the war and the Holocaust is remarkable.