Hit and Tell: a Review Essay on the Soccer Hooligan Memoir

Hit and Tell: a Review Essay on the
Soccer Hooligan Memoir

STEVE REDHEAD

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This is a review essay on the genre of British soccer hooligan books. These ‘hit and tell’
confessional tales of soccer casuals fandom are told in the form of an historical memoir. Five
examples of hit and tell books are reviewed and assessed against the novelistic accounts found
in contemporary football fiction books by authors such as John King and Kevin Sampson and
the more rigorous demands of the sociology of soccer culture. It is argued in the essay on hit
and tell writing that such populist publishing can be harnessed to fill in gaps in historical and
ethnographic work in the sociology of soccer fan cultures, but that what is needed in the future,
above all, is better theorizing of soccer culture and its modernities.

Introduction

The Euro 2004 Championships in Portugal brought more than just the shock
result of the new century – a Greece victory over the fancied hosts. It also brought
the nomination, seemingly against all the odds, of England soccer fans as candi-
dates for ‘fair play’ awards for their off the pitch contribution to the competition.
This accolade came despite massive media publicity about the deportation of some
England soccer fans and numerous news clips of their bar brawls with Portuguese
riot police. Once England were out of Euro 2004, beaten, albeit on penalties, by
the more skilful and adventurous team of the home country, twenty something cult
fiction novelist Helen Walsh1 writing in The Guardian, argued that ‘thug life is not
the English disease – it’s a sign of the times everywhere’ and the ‘time has come
for our noble representatives in the media to start loving the English again’.2
Further, Walsh argued, ‘as a mixed race girl who’s followed football for years,
home and away, it’s asinine to continue to ignore the huge progress we’ve made’.
In an era of New Labour league tables and quality assurance, such claims seem, on
the surface, to make logical sense. The performance-based criteria of the modern
age should be recognized and produce its reward. In this version of the story of our
times, modernity, or post-traditional society, has triumphed and soccer hooligan-
ism, a part of the traditional past, is no more - or at least not a high priority law
and order problem in the wake of mass media images of Al Qaeda terror and Iraq’s
insurgencies.

Soccer and Society, vol. 5, No. 3 Autumn 2004, pp 392–403
ISSN 1466–0970 print/1743–9590 online
DOI: 10.1080/1466097042000279625 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

HIT AND TELL 393

Soccer and Its Modernities

But this divided, even ambivalent, reaction, involving journalists and novelist
social critics, to a major soccer competition, and the behaviour of spectators, is in
fact nothing new. Arguably this contested process had begun with the reaction to
England supporters at the World Cup in Japan 2002 or even before this period at
Euro 2000 in Belgium and Holland or at Euro 96 in England.3 Certainly in the late
1990s, after Tony Blair’s New Labour came to power in the UK, there was consid-
erable media coverage about the improvement of the behaviour of soccer specta-
tors, at club and national level, as Labour, and Britain, modernized and became,
in Blair’s vision, a new young country (again). Labour even adopted Ian Broudie
(of The Lightning Seeds) and laddish comedian soccer fans, David Baddiel and
Frank Skinner’s Euro 96 anthem ‘Football’s Coming Home’ as their own political
chant: ‘Labour’s Coming Home’! As the 1998 World Cup in France got under
way, however, British media reporting changed. As with some of the subsequent
overhyped coverage of Euro 2000 and Euro 2004, the media zeroed in on what
they saw as the soccer ‘thugs’. The ‘return’ of soccer hooliganism by (mainly)
English and German fans, as well as indigenous French and other local youth, was
portrayed as something out of another era, when in actuality it had simply become
more marginalized at Premier League football matches in Britain in the early and
mid 1990s; that is, before Blair and after Thatcher. Another novelist, Peruvian
author Mario Vargas Llosa, wrote provocatively in The Independent at the time of
France ’98 that:

the spectacle of hordes of drunken English hooligans attacking passers by,
charging adversary fans with sticks, stones and knives, engaging in ferocious
battles against the police, smashing shop windows and vehicles and, at times,
the very stands of the stadium, has come to be an inevitable corollary of
major matches played by England, and of many in the British League. And
yet the fact is that for anyone who lives there, England is a country excep-
tionally peaceful and well mannered ... How do we explain this curious
phenomenon? Let us discard from the start the ideological thesis, according
to which hooligan violence is a heritage of Mrs Thatcher’s economic
reforms, which have burdened British society with the deepest imbalances
and pockets of poverty in Western Europe.4

So, we are tempted to ask, as we look back on almost a decade of modernizing
(or de- Thatcherizing) Britain (and football) under Tony Blair, which is it? Are we
modern or traditional? Is thuggish behaviour an English, or British, disease? Are
soccer hooligans back? Did they ever go away? If so, when did these events
happen? And, anyway, how do we know? If the sociology of soccer culture, and
especially the sociology of soccer hooliganism, had done its job more effectively
over the years, or transmitted its work better via the media, perhaps we would not

394 SOCCER AND SOCIETY

have to ask these questions. One of the most prominent means, apart from
sociological work, of producing ‘evidence’ in our accelerated media culture of
diverse modernities5 about this phenomenon has, over the last decade, been the
soccer culture memoir. There are essentially three versions of this product of
football fandom: one is journalistic, one is novelistic and one is academic. I want
to concentrate in this review essay on the first of these but with reference to the
other two.

Hit and Tell

After Nick Hornby’s early 1990s bestselling memoir Fever Pitch,6 there has been a
seemingly inexorable output of a new genre, what I call here ‘hit and tell’,
especially devoted to revealing confessional soccer hooligan stories. The so-called
‘hoolie’ shelves of bookshops are weighed down with the volumes and mainstream
bookshops sell them by the truckload. Originally what was once referred to as the
new football writing7 eschewed hooligan stories but as the 1990s wore on a market
was created for the hit and tell accounts which were often ‘fictionalized’ (certainly
in form if not in content).

The ‘fiction’ category was literally accurate in some cases as a new breed of
contemporary fiction writers, which I have elsewhere, with heavy irony, labelled
the ‘repetitive beat generation’,8 proceeded to paint a more convincing picture of
the history of modern British soccer fan culture and its hooliganism than had
much formal ethnographic work by sociologists of soccer deviance or even
undercover journalists and police. Writers with literary credentials like Roddy
Doyle and D.J. Taylor were included in the anthologies, and burgeoning move-
ment, of new football writing which was essentially seen, self-consciously, as a new
bourgeois genre in literature. Soccer in Britain was, at the same time, being
modernized and resold, as a commercial product, to a more middle class, family
oriented audience, what sociologist of soccer Anthony King called the ‘new
consumer fans’.9 Later in the decade, cult fiction writers like John King, whose
‘realist’ novel The Football Factory sold hundreds of thousands of copies, would
create what they definitely saw as a new ‘working class’ fiction around soccer,
explicitly designed to upset the ‘middle class literary set’ in Britain who had
embraced this strand of popular culture for a while after Italia 90 and then uncer-
emoniously dropped it. The loose football fiction trilogy of novels by John King,10
together with Kevin Sampson’s Awaydays,11 alongside sections of much of the
fiction of Irvine Welsh, gave accounts of soccer fan culture and territorial male
hooliganism – and much else about our contemporary cultural ‘modernities’ –
which felt ‘truthful’ in a way that many media reports, academic treatises, political
current affairs discussions and, indeed, ‘bad’ hoolie books did not.12 The first of
this football fiction trilogy, John King’s The Football Factory, was initially drama-
tized by Paul Hodson as a stage play and eventually made into a feature film by
director Nick Love several years later. Released to much media moral panic

HIT AND TELL 395

shortly before Euro 2004, the film was widely criticized because commentators
claimed it used ‘real’ football hooligans as actors and advisers. An argument can
be made that writers like Irvine Welsh and John King produced fiction output, as
well as non-fiction drama for television, film and theatre, which was actually more
evocative of the culture they were describing, and its history, than much of the
sociology of soccer culture in the 1980s and 1990s which often employed a football
fandom component to authenticate its research. These cult fiction writers also
helped to clearly distinguish the hit and tell books from ‘new football writing’:
‘Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager ... King writes powerfully
with a raw realism and clear grasp of a culture which has been denied but cannot
be ignored’, as The Glasgow Herald reviewed one of John King’s novels.13 These
novelistic accounts of British soccer hooliganism since the 1970s, interesting and,
also, problematic as they are, will not take the primary focus of this review essay.14
Rather, I want to turn to the trash or pulp aesthetic of the soccer hooligan memoir,
displayed in the journalistic brand of hit and tell, in order to push the sociology of
soccer fan culture forward.

Terrace Retro

The amateur journalistic ‘insider’ accounts are now proliferating at a pace and
form a veritable library of hooligan stories. There are many dozens of them, with
a variety of club firms or gangs involved. The best example of the hit and tell genre
are the confessional writings published by Milo Books, five of which are under
review here, but other publishers have also been cashing in.15 Milo, a small scale
Lancashire publishing business originally located in Bury and recently moved to
Lytham St Anne’s, is the brainchild of Peter Walsh, who has produced provoca-
tive investigative journalism on contemporary gang violence for various different
media.16

One of the criticisms of the sociology of soccer fan culture, especially in the
UK, over the last decade is that it has too often descended into ‘uncritical
journalism’17 and has neglected sociological theory – indeed it has been dubbed as
‘uncritical’ and ‘undertheorized’ by critics within the debates which for a while
took on the unappealing status of ‘football wars’.18 Anthony King’s The End of the
Terraces specifically19 singled out my own writings and those of Richard Haynes,
Rogan Taylor, Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong, as well as other work in
the field of sociology of soccer culture by implication. King’s charge was that there
was a widespread ‘false populism’20 within contemporary sociology of football
which ‘amounted to little more than journalism’. Other participants in the debates
made similar observations.

Four of the Milo books under review here, by Allt, Nicholls, Jones and Rivers,
and Cowens are all ‘uncritical journalism’. These sorts of books are part of a ‘cult’
publishing category. Hit and tell literature is unashamedly partisan and boastful,
recounting 20 years, or more, of violent male football fandom associated with a

396 SOCCER AND SOCIETY

particular British league club and its ‘mob’. They are written in the form of fan
memoir. None of them have any pretensions to ‘academic’ style or protocol.21
They are often formularized and written in deliberately ‘trashy’ formats.
Quotations and conversations are seemingly made up at will. The authors are
almost always male and in their late 30s or 40s, old enough to have ‘been there,
done that and bought the T-shirt’. By virtue of their age they have become self-
styled oral historians and archivists of a period when post-industrial Britain, and
its soccer culture, was undergoing fundamental ‘modernization’. But these writ-
ers, for the most part, baulk at expertise, criteria for measurement and learning.
Indeed academia, like the media, in many ways is the enemy, partly responsible for
the myriad misrepresentations of soccer fan culture and its history which these
books perceive as a fundamental problem and consequently seek to put to rights.
The hit and tell books celebrate and romanticize a whole hooligan subculture.

That said Phil Thornton’s book, Casuals, is the best journalistic account of
British youth cultural history since the 1970s that I have yet read. Labels and
soccer have gone hand in hand since the late 1970s and early 1980s ‘subcultural’
period, becoming mainstream sometime in the mid-1980s and an international
youth style ever since. Casual history, in fact, is the missing key to the sociology
of British soccer hooligan culture over the last 30 years and is the underlying
link between all of these five books under review. Casual designer fashion has
been intertwined with the history of football fan culture and soccer hooliganism
in Britain since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and remains intertwined today.22
The shape and contours of the events of hooliganism at and around football
matches over a quarter of a century connect with the rise and fall and rise
(again) of soccer casuals. Phil Thornton acknowledges that casual culture has
been ‘all too often disfigured by needless, internecine violence’ and has ‘always
been a lifestyle that operated on the margins of criminality and gangsterism’.23
Phil Thornton is in his late 30s and for at least a decade has been involved in
(critical) journalistic work on music, fashion and football and the archiving of
the ‘last’ British youth culture, the soccer casuals. With Peter Hooton, lead
singer of The Farm and editor of The End fanzine, he is part of a Merseyside
writers collective called Partizan Media, its online fanzine Fried Icecream and the
website Terrace Retro. Thornton has been connected to football fanzine culture
for many years and contributes to the Manchester United fanzine United We
Stand. Importantly, Thornton writes in an accessible journalistic style but is as
well read on the background of British youth culture since the 1970s and the
history of hooligan subcultures in general, as many academics. He neatly situates
casuals in a subcultural timeline from the scuttlers of the late nineteenth century
through teds, rockers, mods and skinheads of the 1950s and 1960s and the
punks of the 1970s.

Casuals, as Thornton points out, began as a post-mod, post-skinhead
subculture in the 1977-8 football season in Britain, initially in the North of
England on Merseyside, closely followed by Manchester, and later in London and

HIT AND TELL 397

Scottish cities. By the time Eugene McLaughlin and I wrote our seminal essay on
what we called soccer’s style wars24 on the eve of the 1985-6 soccer season, the first
after the Heysel and Bradford disasters, and one which took place against a back-
drop of industrial civil war, several years of growth of soccer casual culture had
meant that a majority of professional league soccer teams in Britain could boast
their own casual firm, or very often, firms. Phil Thornton rightly cites urban
casual hotspots as diverse as Nottingham, Leeds, Aberdeen, Portsmouth and
Norwich in his history of the last 25 years of the ‘scally’ (Merseyside) or ‘perry
boy’ (Manchester) lifestyle. Thornton’s book, as he says himself, is ‘no simplistic
study of designer labels and football thugs’.25 There is a loving attention to detail
with pop musical fads, fashion labels, hair dos and their forever changing styles
carefully choreographed. He argues that it, ‘is an exploration of what shaped a
predominantly white working class youth movement in an era of ferocious attacks
from both a right wing government determined to smash any symbol of urban
resistance and a Sohocentric media unable or unwilling to grasp what was going
on’.26 The casual scene that he traces and trawls, interviewing many of the key
faces and revisiting most of the main events, according to Thornton ‘has been
misunderstood and misrepresented’.27 Consequently, Thornton takes us on a
rollercoaster tour of British youth cultural highpoints such as acid house, hip hop
and drum ‘n’ bass and shows how soccer casuals as a youth culture punctuated
these underground histories. Thornton’s claim to be able to better represent the
casual (sub)culture is based on methodological grounds: first, that he was there, he
was part of it, he was a participant if not a participant observer; and second, that
he talked to many of the other people who also made this unique British youth
cultural historical moment. The other four books cited here are hardcore hit and
tell ‘pulp’ books which flesh out Thornton’s rich historical narrative.

Nicholas Allt’s The Boys From The Mersey tells the story of the Anfield Road
End casual firm (‘Annie Road’ in Allt’s scouse street slang) that he was a part of
from the late 1970s. The Anfield Road end was the opposite terrace ‘end’ to the
famous Kop at Liverpool’s then prestigious Anfield stadium, much feared by
teams and fans alike. Like other casual firms across the country the older more
traditional (often skinhead) hooligan gangs were embedded in the more traditional
ends in the mid–late 1970s. The younger, embryonic casual firms took up
residence in other parts of 1970s soccer grounds, partly because that is where, as
younger fans, they had always stood. The Anfield Road terrace ‘end’ spawned, in
the 1977-8 season, the ‘Annie Road’ firm or mob. Nicholas Allt’s book is the story
of the firm’s travels all over Britain and continental Europe. It begins with the
familiar hit and tell masculine bravado boast: ‘we were the boys, we were always
the boys and anyone worth his salt and honest enough to admit it knew that we
were the boys’.28 Its claim that this casual crew was the ‘first’, as with many in each
of these books, is always contentious, but the Liverpool team’s forays into Europe
meant untold and rarely policed opportunites for scallies ‘jibbing’ (riding trains
without paying) and ‘robbing’ their way across the ‘new Europe’ and importing

398 SOCCER AND SOCIETY

back into England tons of expensive casual menswear, jewellery and sportswear
from the looted emporiums of the continent.

The Everton memoir in this collection of books under review is Andy Nicholls’
Scally. The book is a self-confessed memoir of a ‘Category C Football Hooligan’
and the casual firms that Nicholls, an Everton fan in his early 40s, ‘ran’ with from
the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Category C in the UK National Criminal Intelli-
gence Service (Football Section) means violent supporter or organizer of violence.
‘Snorty Forty’ was one of the monikers adopted by Nicholls and his fighting
mates, one of whom tells the story of the notorious ‘County Road Cutters’ (Cutters
was a label taken up because of the predilection of this particular Merseyside firm
to use stanley knives in hooligan encounters). Nicholls’ book proclaims that for
25 years he was one of the most active hooligans in the country, a leading figure
among the violent followers of Everton FC. Like many other authors of the hit and
tell genre, Andy Nicholls states that he has turned his back on his violent past, but
in both the World Cup 2002 in Japan and Korea, and Euro 2004 in Portugal, UK
statutory orders under the Football Offences and Disorder Act 2000 were issued
against Nicholls to stop him travelling to the tournaments. Like many of these hit
and tell authors, Nicholls is proud of his numerous ‘battles’ with the criminal
justice and penal systems. Indeed, the notice of his travel ban for the 2002 World
Cup forms part of the hardback cover of this confessional book, adorning his words
like a badge of honour. As in the other histories of the casual crews though, club
rather than country is what matters. Nicholls displays a rare passion and
knowledge of modern Everton FC history. Few of the people seriously involved
in casual firms up and down the nation since the late 1970s have had much concern
with the England national team; the same goes for casual firms around Hibernian
and Aberdeen amongst others, for example, regarding the Scottish national team.
This particular club versus country conflict mirrors a deep-seated aspect of fast
changing modern soccer fandom more generally and is more often than not
resolved in favour of club. Territory, represented by the local football club, was
and is, acutely regional for the casual crews.

The ‘Celtic’ example from this set of hooligan books is David Jones’ and Tony
Rivers’ Soul Crew, the story of Welsh lower league team Cardiff City’s casual firm
from the early 1980s to the present. As the book recounts, the Soul Crew was given
world-wide publicity by the media after a game at Ninian Park, Cardiff, between
Cardiff City of Division 2 of the ‘English’ League and Premier League team Leeds
United in the third round of the FA Cup played in January 2002, but had in fact
been in existence for 20 years. Although the book claims that the bouts of hooli-
ganism between the two sets of supporters in January 2002 was nothing out of the
ordinary, television cameras shot enough footage for world 24 hour television
bulletins to feast on for days. Cardiff City’s Soul Crew in the twenty-first century
were quickly as notorious as Millwall’s Bushwackers in the 1970s and Chelsea’s
Headhunters in the 1980s thanks to the lightning fast looping of global television
and the tabloid press in our accelerated modernity. The fact that the Soul Crew

HIT AND TELL 399

were, and are, outside the Premier League symbolizes the continuing trend of the
1990s when lower league casual firms took over much of the earlier notoriety of
‘big’ clubs as the policing and CCTV surveillance at Premier League grounds
(from 1992 onwards) took its toll on the big city mobs.

The final book under review here is the story of Sheffield United’s ‘Blades’ in
the form of Steve Cowens’ Blades Business Crew. The ‘BBC’ (Blades Business Crew
acronym) story is introduced by long-time Sheffield United fan Paul Heaton,
singer in the 1980s ‘indie’ band The Housemartins and later the successful pop
band The Beautiful South. Heaton, as well as his strident foreword, is granted a
photo and several lyric attributions in Steve Cowens’ self-styled confessional
football hooligan memoir which begins in the early 1980s with the familiar rapid
spread of casual culture around soccer away from the main centres of Merseyside,
Manchester and London. As with most of the other hit and tell books on the
market, Cowens’ account is vitriolic about the ‘sociologists, anthropologists and
other so called “experts” who have had their say’ and ‘haven’t a clue’.29 Instead he
claims to have presented the ‘narrative as honestly as possible and as accurately as
memory allows’ and to ‘know’ intimately the Sheffield United fan culture he
represented as a ‘top boy’ for over 20 years.30 The ‘league tables’ that really matter
to Cowens and his fellow club ‘historians’ are not the ones showing the position of
their teams (or the best schools or universities); the rivalry between the soccer
casual firms is what matters. So in Cowens’ case it is Sheffield Wednesday hooligan
fans that come in for most disdain. In a section on the A–Z of violence, Cowens
lists his all time ‘top’ soccer hooligan crews. Media favourites Cardiff’s Soul Crew,
West Ham United’s Inter-City Firm, Chelsea’s Headhunters and Millwall’s
Bushwackers feature prominently, but so, too, do Manchester City’s early 1980s
mob Mayne Line Crew (named after Mayne’s coaches in Manchester, not Maine
Road) and Everton’s Snorty Forty (featured in Andy Nicholls book). The hit and
tell books all reference each other (as academics do) but what matters here is
‘respect’ for the crews who did not cut and run when attacked or provoked, or who
‘took’ the ‘ends’ or, later, parts of stands, of the home casual crews.

The Field of Sociology of Soccer Fan Culture

After reading these five hit and tell books, it is possible to argue that we are better
off with the ‘real’ uncritical journalism of the ‘street’ than the allegedly ‘pseudo’
uncritical journalism of the sociologists of soccer culture, including myself.
However there is a desperate need for better sociological theorizing in our
academic enterprise of creating a satisfactory sociology of football, and for
methodological solutions to the continuing problems of ethnographic work on
soccer hooliganism and indeed soccer culture in general. This need still remains
despite the possibility of using material from populist publishing projects which
might seem, in normal circumstances, to be off limits. Hit and tell books certainly
epitomize the ‘undertheorized’ and ‘uncritical’ criticisms levelled at some

400 SOCCER AND SOCIETY

sociology of soccer fan culture work, however evocative they are of what I have
elsewhere called ‘low modernism’ and ‘low modernity’.31 But some of them, at
least, help to repair gaps in historical and ethnographic knowledge. It is hard,
though, to ‘romanticize’ these hit and tell stories. They are often nasty, brutish
and not particularly short.

This question of theory, and the need for it to be critical and apt, brings us back
to the ‘field’. Sociology of British soccer culture, as represented by sociological
researchers in the UK32 and their many international colleagues, has, rightly in my
view, become an exercise in anthropology.33 It has its successes and its failures but
it needs to pursue its stated goals with renewed vigour in the future. We are
presented with an ever expanding number of international soccer fan cultures,
especially based around nation states but also around ‘club’ and city, which can be
sociologically ‘known’. It is here that, perhaps, some of the sociology of soccer
culture critics’ strictures34 about undertheorized and uncritical thinking in the
British examples might have a point. But it is not undertheorizing or uncritical
thinking per se that is the major problem. I have pointed to some of the unorthodox
uses we might make of ‘uncritical journalism’ in this review essay. The problem,
rather, is developing the most appropriate conceptual apparatus. That is what
matters above all. So, too, does being prepared to adapt such apparatus to shifts
over time. We can see this in the persistence of debates over soccer and
(post)modernity. ‘Post-modern’ as a term for many sociologists of soccer culture,35
for example, remains an era or epoch – after modernity, which in itself is after
tradition. I am inclined, instead, to theorize the ‘post’ as ‘always already’ within
modernity. There is just modernity, nothing afterwards. This distinction matters
because what the sociology of soccer culture offers is very detailed, intricate
pictures of more or less differentiated soccer cultures on a global scale. But this is
a rapidly shrinking, mediatized globe, the accelerated modern world where
‘classic’ sociological theory is not always very helpful any more. We need to renew
our thinking about soccer and modernity more generally.

In my own rethinking of this matter I want to argue that it is ‘modernities’,36
and their contemporary overlapping, rather than transitions from modernity to
post-modernity (or for that matter, to trawl contemporary sociology more
generally, solid modernity to liquid modernity, or first modernity to second
modernity, or early modernity to late modernity) that we should address. The
‘low modernity’ of the soccer casuals, then, in this version of the history of soccer
modernities, sits alongside, not simply after or before, the ‘new labour modernity’
of England football fans with their flags of St George, replica shirts and their fair
play awards.

NOTES

1. See Helen Walsh, Brass (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004).
2. The Guardian, 3 July 2004.

HIT AND TELL 401

3. See Mark Perryman (ed.), Going Oriental: Football After World Cup 2002 (Edinburgh: Mainstream,
2002), Mark Perryman (ed.), Hooligan Wars: Causes and Effects of Football Violence (Edinburgh:
Mainstream, 2001) and Mark Perryman (ed.), The Ingerland Factor: Home Truths From Football
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999). Perryman, co-founder of Philosophy Football, ‘sporting outfitters of
intellectual distinction’, has been an activist and leading participant in the movement to give
England’s national football fans a better image for the last decade.

4. The Independent, 8 June 1998.
5. See Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist For An Accelerated Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, and Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004) on accelerated
culture and accelerated modernity. Also, see Steve Redhead (ed.), The Paul Virilio Reader
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, and New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
6. Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life (London: Gollancz, 1992) is often mistakenly referred to, or classified, as a
novel when it is in fact a memoir.
7. Nick Hornby (ed.), My Favourite Year: A Collection of New Football Writing (London: Witherby,
1993). For an assessment of the new football writing from the perspective of the sociology of soccer
culture see Anthony King, The End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s
(London: Leicester University Press, 1998), Chapter 13.
8. See Steve Redhead, Repetitive Beat Generation (Edinburgh: Rebel Inc, 2000), passim, but especially my
interviews with Irvine Welsh, John King, Kevin Williamson and Gordon Legge, and my editorial
introduction ‘The Repetitive Beat Generation – Live’.
9. Anthony King, The End of the Terraces, Chapter 14.
10. John King, The Football Factory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) was the best selling first novel. The
second and third books in the trilogy were Headhunters (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) and England
Away (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998). John King went on to plan a second loose fiction trilogy, on
music and white male British working class identity, of which two novels have so far been published:
Human Punk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000) and White Trash (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). His,
unconnected, sixth novel, The Prison House (London: Jonathan Cape) was published in 2004.
11. Published by Jonathan Cape in 1998, the historical context for Awaydays is the rise of Tranmere Rovers
casuals in 1979. As an avid Liverpool fan, Kevin Sampson, former manager of Merseyside band The
Farm, also wrote his own retort to Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch memoir in the hilarious non-fiction
account of following Liverpool FC home and away in the 1997-8 season, Extra Time: A Season In The
Life Of A Football Fan (London: Yellow Press, 1998). Sampson went on to write a number of unrelated
cult fiction novels for Jonathan Cape. The Farm’s ‘All Together Now’, remixed from the 1990 hit
version, was re-released to coincide with Euro 2004.
12. Also, the best of the novelistic and journalistic hit and tell books differ qualitatively from the worst. In
this latter category, see the so-called ‘evidence’ of hooliganism in accounts by a number of authors
whose true confessional books really do seem fictional; for instance, amongst many possible examples,
Colin Ward, Well Frogged Out: The Fans’ True Story of France 98 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1998), and
Dougie and Eddy Brimson, England, My England: The Trouble With The National Football Team
(London: Headline, 1996).
13. The Glasgow Herald, 5 October 1996.
14. The novelistic and journalistic aspects of the genre are, inevitably, intertwined. Irvine Welsh, for
instance, penned the introduction to Martin King and Martin Knight, The Naughty Nineties:
Football’s Coming Home? (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999) and John King wrote the introduction to
Martin King and Martin Knight, Hoolifan: Thirty years Of Hurt (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999).
Both the above books explicitly take on, via the subtitles and the sub-text, the Broudie/Baddiel/
Skinner version of the new football fandom of the 1990s. Bizarrely, in one of the hit and tell books
about each club’s supposed soccer culture ‘faces’, Irvine Welsh is interviewed as the Hibernian
‘hoolie’ (hooligan) representative. Irvine Welsh is most certainly a lifelong Hibs fan and his books,
films and musical ventures are packed with ‘Hibs Boy’ references and barely disguised real hooligan
events. He knows a lot of people who could be described as ‘faces’ but even he would not make such
a claim. Amongst other projects, Irvine Welsh has been working on a film about Cardiff City’s Soul
Crew football firm.
15. The publishers of these books, because of their supposed ‘hooligan’ content, tend to be small scale
operations; see, for instance, London’s John Blake Publishing, responsible for several examples of the
hit and tell genre in books such as Cass Pennant’s West Ham United Inter-City Firm hooligan firm
memoir, Congratulations: You Have Just Met the ICF published in 2002.

402 SOCCER AND SOCIETY

16. Amongst other investigative journalism, Peter Walsh, who is in his early 40s, wrote the ground-
breaking Gang War: The Inside Story of the Manchester Gangs, self-published by Milo Books out of
Lytham St Anne’s in 2003. He has been a professional journalist for the Manchester Evening News,
The Sun and The Daily Mail amongst others. As well as being the publisher of many of the hit and tell
books, he co-wrote one of the best known of them in 1997 with Mickey Francis, Guvnors: The
Shocking True Story of a Soccer Hooligan Gang Leader (Bury: Milo Books) on one of the 1980s
Manchester City football firms, the Guvnors.

17. Anthony King, 1998, The End of the Terraces, Chapter 1.
18. Ibid. Anthony King, in a later, paperback edition of The End of the Terraces published in 2002,

withdraws some of the personalized criticism of fellow sociologists of soccer culture he made in the
original manuscript, but his attribution of ‘uncritical journalism’ remains a valid debating point for
those involved in the field. For my own assessment of some of the ‘football wars’ and ‘academic men
behaving badly’ debates, see Steve Redhead ‘Post-Fandom and the Millennial Boos’ (Unit for Law and
Popular Culture Occasional Papers, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 2000). I am
grateful to Anthony King for subsequent correspondence and conversations which helped to move
forward the debates in the important joint enterprise of being ‘for the sociology of football’.
19. Ibid, pp.4-15. 17.
20. Ibid., pp.1-15
21. All three dimensions (journalistic, novelistic and academic) of hit and tell are connected at some
point. The most cited, and approved, academic book on soccer culture in journalistic as well as novel-
istic hit and tell writing is Gary Armstrong, Football Hooligans: Knowing The Score (Oxford: Berg,
1998) which is an award winning anthropology of Sheffield United ‘Blades’ hooliganism over a
20 year period, often told in the style of South Yorkshire street slang. Another participant observation
study, John Sugden’s excellent ethnography of the hooligan blaggers of soccer culture in Britain in
the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, Scum Airways: Inside Football’s Underground Economy
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2002), admits a ‘complete violation of …usual academic standards and
style’. John Sugden also cites Martin King, Martin Knight and Peter Walsh as influences on the book
and its writing.
22. The changing designer labels and fashions of soccer casuals since the late 1970s are best seen visually.
For a recent photographic account, with some explanatory text, of casuals in soccer fan history over the
last 20 years, see Lorne Brown and Nick Harvey, A Casual Look: A Photodiary of Football Fans 1980s
to 2001 (Brighton: Football Culture UK, 2001).
23. Phil Thornton, Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion, The Story of a Terrace Cult (Lytham: Milo
Books, 2003), p.10.
24. See Steve Redhead and Eugene McLaughlin, ‘Soccer’s Style Wars’, New Society, 16 August, 1985.
25. Thornton, Casuals, p.9.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Nicholas Allt, The Boys from the Mersey: The Story of the Annie Road End Crew, Football’s First
Clobbered-Up Mob (Lytham: Milo Books, 2004), p. 9.
29. Steve Cowens, Blades Business Crew: The Shocking Diary of a Soccer Hooligan Top Boy (Bury: Milo
Books, 2001), p.xx.
30. Ibid.
31. See Steve Redhead (ed.), with Derek Wynne and Justin O’Connor, The Clubcultures Reader: Readings
in Popular Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), especially my editorial introduction, and Steve
Redhead, Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues: The Transformation of Soccer Culture (London:
Routledge, 1997).
32. For two good examples of rigorous sociologies of soccer culture based around British soccer clubs,
see John Williams, Stephen Hopkins and Cathy Long (eds) Passing Rhythms: Liverpool FC and the
Transformation of Football (Oxford: Berg, 2001) and Garry Robson, “No One Likes Us, We Don’t
Care”: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom (Oxford: Berg, 2000). See my review in Sociology
35 (2001) 1004-5.
33. See, for a well thought out schema for future research in the sociology of soccer culture, Richard
Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong, ‘Introduction: Reclaiming The Game – An Introduction to the
Anthropology of Football’ in Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong (eds), Entering The Field: New
Perspectives On World Football (Oxford: Berg, 1997).
34. See Anthony King, 1998, The End of the Terraces, and the paperback edition 2002

HIT AND TELL 403

35. For instance, see Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Cambridge: Polity,
1999).

36. See Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist For An Accelerated Culture and The Paul Virilio Reader. See
also We Have Never Been Postmodern, 2005, forthcoming.

BOOKS UNDER REVIEW

Nicholas Allt, The Boys from the Mersey: The Story of the Annie Road End Crew,
Football’s First Clobbered-Up Mob (Lytham: Milo Books, 2004). Pp 296.
15.99 (hardback). ISBN 1-903854-24-5

Phil Thornton, Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion, The Story of a Terrace Cult
(Lytham: Milo Books, 2003) Pp 287. 7.99 (paperback). ISBN 1-9038-54148

Andy Nicholls, Scally: Confessions of a Category C Hooligan (Bury: Milo Books,
2002) Pp 288. 14.99 (hardback). ISBN 1-903854-11-3

David Jones and Tony Rivers, Soul Crew: The Inside Story of Britain’s Most Noto-
rious Hooligan Gang (Bury: Milo Books, 2002) Pp viii+216. 7.99 (paperback).
ISBN 1-903854-08-3.

Steve Cowens, Blades Business Crew: The Shocking Diary of a Soccer Hooligan
Top Boy (Bury: Milo Books, 2001) Pp xxxiii+250. 7.99 (paperback). ISBN
0-9530847-8-7