Sociology of Sport Journal, 1997,14,224-240

O 1997 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc.

New Directors, Customers, and Fans:

The Transformation of English Football in the 11990s

Anthony King
University of Liverpool

In the 1990s, English professional football has undergone rapid and marked changes with
the restructuring of the Football League, the signing of new and lucrative television con-
tracts, the construction of all-seater stadiums, and the growing involvement ofprogressive
entrepreneurial capitalists-the new directors-in the game. This article examines one ele-
ment of those transformations; the political use which the new directors have made of the
concept of the customer The article argues that the use of this term has been important to
the transformation of the relation between the fan and the clubs, facilitating and legitimat-
ing the profit-making projects of the new directors. Drawing on the tradition of dialectical
critical theory derived from Mannheim and Adomo, the article submits this notion of the
customer critique to demonstrate its deliberate partiality and its intensely political nature.

Au cours des anne'es 1990, lefootballprofessionnel anglais a subi des changements rapides
et drastiques dans la foulke de la restructuration de la Football League, de la construction
de stades munis uniquement de places assises et de l'implication d'entrepreneurs capitalistes
progressifs-les nouveaux directeurs--duns ce sport. Cet article examine un de'ment de ces
transfoimations, l'usage politique du concept de consommateurpar les nouveaux directeurs.
L'article soutient que l'usage de ce concept a kt6 important dans la transformation de la
relation entre les supporteurs et les clubs, en ce qu'il a facilite' et le'gitime' les projets de
maximissation des profits des nouveaux directeurs. S'inspirant de la tradition de la the'orie
critique, dans 1s foule'e de Monnheim et Adorno, l'article examine cette notion de
consommateur dans le but de de'montrer sa partialite'de'libe're'e et sa nature intrinsbquement
politique.

Since the publication of Ian Taylor's theory on the origins of football hooli-
ganism (1971), serious sociological interest has been overwhelmingly directed at
this violent social phenomenon. Both Duke (1991) and Moorhouse (1991) have
questioned this concentration on hooliganism, and Duke has argued that sociolo-
gists should look for other important areas of investigation. In particular, Duke
cites the issue of modernization as a fundamental concern (1991, p. 637). In the
light of the marked transformation of the consumption of English football in the
1990s, this need to go beyond research into violent fandom has never been more
pressing. Although in no way dismissive of the work carried out into hooliganism,
this article focuses exclusively on a single but important aspect of the transforma-
tion of football in the 1990s; the use which the entrepreneurs who have become
directors of football clubs in the 1980s and 1990s have made of the concept of the

Anthony King is with the Department of Sociology at the University of Liverpool,

Liverpool, L69 7ZA, UK.
Transformation of English Football 225

customer. Specifically, the article is concerned with showing the way in which the
concept of the customer has been used as a rhetorical and ideological device in the
new consumption of football.
In his contemplations on the Hillsborough disaster of April 15, 1989, Ian
Taylor correctly identified an authoritarian discourse (insisting on the containment
of the violent crowd) as paradigmatic of the 1980s (1989, p. 97). However, sub-
stantially as a result of that disaster in which 95 Liverpool fans were crushed to
death inside the very containing pens recommended by authoritarian discourses in
the 1980s, the fallacy of simple authoritarian solutions to crowd disorder at foot-
ball became evident. Consequently, after Hillsborough in the 1990s, free market
principles became the framing orthodoxy for the reform of football, and this ar-
ticle intends to examine one feature of that free market orthodoxy-the concept of
the customer-and thereby throw some light on the transformation of English foot-
ball in the 1990s and its connection to wider social changes.

Theory and Method

The attempt to uncover the unacknowledged assumptions of the free market
discourse suggests an affinity to Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and to the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School, although the latter theorists were heavily
critical of Mannheim's (unsustainable) notion that intellectuals were somehow
separated from social and political processes and could thereby achieve an "ob-
jective" synthesis of the various competing ideologies and utopias proposed by
dominant and subordinate groups (Mannheim, 1976, p. 136-143). Nevertheless,
there are important commonalities between the theorists of the Frankfurt School
and Mannheim.
Both attempted to locate knowledge or discourses socially and historically
in order to demonstrate the necessarily political and partial nature of those claims
and, thereby, to undercut them. Effectively both the Frankfurt School and Mannheim
were dialectical critical theorists, although the former were more radical because
they demanded the necessity of dialectically positioning their own ideas (even
though they knew that complete self-consciousnesswas finally impossible).Thus,
Mannheim (1976) argued that "what seems to be so unbearable in life itself, to live
with unconsciousness uncovered, is the historical prerequisite to the scientific criti-
cism of self-awareness" (1976, p. 42). The aim of the sociology of knowledge was
to bring the unconscious, unacknowledged assumptions of thought to light and
thereby to gain some control over our own lives for "when any human activity
continues over a long period without being subjected to intellectual control, it gets
out of hand" (1976, p. 1).
In his Negative Dialectics, Adorno argued along similarly critical and dia-
lectical lines, " The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that ob-
jects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to
contradict the traditional norm of adequacy" (1990, p. 5). For Adorno, the crucial
starting point and method of dialectics is given by the inevitable fact of the inad-
equacy of the concept. Every concept hides aspects of the object it represents and
the task of the dialectician is to uncover the social, political, and historical origins
of this deliberate partiality of the concept through a reexamination of the object.
In order to analyze the concept of the customer as a central element of wider
free market discourse expressed by the new directors, I want to draw on this critical
tradition. By situating the notion of the customer historically and socially, and by
comparing it with the actual experience of the football fans to whom it is applied,
I want to demonstrate its inadequacy; an inadequacy that originates in the political
and economic needs and interests of those entrepreneurs who have become in-
volved in football in the 1980s and the 1990s'.
In order to apply this critical theory to the new directors' concept of the
customer, it is necessary to establish both who the new directors are and the par-
ticular details of the idea of the customer. This data that was researched in the
course of a doctoral thesis2 was gathered through two principal methods. First,
traditional documentary sources, newspapers, business reports, journals, and vari-
ous books were consulted to gain an insight into the new directors and their use of
the notion of the customer. Secondly, various chairmen of football clubs in the
Premier League (at the time of the research) were invited to be interviewed with
regard to the transformation of football. Elite groups often make themselves un-
available for interview and I experienced this reticence in my research, especially
among the most important new directors at the biggest clubs, though five chair-
men or directors at various football clubs (albeit smaller ones), as well as two
other official figures at Manchester United3,did make themselves available for
interview. These interviews were analyzed and employed as evidence of the new
director's use of free market discourse. Although more acceptances for interview
would have been advantageous, the interviews that were conducted proved useful.
Furthermore, they were triangulated by the documentary research which, for the
most part, replicated the claims that the new directors made in interviews. This
replication of data is significant as it suggested that I had reached the point that
Glaser and Strauss (1968) recognized in their grounded theory as a satisfactory
place at which to finish research; when new data merely reconfirms the categories
that have been developed in the course of the research (p. 61).

Historical Context: Post-Fordist Britain

Both Mannheim and Adorno prioritized the need for historicizing the con-
cepts and arguments that were to be subjected to critique. Only by comprehending
the wider historical context in which concepts and discourses arise is it possible to
recognize the significance and, therefore, the potential partiality of any concept.
To this end, it will be worth providing a very brief outline of the recent historical
developments in Britain as it is only through some knowledge of these develop-
ments that the new directors and their use of the free market discourse becomes
meaningful.
After the collapse of the postwar settlement in the 1970s (see, for example,
Kavanagh, 1990; Marquand, 1988), there has been a rapid transformation in the
social, political, economic, and cultural constitution of Britain which some com-
mentators, citing global comparisons, have termed post-Fordism (e.g., Hall &
Jacques, 1990). Although different aspects of this historic transformation have
been emphasized by different schools of thought (see Amin 1994, pp. 1-39) and
some theorists have denied the developmentof post-Fordism at all (e.g., Lee, 1993),
this article recognizes two central transformations that have characterized post-
Fordism. On the one hand, mass manufacture of scale has been replaced by econo-
mies of scope that are based on flexibly specialized production techniques (Piore
& Sabel, 1984). On the other, there has been a growth in the service sector and a
Transformation of English Football 227

concomitant decline in manufacturing that has divided society into a periphery (of
marginalized or unemployed workers) and a core (of relatively secure, well-paid
workers). This divided society also has been termed the two-thirds, one-third society
(Therborn, 1990; Burrows, 1991) or the 30,30,40 society (Hutton, 1996).
In Britain, many of these changes have been affected under and in the name
of Thatcherism.As Hall and Jacques have argued (1983), Thatcherism constituted
a hegemonic project that sought to replace the framing Keynesian paradigm of the
postwar consensus with a new set of principles. There is no room to consider
Thatcherism at length here, despite the extensive academic debate about it!. I will
merely follow t amble (1988) in maintaining that Thatcherism comprised two cen-
tral guiding principles-the free market and strong state-by which Thatcher sought
to revitalize Britain's economy and society in the light of the new pressures of the
post-Fordist global economy. The principles of the strong state and the free market
(Gamble, 1988, p. 32) were directed at five specific tasks laid out in the Conserva-
tive manifesto of 1979: the restoration of economic and social life, the recreation
of incentive through the removal of the burden of state intervention and heavy
taxation, the upholding of Parliament and the rule of law, the support of family
life, and the strengthening of Britain's defenses (Gamble, 1988, p. 121). The first
two measures would be achieved by the application of the free market, the last
three would require a strong state. Consequently, from 1979, solutions to eco-
nomic and social problems have been increasingly informed by free market ideas
or the notion of the strong state, and this continued into Major's premiership. The
attempts by the new directors to apply notions of the customer to reformulate the
relation between fans and clubs in the 1990sbecomes especially meaningful in the
context of this wider Thatcherite reformation of ~ r i t i s hsociety into its peculiar
form of post-Fordism.

The New Directors

The term, the new directors, refers to those entrepreneurs who emerged after
the collapse of the postwar consensus and have, since the early 1980s but more
particularly the 1990s, become involved in football5. There are two principal de-
fining features of the new directors, although one of these features will be quali-
fied in the discussion of Sir John Hall at Newcastle United and Steven Gibson at
Middlesbrough below. The first distinctive feature of the new directors is the mar-
ket position in which these entrepreneurs are situated. The new directors operate
in the interstitial markets at the regional level below that of the concentrated mul-
tinational companies. The subsidiary nature of the entrepreneurial capitalist frac-
tion in Britain has given the transformation of English football in the 1990s a
distinctiveness in comparison with other European countries6.English football clubs
have not been incorporated into larger capitalist companies but, rather, the new
directors have merely added the football club to their capital interests or have put
all their capital into a single club. For the new directors, the football club is an
independent, regionally situated investment opportunity.
From this fact follows a second crucial defining characteristic of these new
entrepreneurial football directors. Because the football club is regarded as an in-
vestment opportunity in itself-a business operating in its own right in different
niches to multinationals-it is essential that the football club is profitable. Here,
the new directors in England are distinguishablefrom both their predecessors and
from many football club owners in Europe. For the very reason that football clubs
are integrated within larger capitalist interests in many parts of Western Europe,
immediate losses are acceptable in the footballing subsidiary, if the club provides
the parent company with an international profile and assists in easing relations
between capital and labor.
The demand that football clubs must operate like any other business and
make a profit amounts to a sea-change in the administration and perception of
football in England. For instance, in the past (probably between the 1920s and
1970s), the football club was not seen as a profit-making institution but part of a
city's public amenities and as a source of kudos for the owner. "A football club
was in many ways as much a part of the burgeoning corporation as a public library,
town halls, and law courts and was certainly used by more people" (Inglis, 1991,
p. 12)'. Denis Hill-Wood, who was chairman at Arsenal in the 1970s, created a
League team in his hometown of Glossop in Derbyshire, in which he owned some
mills, and his son, Peter (also a subsequent chairman at Arsenal), explained this
creation of a football club as an example of bourgeois philanthropy. " I suppose
my father felt it was his duty to give the townspeople something. They had schools
and a hospital, so I suppose he said he'd give them a football club " (Hopcraft,
1990, p. 153).Even in the 1980s, Peter Hill-Wood expressed similar notions about
the football club. When David Dein, one of the earliest of the new directorslfig-
ures to become involved in football, acceded to the board of directors at Arsenal in
1983, Hill-Wood commented, "Some rich men like to buy fast cars, yachts, and
racehorses, but Dein is more interested in Arsenal. I'm delighted he is but I think
he's crazy. To all intents and purposes, it's dead money" (The Sunday Times, Au-
gust 8,1991). This quotation highlights the distinction between traditional English
football chairmen and the new directors with some precision. Whereas the tradi-
tional directors regarded the football club as a philanthropic hobby, the new direc-
tors recognized the economic potential of football clubs as a new form of service
in the economy and actively sought to realize this potential.
That the profit motive is the decisive defining and differentiating feature for
almost all the new directors' involvement in football was evinced in the interviews
I carried out with the directors football clubs. Ian Stott, the owner of Oldham
Athletic, had originally become involved in Oldham in the 1970s and had now
moved all his capital interests into the football club that was now his full-time
occupation (personal interview, June 21, 1994); the inference being that his liveli-
hood was at stake if Oldham failed to make a profit. Ken Bates (personal inter-
view, October 10, 1994), the chairman of Chelsea Football Club, was typically
outspoken about the need for football clubs to recognize that they had to make a
profit, and he usefully distinguished himself from more traditional directors.
I can remember arguing with the late chairman of Gillingham, Dr. Grossmark.
Again, 15,20 years ago, and he turned 'round and said, 'Oh, you don't un-
derstand football. It's not like any other business.' I said, 'That's rubbish.' I
said, 'The plumber down the road writes a cheque and there's not enough
money in the bank and it will bounce.' I said, 'At the moment, you don't
think banks won't dare to do anything but one day they will, they will bounce
your cheques.'
The belief that football is a business and must therefore prioritize profit-making
(or at least solvency) is a practically universally held belief by the new directors8,
Transformation of English Football 229

and this belief differentiates these entrepreneurs from their forebears at football
clubs. The rhetoric of profitability has, to some extent, been matched by the
actual financial figures that the clubs in the Premier League have delivered.
For instance, in the 1993-94 season, the clubs in the Premier League as a
whole made a £49,278 million operating profit and a £6,297 pretax profit
(after transfer fees had been extracted). In the 1994-95 season, the Premier League
had operating profits of £40,831 and pretax profits of £12,826 (Deloitte & Touche,
1996, p. 7).
Although the notion of profit is central to most of the new directors, there
have been examples where new directors have not been motivated out of a concern
with short-term profit. Sir John Hall, the chairman of Newcastle United, is a key
example of this kind of financial strategy that does not prioritize immediate profit9
but regards the football club as part of a much larger and more integrated strategy
of capital accumulation.Hall's development company, Cameron Hall, has invested
some £26 million into ground renovations and an estimated £40 to £50 million on
players (J. Williams, 1996,p. 28). There is clearly going to be no immediate finan-
cial return on this huge investment. Rather, Hall has employed Newcastle United
as a symbol of Northeastern identity and cosmopolitanism designed to attract in-
ternational capital into Tyneside.
They say you can't regenerate the UK by shopping centers alone. But you
can break into the manufacturing decline of an area by making it an attrac-
tive area. Industries won't come just because Geordies are nice people. You
have to present them with ambience, life-style. (cited in Gardner & Sheppard,
1989, p. 41)
Newcastle United is being employed by Hall along with the very large shopping
mall, the Metrocentre, which Hall also built, to demonstrate to international capi-
tal that Newcastle is an affluent, thriving city in which capital can be invested with
a good chance of a return. Hall seems to have been successful in this as Samsung,
the large Japanese electronic company, has decided to set up its European opera-
tions on Tyneside, very much due to Hall's intervention (see J. Williams, 1996, p.
26). Hall, then, is more radical in his project than the other entrepreneurs involved
in English football in the 1990s. By employing Newcastle United as a symbolic
representative of the economic and social vibrancy of the area, Hall intends to
regenerate Tyneside through attracting international capital that will expedite his
own regional business project there. The more international capital to come into
the Northeast, the greater the potential for profit-making. Hall's use of Newcastle
United as a symbol of Northeastern cosmopolitanism and affluence accords with
Lash and Uny's (1994) argument that in post-Fordist economies of signs and space,
the central economic value is no longer use or exchange value but what they call
sign value. That is, commodities whose worth is decided by the identities that they
are able to provide. Newcastle United is, in effect, a commodity with sign-value
that Hall sells not only to the fans of the club but through which he intends to sell
Tyneside on the international markets. At the same time, it should be recognized
that Hall has in no way ignored the financial possibilities of the football club, and
it is certain that in the long-term he is concerned with the club's profitability. For
instance, he has increased the club's turnover from £4 million in 1991 to £40 mil-
lion in 1995, £8.5 million of which is derived from the sale of merchandise (J.
Williams, 1996, p. 30).
 Interestingly, in the same region, Steven Gibson has transformed the
Middlesbrough Football Club along very similar lines to Halllo. Gibson has in-
vested substantially in the club which has also been dependent on some more or
less covert underwriting from the chemical giant (and major local employer) ICI,
which is the main sponsor of and majority shareholder in the club and is repre-
sented on the Board (by George Cook). The relationship between Middlesbrough
Football Club and ICI is somewhat Byzantine, but it seems that Gibson is typical
of new directors in that he brokers the relationship between the chemical giant and
the football club, effectively operating at an interstitial level in the market. Gibson
is well-positioned for this mediating role as he used to work for ICI and now has
close business contacts to the corporation through his haulage firm, BulkHaul,
which specializes in the transportation of dangerous chemicals, especially for ICI.
However, although both Gibson's company BulkHaul and ICI are hugely
successful businesses in their own right, Middlesbrough Football Club operates at
a loss due to extravagant dealings in the transfer market that have included the
purchase of 1994 World Cup star Juninho in 1995 and the Italian player Ravanelli
in 1996. The acceptance of that running loss by both Gibson and ICI seems to be
explicable on two counts (beyond Gibson's undoubted fanaticism for
Middlesbrough). First, the heavy investment into football in the mid-1990s can be
seen as a rational strategy of capital speculation. With the influx of hugely in-
creased television revenue for Premier League football through the Sky contracts
in the 1990s and the promise of much greater rewards if a club is successful enough
to compete in Europe, Gibson and ICI in Middlesbrough might have these long-
term rewards in mind and without accepting initial investment losses, the club
(and, therefore, Gibson and ICI) would never have a chance of the kind of rewards
offered by the Premier League and European competition. It is likely that Gibson
and ICI may be speculating to accumulate.
A second strategy can be inferred that parallels Hall's own project at
Newcastle. Gibson and ICI, in particular, have invested in Middlesbrough not as a
profit-making business in itself but, rather, as a crucial symbolic part of a more
integrated strategy. The success of Middlesbrough Football Club creates sign-value
for Middlesbrough as a city, situating that city in the global economy. In particular,
the new Riverside Stadium, which is significantly situated on the once-derelict
docks that were traditionally the heart of this city's economy, communicates the
rejuvenation of the region and the development of new (post-Fordist) service in-
dustries that sell sign-values. The new Riverside Stadium, like the new St. James'
Park, communicates an "ambience" about Middlesbrough. ICI has been more or
less explicit that their investment in the club is predicated on the creation of a sign-
value that will assist in the wider regeneration of the region and therefore success-
ful capital accumulation on a greater scale. The creation of a successful football
club is beneficial for ICI because not only does it communicate their name as the
formal sponsors of the club across the globe, but this club makes the region more
attractive, facilitating the employment of the best staff at ICI and encouraging
international capital to invest in the area and the company. The use of Middlesbrough
Football Club as a sign-value suggests that, although some of the new directors like
Gibson and Hall may not look to the football club for immediateprofit, the club is part
of an integrated strategy of capitalist accumulation. Immediate loss is only accepted
for greater long-term returns. Gibson and Hall have a grander strategy in mind
than other new directors but not different; they, too, are concerned with profit.
Transformation of English Football 231

Furthermore, although these football clubs are themselves loss-making at

the moment, their effectiveness as sign-values for the new directors lies in the fact
that they connote profitability and wealth, despite this fact of loss-making. This is
substantially due to the fact that the new directors insist that football now embod-
ies the free market values of the Thatcherite hegemony, even though particular
clubs might not actually be profitable in the short-term. The expense of new stadi-
ums and new playing squads is important here because these developments dem-
onstrate the clubs' wealth that then comes to connote profitability as a result of
Hall and Gibson's rhetoric. This appearance of profitability is also very signifi-
cantly assisted by the fact that other clubs in the Premier League are profitable,
and the profitability of these clubs effectively rebounds onto Middlesbrough and
Newcastle, endowing them with a sense of financial success. The strategies (and
rhetoric) of Hall and Gibson are intended as self-fulfilling prophecies where the
communication of wealth and profitability (even in the absence of the latter) is
intended to attract investment which will eventually ensure that profitability".
It is at this conjuncture, when an emergent entrepreneurial class fragment
has become involved in football and has sought to transform the football club into
a profit-making business, that the concept of the customer, as a central element in
a wider free market discourse, has become crucial. The concept of the customer
envisages a transformation of the relationship between the fan and club that is
essential if the club is to succeed in turning itself into a primarily profit-making
organization. The profit-making club has to exploit the fans' monetary potential to
a far greater extent than when football clubs were run according to the public
service ethos. Football clubs have had to charge more for admission, and they
have had to look to increasing the amount that fans spend at the club through the
purchase of food and drinks at the game and merchandise at the club shop. In order
to justify that increased demand on the fans' incomes, the club has to insist that its
relationship to the fan has changed. The fan has to pay more because they are no
longer fans as they once were. They are now customers.

The Press and the Idea of the Customer

It was noted previously that Taylor (1989) had argued that the framing para-
digm, which informed discussions about the reformation of football in the 1980s,
was disciplinarian. Yet, there was a subsidiary argument throughout that decade
which insisted that football should be reformed by the application of the free mar-
ket, and this free market discoursebecame dominant in the 1990s after Hillsborough.
A brief examination of some of the press' use of this free market argument in the
1980s and, in particular, their use of the notion of the customer, will provide a
useful introduction to the analysis and critique of the new directors' employment
of the term.
Before I go on to this critical analysis, it is important that we recognize the
reasonableness of these demands for reform to avoid falling into facile, reaction-
ary, and romanticized responses to the reformation of the game that have been
expressed by some fans and, indeed, some "academic" commentators. English
professional football was in crisis in the 1980s. The administration of many clubs
was unsound and the facilities offered to spectators were unsanitary and danger-
ous. Furthermore, football was facing an economic crisis in the mid-1980s due to
a long-term decline in attendance and the increase in wage costs since the abolition
of the maximum wage in 1961. Consequently, there was a need for some form of
reformation. However, having recognized that some reformation was required and
prevented a retreat into romanticism, it is possible and indeed essential to analyze
the particular nature of those reforms critically.
In the 1980s, the press' free market argument for the reform of football oper-
ated around two major points. First, football grounds needed to improve their fa-
cilities. After the Bradford fire'', The Sunday Times was at the forefront of this call
for a transformation of the grounds: "The game needs cleaning up and revitalizing
every bit as much as the rest of Victorian industrial Britain" (May 19, 1985,p. 16).
However, the call for the complete renovation of the grounds became overwhelm-
ing after the Hillsborough disaster. The Times insisted on the creation of all-seater
stadiums: "But its [Hillsborough's] principal result may eventually be the mod-
ernizing of Britain's league football grounds into all-seater stadiums where a trag-
edy such as Saturday's simply could not happen" (April 17, 1989, p. 1). Or again:
"I believe we are in sight of an end to standing accommodation which will give
way to seated stadiums with better facilities such as cover from the rain, decent
lavatories, and improved refreshment areas" (April 17, 1989, p. 16). The Daily
Telegraph echoed this view: "It is no longer safe or socially tolerable for football
supporters to be packed standing in huge crowds. All-seater stadiums must be-
come the rule" (April 17, 1989, p. 20). Even The Guardian, with its politically
liberal and anti-Thatcherite editorial line, effectively adopted a very similar posi-
tion to the avowedly rightist Times:
Terraces on our big grounds pack in more spectators than the seated areas
where no surges can occur. Scrapping the terraces, installing seats would
cost money. So what? The clubs gripped by market forces have never struck
a balance between transfer fees and civilised facilities for the millions whose
five pounds a time make them possible. (April 17, 1989, p. 18)
Football grounds needed complete renovation and, in particular, all-seater stadi-
ums had to become a requirement.
The renovation of the grounds in the press' arguments implied a second very
important transformation in the relationship between fans and clubs. In the im-
proved grounds of the future, fans were to become customers. Concluding their
demand for the complete reconstruction of the terraces, The Guardian argued that,
"the paying customer always comes second to a good inside forward" (April 17,
1989, p. 18), implying that from now on fans should be treated as customers. The
Financial Times maintained a similar line: "All-seater stadiums and fewer all-
professional clubs may be part of the answer, but it is definitely time for the spec-
tator to be treated as a paying customer and not a dangerous nuisance" (April 17,
1989, p. 10). Because football fans became customers when the grounds were
reconstructed into all-seater stadiums, the customer, which was widely envisaged
by the press after Hillsborough, referred to an individual who paid more in return
for better services at the match.
That simple transformation, which was certainly inspired out of a genuine
concern for the welfare of football spectators and which seemed entirely
commonsensical, actually implied a significant and politically controversial de-
velopment. The notion of the customer, who paid more for better service, implied
a shift of football support toward more affluent sections of society. That shift was
explicit in some of the press' arguments in the 1980s. One of the earliest examples
Transformation of English Football 233

of this argument for the social relocation of football was Russell Davies' piece
published in The Sunday Times called "Cockpits of Ignobility." He argued that,
"the game drifts slowly into the possession of what we are now supposed to call
the underclass; and a whole middle-class public grows up without ever dreaming
of visiting a Football League ground" (August 28,1983, p. 12g). In response to the
Bradford disasteri2,The Sunday Times expounded on the need for the social relo-
cation of football furiously: "British football is in crisis; a slum sport played in
slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people, who deter decent folk from
turning up" (May 19, 1985, p. 16a). By slum people, The Sunday Times can only
have referred to those sections of society that have been confined increasingly to
permanent unemployment, crime and poverty, and that have been described as the
"periphery," "the one-third" or the "underclass" in British post-Fordist society
(Therbom, 1990; Burrows, 1991; Mcdowell, 1989; Murray, 1990)13.The Econo-
mist, "a key voice of progressive capital" (Taylor, 1989; p. 95), was similarly
explicit about the need to attract a more affluent audience to football, at the effec-
tive cost of excluding the poor.
Those close to Mrs. Thatcher have always seen measures to change the na-
ture of football as guaranteed vote winners. Their convictions reflect a com-
mon view that the game is irredeemably tied to the old industrial north, yobs
and slum cultures of the striken inner cities-everything, in fact, that mod-
ern Britain aspires to put behind it. (April 22, 1989, p. 28)
By putting these slum cultures behind it, however, Thatcherite free market
arguments did not refer to eliminating the poverty in which these cultures have
developed but only the social exclusion of the poor. With regard to football, the
creation of the customer refers to the exclusion of the urban poor from football and
their replacement by the affluent middle classes. The Economist was explicit about
this exclusion.
What of the fans themselves?American football is a family event, with many
women and elderly people in the crowd. Clubs try to encourage parents to
bring children by selling cheap family tickets and putting on children's en-
tertainment before a match. Stadiums are organised with middle-class fami-
lies in mind. (April 22, 1989, p. 38)
In the press' arguments for the reform of the game in the 1980s, the customer
refers to the exclusionary remarketing of football away from the periphery and
into the core of post-Fordist society. According to free market arguments, the reno-
vation of football grounds is intended to replace the dangerous poor with "decent
folk;" the respectable members of the white-collar workforce and the service class.
The customer is a useful rhetorical device because, within the context of an emer-
gent Thatcheritehegemony, the benign neutrality of the term conceals the intensely
political nature and social divisiveness of the developments that the concept
envisaged.

The New Directors and the Creation of the Customer

The concept of the customer, which the press had increasingly foregrounded
in the 1980s,became important to the new directors in the 1990s as they attempted
to renovate the game and, in particular, as they tried to make the game profitable.
Ken Bates (personal interview, October 10, 1994) revealed the importance of the
notion of the customer to the new directors in the 1990s.
The customer in any business pays for what he gets. I've been converted to
all-seating. I mean, the working class no longer go to Blackpool for their
holidays, they go to Spain or Madeira and Phuket and the Caribbean, they go
on cruises. They no longer have Blackpool rock and cloth caps and handker-
chiefs on their heads and their stockings rolled up while they're packing in
[unclear] Brighton. And the other thing is that when they go to the pictures,
the working class, they don't go in and stand in the rain with water running
down the back of their f---ing neck with their cloth cap and a muffler. They
go into a warm place where they can sit down. Somewhere to hang their
coats up. They can get a cup of coffee or an ice cream or popcorn or what-
ever and they sit down in two or three hours comfort.
In line with the argument forwarded in various parts of the press in the 1980s, for
Bates, the football fan has had to become a customer, the defining feature of which
is that more is paid in return for better services.
In addition to referring to a more affluent market supporter, the concept of
the customer also envisages that many of these new spectators will be womeni4
and, indeed, whole families. For instance, Peter Storrie (personal interview July
25, 1994) argued that, "Football is moving towards the family model. There is a
strong basis to go forward if we push the family idea." While Robert Chase (per-
sonal interview, October 18,1994) confirmed the need to attract women and fami-
lies, "It's life. Women have a greater role in the world than they were in the past.
They are 50% of the market. Isolate yourself or improve your facilities." The im-
provement of facilities in order to create a customer for football is an explicit
attempt to increase the attendance of women and of whole families in order to
increase the clubs' revenues.
However, the new directors' emphasis on the need to attract families reveals
that they effectively endorse the exclusion of the poor envisaged in the press' use
of the concept of the customer. Although the price of tickets to the new football
customer has become expensive for the single fan, to fund the attendance of an entire
family (or even part of a family) to a football match in the 1990s renders the atten-
dance of the unemployed or marginally employed impossible.The attraction of afflu-
ent families through the improvement of facilities and the concomitant increase in
prices necessarily implies the exclusion of poorer sections of society from an impor-
tant public ritual, in which identities, solidarities, and social debates are articulated.
The attempted introduction of new affluent families to football under the
concept of the customer implies not only socially exclusionary strategies, but the
idea of the family as the new customer has also suggested a new method of disci-
plining the crowd. In this, the notion of the customer, although originally embedded
in the free market discourse, also effectively connects with important authoritarian
strands of which Taylor wrote (1989). Robert Chase has made this disciplinary
aspect of the notion of the customer explicit.
In any business, in any walk of life, you have to say sometimes to your
customers, 'I'm sony, you're abusing the service that I'm providing, if you're
not prepared to mend your ways or to conduct yourself in a better or more
reasonable manner, the service will cease.' Take, for example, the bank. If
Transforpation of English Football 235

you open an account and you don't stick to the rules, the manager generally
writes to you nicely. The second time, he rings you up and says, 'I think you
ought to come and see me' and the third time, he closes the account. (per-
sonal interview, August 10, 1994)
The free market model carries with it disciplinary implications but, significantly,
the free market argument obviates political debate about these implications. The
free market argument, which Chase uses here, reduces the relationship of the fans
and the club to a purely economic one given by the market. Political debate about
the nature of this relationship is, therefore, effectively side-stepped because the
rules that govern market relations are all but commonsensical. Drawing on the
market principle that the owner of a private service must be free to refuse to serve
a customer, Chase therefore concludes that football clubs must be equally free to
refuse entry to those who go beyond the rights prescribed by the market or who
simply cannot afford entry. The political dimension of the issue of discipline is
effectively repressed, as the argument is flattened to an economic issue.
Although the seriousness and unacceptability of much of the behavior on the
terraces since the 1960s should not be ignored (Taylor, 1989),the strategy by which
the new directors seek to transform this behavior by reducing political and social
issues to economic ones (which are much more difficult to dispute) is significant.
In particular, Chase's commonsensical appeal to the analogy of a bank assumes
that football clubs are now suddenly private institutions and therefore, the rules
that frame relations in the market for private services are automatically applicable
to football. Yet, the crucial assumption that the football club is a private service (to
which free market discourses and notions of the customer are applicable) has not
been established through public debate but merely taken as an a priori fact by the
new directors. Although it is all too easy to accept that assumption because it is in
line with the free market commonsense that has become dominant in Britain since
1979, this privatization of the football club is a new and radical departure. In the
past, the traditional directors, as we have seen, viewed the football clubs not as
private, profit-making domains, but rather as public institutions whose purpose
was the provision of an inclusive public good to the working population. Ian Tay-
lor (1971) probably overstated the case when he argued that traditionally football
clubs were participatory democracies-fans have never had formal entry to the
board-but these clubs were democratic in their provision of the leisure service
they offered. Entry to the ground was sufficiently cheap to be potentially univer-
sally affordable. The notion of the customer is intrinsically bound up with the
privatization of the football club and the reduction of the social relations between
fans and club to a purely formal economic one. That reduction has not only facili-
tated and legitimated the transformation of the football club into a capitalist enter-
prise, but it has undermined the potential political protests that fans have mounted
against these changes. According to the market model, which the new directors are
attempting to institute, the only valid form of protest in the market is the withdrawal
of custom, but that is exactly what the fans are protesting against.

The Inadequacy of the Concept of the Customer

Sociologicalresearch (Tomlinson & Whannel, 1986; Bromberger, 1993) and
football fan autobiographies (e.g., Hornby, 1994) have emphasized that football
lay8y lnoqe slsalosd ,suq Aue 8ugm jo asodrnd p3;[1!10d Injasn ayl saNas uayl
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d ayl 01 p13ru3 uaaq
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sly JO mno:,3r! s!y UI woddns jo apemads ayl :aleam A1anpeu!8r!ur! pue AI~A!I~V
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Transformationof Enghsh Football 237

prices out of court a priori16. Within the market, all political debate is reduced to a
haggle over prices.
The conscious attempt of new directors to anticipate and prevent the incon-
venience of public, political debate is evinced by the experience of the chairman of
Newcastle United's independent supporters' association, Kevin Miles. He related
how in a public debate with Freddie Fletcher, the chief executive at Newcastle
United, on local radio in 1995, the latter had dismissed Miles' suggestion that fans
should have some representation on the board at the club. Fletcher asked Miles
where he shopped, to which Miles replied that he shopped at Safeways. Fletcher
then asked Miles whether he wished to be on the board of this supermarket be-
cause he was a customer there, or whether such a demand would be considered
legitimate by Safeways. In other words, Fletcher explicitly drew an analogy be-
tween the football club and its fan, and the supermarket and its customer as the
appropriate (economic) model to which the relation between fan and clubs should
accord. Demonstrating the inadequacy of this purely economic model to the expe-
rience of fandom, Miles replied ironically that he did not spend his weekends and
evening visiting "away" stores, nor did he possess a Safeways' away strip (per-
sonal interview, September 10, 1996). The special attachment and dedication
that the fans demonstrate for their club demands the recognition of the social
and political relationship of the fans and club in place of a flat formal eco-
nomic ideal.
The concept of the customer echoes the bourgeoisie's classical division of
politics and economics, whereby they hoped to exempt themselves from the inter-
ferences of state legislation. Through the notion of the customer, the new directors
have attempted to reduce their relationship to the football fans to a purely eco-
nomic transaction. As Bates says, "the customer gets what he pays for." For the
new directors, this is all they are willing to give to the customer; the only rights
that they are willing to concede are economic ones of nonpurchase. The concept of
the customer conveniently rules out a priori any serious political intervention the
fans might have in the running of the football club.

Conclusion
Critical theory seeks to uncover the political nature of discourse by high-
lighting the social location and historical context that gave rise to that discourse.
This article has applied that critical method to cne aspect of the free market dis-
course to show how the concept of the customer has informed the new directors'
transformation of their football clubs to private, profit-making businesses.
However, although this article has critically demonstrated the deliberate in-
adequacy of the concept of the customer, the article does not suggest that this
concept is totally false in the sense that there is a "true" reality that this concept
covers up. Rather, the concept is only inadequate and partial, taking into account
only one aspect of the fans' relations to the football club, while ignoring other
elements that would impinge on the new directors' project. On their part, the fans
inevitably employ similar strategies of partial and inadequate concepts that high-
light and advance their social position, while playing down other aspects that
undermine their position. Fan discourse is equally open to critical theory. Critical
theorists should remain detached from any particular political standpoint, includ-
ing (as Adomo insisted) their own.
 Nevertheless, despite the need for moderation in the critique of the concept
of the customer in order to avoid falling into facile dualisms of the inevitable
opposition of interest between fans and new directors, it is equally important to
recognize the intensely political nature of the concept of the customer. It has been
noted that the concept of the customer attempts to reduce the political and social
relationship between fan and club to a purely economic one. The significance of
this reduction of the political to the economic has significance beyond football for
it has been typical strategy in Thatcherite Britain to de-legitimate political opposi-
tion by narrowing broad social issues down to very limited economic problems (to
be answered by equally limited economic concepts). In his recent manifesto, Hutton
(1996) has demanded the need for the extension and transformation of citizenship
to overcome the social divisions that have emerged in post-Fordist Britain. As a
central ritual of social debate and solidarity, the football ground would seem to
offer an obvious arena in which new notions of citizenship-that is, active partici-
pation in decision-making-might be expressed. The critique of the concept of the
customer is, then, intended in a very small way to contribute to those arguments
for a better form of citizenship through the demonstration of the sterility of
economistic thinking and the constrictedness of its vision.

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments to Cynthia Hasbrook and the two anonymous referees for their
useful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes
'The echoes with Williams' discussions of customers and consumers are ulain here,
although Williams argues against the concept of the consumer rather than the customer
(1961, pp. 296-298).
 King

ZIwrote to the chairmen of the clubs in the Premier League in 1994, requesting an
interview. Ten replied, four refused (Walker, Blackburn; Moores, Liverpool; Edwards,
Manchester United; and Hammam, Wimbledon), and six accepted (Bates, Chelsea; Chase,
Norwich; Stott, Oldham; Dooley, Sheffield United; Storrie, West Ham; and Askham,
Southampton).
3This doctoral dissertation, The Premier League and the New Consumptionof Foot-
ball, was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council postgraduate studentship
and was awarded at the Institute of Social Research, Department of Sociology, University
of Salford, UK. The research from that thesis will form the basis of a book, The End of the
Terraces,to be published by Leicester University Press (1 997).
4Jessop has argued that Thatcherism amounted to pragmatic statecraft with no dis-
cernible ideological project (1988, p. 74). There is no room to refute this claim here.
'The central figures among the new directors are: Sir John Hall (Newcastle), David
Dein (Arsenal), Martin Edwards (Manchester United), Alan Sugar (Tottenham), Steven
Gibson (Middlesbrough), Bob Murray (Sunderland), Jack Heyward (Wolves), although al-
most every club in the top two divisions has converted its style of operations in light of the
increasing control of these entrepreneurs over the game.
hMany large European clubs are integrated into multinationals: Juventus with Fiat,
PSV Eindhoven with Phillips. While Olympique Marseilles and AC Milan have been inte-
grated with the television companies of their respective owners, Bernard Tapie and Silvio
Berlusconi (Duke, 1991, p. 634), and "it is widely accepted that all Italian and Spanish
clubs run on huge deficits" (Inglis, 1992, p. 5 1).
'Fishwick's historical account of football makes a similar point, arguing that football
in the middle years of this century amounted to the "Labour party at prayer" (1989, p. 150;
see also King, 1995, p. 208).
'By this criterion, Jack Walker, the chairman of Blackburn Rovers, cannot be de-
scribed as a new director because he has invested enormous amounts of money in the club
with no hope of a return and he does not seem to have any grand integrated project of
accumulation which Hall and Gibson have in mind.
gAlthoughDeloitte and Touche recorded that Newcastle made an operating (pretransfer
fee) profit of £5,251 million in the 1994-95 season, that profit became an £8,159 million
deficit after transfer fees were included (Deloitte & Touche).
"This account of Steven Gibson's strategy at Middlebrough is taken from a personal
interview with Louise Taylor, Northeastern football correspondent for The Sunday Times
(October 16, 1996).
"I have made a similar argument in a recent article (King, 1996).
I2Bradford's main stand burnt down on May 11, 1985, killing 55 people.
I3Theconduct of some masculine fans in the past should not, as Taylor has suggested
(1989, p. 104), be romanticized in order to argue against the transformation of football.
14Feministswould object strongly to the passive notion of women suggested by these
arguments.
ISSloane has recognized the peculiarity of sport as an economic form (1980), al-
though his arguments are very different from my own.
I6It should be emphasized that the new directors have only attempted to undermine
the arguments of the fans through the use of the concept of the customer. That use has not
always been successful. This article does not examine the resistance of the fans to the no-
tion of the customer (see King, 1995, pp. 245-307).