‘Thinking long and wide’: which communities have a future within the global game?

Sustainability is a concept with which the world of football is increasingly starting to engage, if not yet fully embracing or grasping its relevance wholly or coherently. The second Annual ‘Football and Community’ Conference of the Centre for the Study of Football and its Communities (CSFC) in June 2013 carried sustainability as its overarching theme, and saw academics, football industry practitioners and community stakeholders coming together in Manchester to present, discuss and debate the different ways in which football in different parts of the world is coming to terms with issues of sustainability. It is from those collective, collaborative, multi-disciplinary endeavours that this collection of papers has been brought together.

It should be emphasized that the overriding interpretation of sustainability within this collection is not one that focuses on environmental or ecological sustainability, but one that shares a concern that football might foster, nurture or facilitate more sustainable communities. The focus therefore is predominantly on what the United Nations refers to as the social and economic pillars of sustainable development,¹ that are conceived separately – if not independently – from their more immediately recognizable fellow pillar of environmental sustainability. This focus raises many questions in itself and deserves critical discussion around interpretations of sustainability, as does the important acknowledgement that processes related to sustainability interact interdependently, both within and beyond the world of football.

The often uncritical use of the term sustainability reflects similar definitional problems around the concept of community. As highlighted by Brown et al. in a 2008 special issue² of this publication, football like other high-profile industries often pays lip service, and certainly insufficient critical attention, to its engagement with such agendas, despite or perhaps more likely because of the ubiquitous appearance of these ‘buzz words’ in policy documents, corporate social responsibility claims and mission statements.

Indeed, the founding of the Centre for the Study of Football and its Communities was based in large part on a shared recognition that football clubs and authorities, particularly in the UK, were increasingly touching the lives of different kinds of community as a result of significant transformations in the scope and aims of their operations.³ The broader social, cultural, economic and political milieu within which football exists can partially explain such transformations, but we should not overlook the active and calculated role of football’s owners and guardians in wilfully embedding clubs and the game amidst the myriad flows of global capital,⁴ thus both exploiting and manipulating the character of that milieu for ends that often conflict with the interests of some of football’s communities, both old and new.

The contradictions therefore that exist between those different yet connected pillars of sustainability, threaten to undermine the long-term stability that can only be achieved through a more encompassing embrace of the values that underpin environmental, economic and social sustainability. Indeed, English football’s attempts over recent decades to balance a social inclusion agenda with a prevailing free market ideology has raised serious questions around the sustainability of what Mellor called the Janus-face of the English Premier League.⁵

The overriding sentiment expressed throughout the June 2013 Manchester conference, as reflected in this collection of papers, is that the game of football has the capacity – financially, socially, culturally, symbolically – to be a real force for sustainable good in its interactions with its various communities. Qualifying such optimism however was a recognition that more critical focus is needed, via academic researchers, journalists and football industry practitioners themselves, on the fundamental contradictions that severely lessen the potential of football to play a positive role in making that interdependence between social, economic and environmental sustainability a cause for celebration rather than despair.

Scholars, practitioners and stakeholders

A core principle of the approach of CSFC has been to see academic research and analysis as a resource for knowledge exchange, to be shared with football industry practitioners, supporters and other community stakeholders, including journalists, community groups and policy-makers. The perspectives and insights of all these representatives of football’s communities, from the UK and beyond, both complement and strengthen the understandings of academics seeking to make sense of contemporary football.

This process is deepened further when multi-disciplinary collaboration within academia is embraced, and CSFC has already benefited from the collaborative spirit that has developed between researchers representing such disciplines as sociology, politics and public services, architecture, business, human geography, literature, information and communications, art, psychology, sports studies, management and history.

The involvement of practitioners and those who have the inside track on the processes they describe is one of the key features of this collection. First-hand practitioner accounts are not a standard feature of academic journals, but they provide fresh angles upon the issues they discuss and allow for levels of inside knowledge that researchers often cannot access. Academic writing conventions have therefore been dropped to the bench at key moments in producing this collection in order to give a run out to such welcome insights.

The papers

The articles contained in this collection are laid out in three broad themes: the first examines financial sustainability and related issues in both Europe and Asia; the second looks at the sustainability of fan culture and fan-owned clubs in Europe; and the third evaluates the success and prospects for particular community initiatives launched by football clubs in the United Kingdom. This structure organizes articles in terms of broad themes, yet there are clearly overlaps between them and they can stand together as a coherent whole under the overarching theme of the sustainability of football’s communities.

Steve Menary’s ‘One rule for one: the impact of Champions League prize money and Financial Fair Play at the bottom of the European club game’ examines an important but thus far under-examined issue regarding sustainability in the smaller football nations of Europe. The award of Champions League prize money in nations like Luxembourg, San Marino and Cyprus appears to be changing the nature of domestic leagues such that once a team has qualified for European competition and been awarded the requisite money by UEFA, they are able to use that money to dominate domestic football for years to come. This means that prize money ultimately creates an unequal playing field and dilutes the competitiveness of, and ultimately interest in, domestic football.

By contrast, Siriwat and Brill broadly welcome the recent influx of money into the domestic league that they focus upon, the Thai Premier League. This relatively new competition has attracted financial backers locally and as a consequence footballers from across the globe, and particularly from South America, have travelled to play in the top division of Thai football. ‘Chao Amigos! Hello Thailand: Football, Migration & Sustainability in Thailand’ examines the issues that face football migrants to Thailand, and is a particularly useful insight into the processes involved in migration from powerful football nations to a relatively weak one, providing an insight into a local culture that hasn’t to date been the subject of much academic study in the West.

Adriano Gomez-Bantel’s work examines the ways that VfB Stuttgart have been able to both foment regional identity and thrive through exploiting it. Writing from a financial point of view, the author discusses VfB’s success in using an existing sense of identity in Baden-Wurttemberg for their own ends. The discussion contained in ‘Football Clubs as Symbols of Regional Identity’ also focuses upon regional rivalries in Germany more broadly, and is therefore of interest both to scholars of sports management and those who examine the development of sub-national identities.

A further discussion of football culture in Germany can be found in Mick Totten’s ‘Football and community empowerment; How FC Sankt Pauli fans organise to influence’. This article provides a useful contrast to Gomez-Bantel’s by examining the culture of a club whose appeal is multi-national but whose culture is tied firmly to locality. Totten particularly examines the political nature of St Pauli, and analyses how the now-famous sense of community associated with the club developed and is maintained by a network of activists. The autonomous and non-hierarchical organizational structure of St Pauli fans is examined in detail and the article also discusses ways in which fans influence politics outside of football. This demonstration of the potential of football communities to influence matters outside of the sport itself is particularly interesting from a socio-political perspective. St Pauli continue to inspire other fans to take political action at their own clubs, and Totten’s article discusses this in detail.

Similarly to Totten, Will Simpson explores fan activism in his article ‘Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls – Anatomy of an Alternative Sports Club’. Simpson provides an engaged, and engaging, insider’s account of a club that attempts to bridge the difficult gaps between participatory club membership, enjoyable sports participation and the embrace of a more active, politicized worldview. Sustainability appears to be something that lies at the heart of what drives the Cowboys and Cowgirls, both from an internationalist perspective of social justice, solidarity and collaboration, and also from a concern for maintaining what they have created for the benefit of future generations.

David Treharne’s overview of ‘Ten years of Supporters Trust ownership at Exeter City AFC’ offers a unique insight into his experiences as a founder of the Trust and Chair of the club itself. Those interested in the sustainability of fan ownership gain a complete history of Exeter’s experiences as a fan-owned club. The struggles of the Trust to gain control of the club, and the governance issues that they faced, are examined in detail. As one of the first fan-owned clubs in the English game, Exeter City are a fascinating and extremely useful case study for those interested in fan culture and sports management. Treharne’s discussion of the issues Exeter City faced is essential reading for all would-be fan activists.

A much less savoury aspect of fan culture is explored in Roy Krøvel’s ‘Fighting Strategic Homophobia in Football’. Krøvel examines a Norwegian case study, and analyses homophobic comments made both at matches and online in web forums. He suggests that such comments are designed to upset opposition fans (who are involved in anti-homophobia movements) and are therefore part of the anatomy of fan rivalry. Krøvel also examines the sustainability of homosexual football fans being involved in the sport in Norway, linking the broad concept of sustainability to resilience and willingness to deal with abuse. This understanding of the concept broadens the scope of the collection and adds a new paradigm to the study of sustainability in sport.

The final two articles in this collection cover initiatives that are run by football clubs with an aim of improving the lifestyle and experiences of their supporters. Pringle et al. in ‘Sustaining health improvement activities delivered in English professional football clubs using evaluation’ examine the health promotion programmes of two clubs currently competing in the English Football League. This article highlights the importance of thorough monitoring and evaluation strategies in sustaining the effective promotion of positive lifestyle changes through football-based community initiatives.

Perhaps the most popular football club in the world are the focus of Paramio-Salcines, Downs and Gray’s article on the experiences of disabled football fans. ‘The Celebration of Manchester United FC’s Ability Suite’ provides an authoritative history of the initiative – Phil Downs was one of the driving forces behind the Ability Suite. The article suggests that the scheme provides Manchester United with a competitive advantage in attracting and meeting the needs of disabled fans, and argues that other clubs should invest in similar initiatives in order to keep pace and provide more equality of access for match-going fans.

This collection of papers brings together some of the many ways that football has a real stake in maintaining, or working towards, social and economic sustainability, and in so doing shares international reflections as well as bringing practitioner experience to the fore. This collective insight thus provides a snapshot of the challenges faced at all levels of football and its diversity of communities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. United Nations, Report of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.

2. Brown, Crabbe, and Mellor, ‘Introduction: Football and Community – Practical and Theoretical Considerations’.

3. Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game; Giulianotti and Robertson, ‘The Globalization of Football’.

4. Conn, The Football Business.

5. Mellor, ‘The Janus-faced Sport’.