engleski

'Against modern football' movement: notes from the field

In the 1880s some English teams started hiring players known as 'professors of football'. That was the first time professionalism entered football ; it is also the starting point of the process of commercialisation of football. After the 1990s football became a part of global business and the majority of fans were equalled to passive consumers. 'Against modern football' is common denominator for broad and heterogeneous social movement across Europe, embedded in local communities and connected internationally by the Internet. Modern football supporters, as social actors, protest against contemporary corporate football in various ways: from complex actions (like founding new football clubs) to simple expressions of attitudes on the terraces. Although British sociologists tried to explain football hooliganism as a certain protest of working class youth against commercialisation of football as early as the 1970s, only in the past decade this movement became self-reflexive, articulated and widely present. This paper is based on sociological, ethnographic research on football supporters in Croatia ; within large international project MYPLACE (memory, youth, political legacy and civic engagement) we carried out research on Torcida (fans of Hajduk football club) during last two seasons. Football supporters organised themselves in Croatia long ago. Torcida was founded in 1950, but in the 1980s, due to subculturisation process, one section of football fans became autonomous social actor with high mobilisation potential. Croatian society passed through painful process of war and transition from socialism to capitalism ; majority of citizens became losers of this transition process, while the winners formed ‘new rich’ class. Football supporters strengthened their role as social actors particularly regarding their own formal structure which was not imaginable in a one-party system, as well as regarding social actions like protests, boycotts, demonstrations, petitions and other forms of resistance to the local and national political-economic elites of the new consumer society. During season 2013/2014 all the main groups of football supporters in Croatia (firms) agreed to abandon mutual conflicts and decided to join their forces in the fight against the Croatian Football Federation and the key people behind it. The fight against modern football in Croatia is the fight against global organizations in the service of corporations (FIFA, UEFA), but also against social injustice, social inequality, crime and corruption in Croatian society.

social movement; modern football; football supporters; social action; Croatia

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