Football and Its Fans: Supporters and their Relations with the Game, 1885-1985.

Although Taylor's title suggests a somewhat broader study of England's soccer fans, his focus--apart from some rather perfunctory chapters on the early years of the sport--is actually on the National Federation of Football Supporters' Clubs, an organization founded in 1927 on the initiative of Thomas Hodgeson, a supporter of Northampton Town Football Club. The members of the NFFSC were all clubs formed to support amateur and professional soccer clubs. At its zenith, the NFFSC may have had as many as 250 member clubs, some of whom had thousands of individual members. In the postwar years, the number of clubs represented at the annual meeting declined from 139 in 1960 to a mere 40 in 1988. After the failure of numerous bids to revitalize the NFFSC by opening it to individual members, dissident fans eager for a less mediated relationship with the Football Association (and with the government) formed a rival organization, the Football Supporters' Association (1985). (Taylor served for four years as the FSA's chairman.)

Even the days of its maximum influence, just before and just after the war, the NFFSC was relatively ineffective. Its motto, "To help and not to hinder," aptly summarized its attitude vis-a-vis the Football Association, which refused officially to recognize the existence of the NFFSC until the Sixties, when representatives of both organizations were invited to participate in the government's many studies of British soccer and its discontents. Although the stadia were uncomfortable and unsafe, Jack Patience, "the truculent Coventry representative" (59), was unable to interest his NFFSC colleagues in any kind of serious remonstrance to the FA or the football clubs. Unthreatened, the FA's attitude towards the obsequious NFFSC was "cynical (97). Repeated requests for a share of the tickets to the Cup Final were ignored. Four years after parliamentary lobbying by the NFFSC helped pass the Lotteries Act of 1956, the FA changed its rules to permit "official" supporters' clubs, i.e., those set up and strictly controlled by the football clubs, to administer the newly legalized source of income. The NFFSC's independent supporters' clubs were pushed aside.

The directors of most individual football clubs seem to have treated their supporters' clubs with disdain equal to the FA's. It was a rare football club whose directors included a single representative of the supporters who had given them hundreds of thousands of pounds. Worse yet, it was often the case that "supporters found themselves barred from the very facilities they had paid to construct" (115). It has been, in Taylor's view, a sorry story in which powerful and arrogant organizations have manhandled weak and supine ones.

Tayor's doctorate is from the University of Leicester (which published his book). He has worked at the university's Centre for Football Research. Strongly influenced by Eric Dunning and others who have made Leicester the place for the study of "football hooliganism," Taylor pays little attention to scholars not associated with the Centre and virtually ignores the wider field of sports spectatorship. Football and Its Fans is a useful book--but a rather narrow one.

Allen Guttmann Amherst College