Creating and managing community in a community football club

ABSTRACT

Purpose: To explore the theme of community, a very mobile and contested concept [Delanty (2003). Community. London: Routledge], by looking at how it is understood, made operational and managed at Football Club United of Manchester (FC United), a semi-professional and self-declared community football club in England.

Design: FC United was studied ethnographically, through participant observations, interviews and analysis of secondary data.

Findings: Results confirm the difficulties in defining community, as well as highlighting the resilience of football communities. Moreover, they show that the utopian goal of creating a sense of community often clashes with the need to manage “community” against set standards, bound by bureaucracy and managerialism, in the (ambitious) attempt to look like an “orgunity” [Parker (2002a). Utopia and Organization. Oxford: Blackwell].

Implications: To maximise the impact of community-making projects, football clubs should favour progressive micro-emancipatory over grand narratives of social change, and exploit the multi-faceted nature of community].

KEYWORDS:

• Community
• liquid modernity
• fan-ownership
• alternative organisations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A previous version of what is currently the Community section, available at: http://www.fc-utd.co.uk/community.php (Accessed 18 November 2016).

2 FC United has benefited from a good standard of community work delivery to intensify its partnership with the public sector, from which a large part of the funding for the stadium comes. This is one of the reasons perhaps why the club has had less openness towards voluntary community activities compared to other voluntary roles (i.e. helping on match-day or in the office).