British Soccer Fans, Kicked Again

In case you're wondering, that law against beer was introduced in the 1980s to deal with the hooliganism problem. Until recently, the misery of the soccer experience was compounded by a high probability of being close to some kind of violence. In the 1970s many fans abandoned the game entirely because of hooliganism, and attendance fell to an all-time low in 1986.

Gentrification reversed this trend. For most of the last century, English soccer fans came mostly from the working class; one reason they were so badly treated was that they had no money to spend on revenue-generating frills. Until the 1960s, the working class put up with this peacefully, but as traditional soccer authority broke down, the game attracted the kind of young thugs more likely to be found in inner-city gangs in the United States. Eventually, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the British government stepped in and imposed draconian policing and new laws to stop the violence; since the 1990s English hooligans have had to go abroad to find the kind of opportunities to fight that they had once enjoyed at home.

Once English soccer was safe again, it became fashionable. Hornby himself played a role by raising the misery of the soccer fan to the status of art. Recognizing a lucrative audience, broadcasters started to pay huge sums to show live games, giving clubs the resources to attract star players from abroad and to fund a massive investment in new stadiums. At this point, business saw an opportunity to make serious money in soccer. Clubs raised equity, issued IPOs, and moved from the back pages to the financial pages.

The new guys in suits set about finding a way to maximize soccer's value. Higher prices brought in a new kind of clientele, more hedonistic and less fatalistic. But the old guard still has the biggest voice in the game, and it is not happy. Roy Keane, the iconic captain of Manchester United, derisively referred to the newcomers as the "prawn sandwich brigade" and blamed them for the declining volume of cheers.

The old fans are not happy that their story of true grit is being sanitized. They don't want pizza and hot dogs at the stadium. They don't want fair-weather fans who pay fancy prices for executive boxes. They don't want Americans and American accents and most of all they don't want an American businessman who's only in it for the money.

In England, the vast majority of soccer clubs have never made a profit. Emulating the U.S. model and uniting Europe's top clubs -- Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona, AC Milan, Inter, Juventus, Bayern Munich-- into a single, closed league would be a surefire way to make more money. Not only would it add to the value of broadcast rights, it would create a system for controlling costs and raising revenue. But it wouldn't be the traditional English way.

Some might have said that Roman Abramovitch, the Russian billionaire who bought the Chelsea soccer club and invested $400 million to make the team champions this season, brought globalism to English soccer. But he borders on being acceptable, because, unlike Glazer, he loves the game -- and he's not an American.

Hornby's "Fever Pitch" was recently released as a film, in what you might call the American translation, as the rather more upbeat story of a Red Sox fan. If Malcolm Glazer is trying to rewrite downbeat English football as upbeat American soccer in Manchester, he is going to have to overcome the English taste for misery.

It's one thing for the British to buy Chinese-made shirts or Chilean fruit. There's no cultural subversion there. But sporting passions are another matter. The implicit ethos of globalization that one size fits all just might meet its match as American capital invades the playing fields of England.

Authors' e-mails:

s.szymanski@imperial.ac.uk

azimbali@email.smith.edu

Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist are the authors of "National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer" (2005, Brookings Institution Press). Zimbalist wrote from Northampton, Mass.