This profusion only came to a stop when he arrived at the subject of his beloved club, Chelsea. “This is a good place for you to visit,” he said, motioning toward the bar, “because of its symbolism.” The bar takes its name from the old, notorious Shed that once housed the Chelsea toughs. In fact, the bar stands on that very spot. Only now the Shed can be entered from the lobby of a plush hotel—part of a massive upmarket development on the stadium grounds. Around the corner from the pub, it is possible to order lobster at the King’s Brasserie. Inside the Shed, professionals in suits laugh over pints. A plasma TV flashes an advertisement for massages and other treatments at the Chelsea Club and Spa on the other side of the stadium.
More than any club in the world, Chelsea has been transformed by globalization and gentrification. It went from the club most closely identified with hooliganism in the eighties to the club most identified with cosmopolitanism in the nineties. The real estate development of Stamford Bridge was only a piece of this.
Gentrification could be seen on the pitch, too. Chelsea hired a string of Italian and Dutch eminences to coach the team and leave their flashy foreign imprints. Under their stewardship, Chelsea earned the distinction of becoming the first club in England to field a squad that contained not a single Englishman. Their new panache exacerbated the trend toward the cosmopolitan, attract-ing a boatload of foreign investment. The Middle Eastern airline Air Emirates began advertising on its jersey.
In 2003, the second richest man in Russia, a Jewish oil magnate called Roman Abramovich, bought a majority stake in the club and began to spend his fortune constructing a championship-caliber team.
To many, Alan included, these improvements felt like a nasty swipe at the club’s working-class base, as if the team had dropped its most loyal fans for the ephemeral aªliations of the trend-conscious e¤ete. Of HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
the many changes, there was a single moment that hurt most. In 1983, Chelsea’s chairman Ken Bates proposed encasing fans in a 12-volt electrical fence that would shock them if they ever attempted to escape their pen.
“They would have treated us as badly as animals,” Alan says. Only intervention by the local government prevented this plan from going into action. But the public-relations damage had been done.
Until the 1990s, much of England’s social elite treated the game with snobbish disdain. Before Rupert Murdoch tried to acquire Manchester United, his paper the Sunday Times famously branded soccer “a slum sport played by slum people.” Britain’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the leading proponent of middle-class values soi-disant, exhibited this haughtiness as much as anyone. The Iron Lady’s good friend Kenneth Clark said that she “regarded football supporters as the enemy within.” For much of her tenure, she spoke aloud of her desire to declare war on hooliganism. And in 1989, her government had the ideal pretext for taking action. At the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheªeld, ninety-five fans watching Liverpool play Nottingham Forest were asphyxiated against the fences in the over-crowded terraces that held them. In response to this carnage, a government commission demanded that stadiums turn their standing-only terraces into proper seats, like the ones you might find at a theater. Policing at stadiums would finally become a serious business, with video cameras documenting every fight and song.
The new requirements transformed the game’s economics. To finance the reconstruction of their stadiums, the old owners, mostly small self-made businessmen, imported loads of new capital. Much of it came from slick city investors, who understood that soccer held a giant captive market and massive untapped profit centers. The new stands included plush executive suites that they leased to corporations. They floated shares of their clubs on the stock exchange, raised ticket prices, and sold the league’s television rights to Rupert Murdoch’s satellite service. Their plan worked to perfection.
A new, wealthier fan began attending games in the safer, more comfortable stadiums. For the first time, women were plentiful in the stands.
But these changes came at a cost. The new clientele eroded the old, boisterous working-class ambience. As Alan explained this transformation, he invoked a time when “ten thousand would come to the stadium. Six thousand of them would be up for a fight. The rest came to watch a fight. Yeah, they’d say they were disgusted. But you’d ask them in the pub afterwards, ‘Did you watch the fight or the football?’ ” He leans back and imitates a prig’s voice, “ ‘Oh, the fight, of course.’ ” He laughs at his own observation. “Now, people just want to go to the game so that they can say”— he reverts to the prig persona —“ ‘Look, I’m cool. I go to Chelsea.’
When I get up to sing, they say, ‘Sit down.’ ”
Unwittingly, Alan boiled down the essential cultural argument against globalization made by No Logo author Naomi Klein, the McDonald’s-smashing French farmer José Bove, and countless others: multinational capitalism strips local institutions of their localness, it homogenizes, destroys traditions, and deprives indigenous proletariats and peasants of the things they love most.
It’s easy to understand how this argument would apply HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
to English soccer in general and Chelsea in particular.
When I attended a game at the Stamford Bridge, I went with an American investment banker and his Latin American girlfriend. We sat in part of the stadium that Alan Garrison had once ruled with his band of rowdies.
But in comparison to the taunting songsters of Glasgow, Chelsea looked like the audience at a symphony, with only a few beefy guys muttering incendiary obscenities under their breaths. They studiously kept their vulgarities to themselves, so that police scanning the crowd with handheld cameras would see nothing and have no basis for depriving them of their tickets.
(Alan has lost his three times.)
But it’s possible to overstate the
