Nick Crossley, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: the Punk and Post-punk Worlds of Manchester, London and Sheffield, 1975-1980

Generations, events, and social movement legacies: Unpacking social change in English football (1980–2023)

“…Importantly, the fanzine movement was parallelled by the rise of the Football Supporters Association (FSA): a national supporters group led by two politically left-wing activists in Liverpool, who opposed the Thatcher government's supporter identification card proposal. 1 Then, in the 1990s, Independent Supporters Associations (ISAs), comprising of predominantly left and centre-left activists hailing from industrial trade unions, local government, academia and other public and private sector industries (Turner, 2022(Turner, , 2023, entered the UK supporter activist scene, and thus constituted a critical mass of highly resourced actors who were able to communicate effectively across the various regions of English football, notably from cities such as Liverpool, London, Sheffield, Birmingham, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, and Southampton, characteristic of the type of collective effervescence produced by larger populations where resources, communication, and capital are more effectively connected (Crossley, 2015). Together, they were networked together through a shared ideological commitment to a post Thatcherite social democracy and what constituted the appropriate consumption of football (Turner, 2022(Turner, , 2023Nash, 2000;King, 2003), and sought to reinvent fan politics (Numerato, 2018); it was here a new generation of politically engaged supporters expressed their political contestations over the colonisation of the lifeworld of traditional supporter rituals.…”