The Hollow Victory of Anti-Racism in English Football

Abstract

The starting-point for our review of the current state of anti-racism in English football is a retrospective look at developments over the last two decades, which is the approximate time period over which we have researched and written about the issues revisited in the discussion below. As football fans with a professional sociological and criminological interest in racism and anti-racism, we have investigated developments in the game in their British and wider European contexts as well as a range of parallel issues within the criminal justice system and in society more generally. In the early 1990s we became interested in anti-racism within football as it emerged alongside broader trends that repositioned football fandom in a post-hooligan context. Anti-racist activity within the game developed in tandem with a new fanzine culture, supporter democracy initiatives (most notably the Football Supporters’ Associa- tion, or FSA) and wider sensibilities that were at once antagonistic to the old stereotypes of fandom and to the commercialisation of foot- ball that was in its early stages in that era. During that period, we were involved in a multidisciplinary network engaged in a comparative study of racism and xenophobia in European football. Each nation in the study had its own historical, social, cultural and political context that shaped the nature and extent of racism within the game (Merkel and Tokarski, 1996).