‘No One Likes Us, We Don’t

Care’

Researching the Subculture of

England’s Most Notorious

Football Fans

Basic question:

•What does the

drone mean?

The problem and its context

• Football hooliganism as a social problem

• Millwall as the most famous hooligans

• ‘Millwall’ as a symbol & myth

• How do fans negotiate/manage their

symbolic status?

Hypothesis

• Specific: Millwall Football Club is an

informal cultural instution centered on

the expression and maintenance of a

specific variety of social identity (in

context of globalisation/late modernity)

• General: Many football clubs in England

perform this function, especially for

their working class followers

A multidisciplinary

approach

• Cultural Studies
• Social Theory (the body)
• Social History (the history of the area)
• Sociolinguistics (how people

communicate)

• Media Studies (the Millwall myth)
• Ethnography, Participant Observation

(+ interviews: finding the right questions to ask – values, social history of the
region, how people communicate, the body…)

Research areas (unfolding)

• Regional culture, social identity and football

fandom in the context of globalization

• Media myths

• Forms of communication

• Embodiment & habitus

• Ritualisation

Research Questions

• Are Millwall fans really ‘the worst’? If so, why? Is such

an assertion measurable?

• How did the Millwall Myth originate? How does it work?

• Who are these people? What does their subculture look

like? Their broader regional culture?

• What are the deeper meanings of participation?

• What does the drone (aka the Lion’s Roar, the monk

chant) mean?

Class

• Beyond ‘economic’ thinking: class as

a mentality with specific forms of

communication

• Sub-political ‘oppositionality’

• Q. Pre-modern mentalities,

behaviour?

SE London in history and

imagination

• The first suburb of London: crime,

disreputability and entreprenurialsm

• Competitive individualism v

corporate/collective class formations
(e.g.the North)

• SEL as the land that time forgot: London’s

west/east, light/dark, order/chaos binaries

SE London & its archetypes

• Fugitives from regulation
• Elizabethan theatre

• Highwaymen
• Dockers
• Boxers
• The O ‘Houlihans or Hooligans
• Teddy Boys
• Skinheads
• Gangsters

Cultural reproduction: how

does this past get into the

present?

A set of ‘dispositions’: ducking and diving (guile, autonomy,

inviolability) as well as toughness

Implicit know-how/‘common sense’

Masculinity and physical capital in the working class

neighbourhood

A sense of the world held in the body (standing, walking…)

Speech codes

(Bernstein: Class, Codes

and Control)

The working class child in the middle class school

Elaborated Code: explicit, abstract, individualised

speaker roles, precise

Restricted code: implicit, concrete, communalised

speaker roles, metaphorical

A grammar of embodied communication?

Implicit and Elaborated?

Ethnography/Participant

Observation

• Interviews

• Attending Games as participant

• Field notes and audio recordings (no cameras)

• Immersion in bodily culture – standing/stance,

walking, participation in the ‘ballet’ as physical
capital

• The problem of ‘going native’

Globalisation and Social

Change

• The significance of place

• Economic restructuring (e.g. the docks)

• White Flight & suburbanisation

• New communities in old places: in-migration
• New communities outside town: out-migration
•
• Significance of the old place: pilgrimage

Findings: The Ritualisation

Process

• Anthropologically widespread techniques and

processes: the people gather around the campfire and
sing

• Songs and chants as restricted code
• Ritual and singing: ‘you can’t argue with a song’
+
• Bodily immersion: gestures, movement =

• A ritual that heightens the lived experience of collective

identity

Findings

The ‘spine of history’’ cultural

continuity

Community and ritualisation

The drone? - a collective and heightened

performance of identity

• Hooliganism ?