casuals - 1996 - The Football Factory

The Football Factories
John King
1996
Vintage
262 pgs

I've watched a number of documentaries about English football casuals where a talking head representing the subculture expresses his resentment about punk getting all the attention back in the 70s and 80s when the casuals were just so much more interesting. Its such a dumb and funny thing to express since the punk subculture gave rise to new fashions, music, attitudes, literatures, ethos, semiotics, philosophies, dance. The Casuals pretty much bashed eachother at and around football matches. When punks were exploring the limits of every cultural form within the framework of their DIY ethos and post-situationist anti-establishment attitudes, the Casuals were becoming even more conformist by dressing in designer sportswear. Sociologically the Casuals are interesting, but they're interesting for the absence of creativity in their culture.

The Football Factories is a dramatic film about casual firms, starring Danny Dyer who went on to host a documentary TV series about the subject, The Real Football Factories. It was first a 1996 novel by John King that's written in the first person consciousness stream from the perspective of a Casual Chelsea supporter named Tommy. The novel reminds me of two other works of transgressive fiction, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. A Clockwork Orange because King writes in the heavy cockney slang of Tommy - not the lyrical rhyming slang we sometimes hear about in Canada either - reminiscent of the slang Burgess invented for his novel. I'm well aware that there really are people out there calling the police 'old bill' and whatever, but its foreign enough to me to make me think of the nadsat language.  American Psycho because the sex, intoxication, and violence of Tommy's life becomes a dull pattern that moves around Chelsea's home/away schedule, otherwise the narrator expresses his views about life and such and every single idea he has is a cliche trapped in a painfully constricted worldview.

ultras - 2010 - Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong

2010

A & C Black

256 pages

In Italy, Football fanatics are called Ultras and engage in many of the same soccer related activities as the Casuals in England. They fight with each other and they sing songs to their team while insulting the fans of their opponents.... and so forth. There are some differences too, though, unlike the English Casuals the UltraS wear their team colours and that’s about it for differences as far as I can tell from reading Football, Fascism, and Fandom. If there are other differences, they’re obscured by this book’s degree of focus on strictly neo-fascist UltraS firms, and their focus on uncharacteristically large firms.

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong make all the connections needed to satisfy the reader that the Irriducibili, supporter of SS Lazio, and the Boys, supporter firm of FC Roma, are great admirers of Mussolini, opponents of immigration, lovers of violence, etc. Just like everywhere, in England the English Defense League recruits from hooligans and in Germany, Football hooligans are thought to make up a significant component of the Islamophobic Pageda movement. It is interesting to read about the unique ways that these attitudes are given form among fans in Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, as the teams whose supporters are the object of study for this book both play in a stadium created by the Fascist regime in a city where some monuments to that period still stand.

While Testa’s and Armstrong’s book gets into all of the specific ways Fascism is given a new voice in Italian sports-fandom, particularly in these support clubs, there’s something disappointing about the tight focus this book places on Irriducibili and Boys when the book’s subtitle ‘The UltraS of Italian Football’ led me to believe that I would be reading an overview of the Italian UltraS scene with a focus on political attitudes. The two firms the book discusses, in that they support major clubs in Rome, are undoubtedly at the heart of Italian football, and they may be taken by the reader, at first, as representative of the larger UltraS scene. When reading through the book though, its suspect how typical they are. Irriducibili have built a brand of merchandise using the logos of their firm. How many other firms have a reputation that’s commercially viable? Additionally, they’re both neo-fascist groups, but its not surprising that there are connections between sports fandom and rightwing politics. Major league sports with city teams has, on a surface level, a lot to offer to adherents of the political right. There are moments in reading Testa and Armstrong’s account of these firms where they allude to other Italian teams having left-wing supporters, and I’d like to know more about them and how they come to be.

So essentially my issues with the book dont emerge from any problem with the book content but rather from a gap I perceive between the book and its content.

There was one statement in the book that I found especially troubling, when the authors noted that the method spectator’s used to express racism, that is, grunting like an animal when a black player took possession of the ball - the same method of expressing racism Bill Buford described witnessing on the English terraces in the 1980s in his 1991 hooligan ethnography, Among the Thugs - was practiced by the spectators at large, and not simply by the UltraS, and are therefore ‘beyond ideological explanation’. It is not at all clear to me how such a statement is true.

football hooligans - film - 2008 - Cass

Cass
Jon S. Baird
Cass Films
2008
108 minutes

Cass is a biographical film based on the life of Cass Pennant, one of the best known participants in the English “football Hooligan” or ‘casual’ subculture of the 1970s and 80s (which isn’t to say that the subculture is currently dormant) wherein hardcore fans of specific soccer teams would fight each other in the streets when their chosen teams would play. The film is directed by Jon S. Baird who, according to iMDB, has also worked on one of the few other casual films, Green Street Hooligans, and directed a short about the subject earlier in his film career titled It’s a Casual Life.  Most directors of drama have little to do with the subject matter of their films however the recurrence of this subculture as content in Baird’s career suggests he might have direct knowledge of his material. There aren’t many films about the casuals and Baird is involved with two.

The film is largely a positive look at the phenomenon of unorganized Football violence, which puts it in league with Green Street Hooligans and The Football Factory, neither of which really represent the subculture negatively. Cass Pennant was a Jamaican orphan, abandoned by his mother and then adopted by aged pensioners in an all-white neighborhood. He bonded with his elderly adoptive father over football matches and entered the hooligan scene when he fought alongside West Ham United supporters against the Wolverhampton Wolves (also called the Subway Army or the Subway Wolves, they were supporters of the Wolverhampton Wanderers FC).  Following this melee, Pennant joined the Inter City Firm (the Casual club that fought for West Ham), and eventually became a leader to the group. 

From the film, Cass and his crew advancing on their enemies!

The film follows the predictable life of a prominent Football Hooligan, featuring scenes of violence (of course) and prison terms (of course). Baird’s film, however, also creates the sense of an emotional and intellectual life for an individual who, as a celebrity of a subculture known primarily for its brutality, was undoubtedly portrayed as a lizard-brained thug for much of his life. Cass is often shown in the film to be critiquing the misunderstandings of mainstream media (and other observers) of the Casuals, and takes to the writing of his autobiography and his personal views on the subculture as a challenge to outsider perspectives. The real Cass Pennant published his bio in 2002 but has gone on to write a number of books on Football Hooligans, to greatly expand a body of literature that was once made up of only Bill Buford’s gonzo-esque Among The Thugs (which portrays the Hooligans as the mindless attack-drones of Working-class spectatorship).  Cass also shows its subject’s sadness over the death of his father as well as his struggles in maintaining his life as ICF leader while starting a family.  

One interesting aspect of the film is the aspect of the business cards the ICF members carried that said “Congratulations - you have just met a member of the Inter City Firm”.  Outlaw Biker clubs also developed this practice.