Search: ' FSA'

Adam Brown looks at how the political interaction of fan culture has developed since the disenfranchisement of the mid-1980s

The year 1985 was a nadir for English football in a decade of great change for football supporters in Britain. And May was the pit of the trough. Supporters were caged in decrepit stadiums and 56 of them died in a fire at Bradford City’s ground on May 11. Violence was rife at home and abroad, policing was brutal and on the same day a 14-year-old was killed during fighting between Leeds and Birmingham fans and police at St Andrew’s. Just over two weeks later, these two factors came together killing 39 and injuring 600 at Heysel.

Read more…

Dear WSC
Regarding Simon Cotterill’s article in WSC 269. Indeed it is rare that many J‑League clubs sell out tickets for many games but this doesn’t tell the whole story about Japanese football. First of all, the World Cup crowds were different to those at ordinary J-League games. I’m not sure if it’s the same case in England but the media strongly encouraged people to cheer on the national team, which is followed on a four-year cycle only at major tournaments or in qualifying.  Secondly, J-League attendances did decrease quickly after the initial boom but a football culture is developing and the supporters who go regularly understand the game a lot more. This can be seen at Urawa Reds and Albirex Niigata who both use stadiums built for the 2002 World Cup and sell out all their home games.  It’s not just Japan and Korea where there are problems with attendances – English football has them too, as can be seen at the half-empty Ewood Park or Riverside Stadium.
Kazutaka Watanabe, Atsugi, Japan

Read more…

Liverpool’s American white knights have become the focus of protests after less than a year, so fans including John Williams are dreaming of the day that 100,000 of them will buy out Hicks and Gillett

Sat, irritably, on the Kop at the recent home match against Sunderland, I hunched, as always, next to the man now charged with raising some £500 million for a Liverpool fans’ buyout from the current, unloved, American co-owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Rogan Taylor enjoys ambitious projects. Back in 1985, after Heysel, he formed the national Football Supporters Association to give fans a public voice that the press and the authorities might listen to, before later setting up a football MBA at the University of Liverpool. Today, he thinks this club are in even greater danger than back then, when the fans were labelled beasts and the English game seemed spent. “The biggest crisis in over 40 years,” he says. Since Bill Shankly first arrived, in fact, with Liverpool languishing in the old Second Division.

Read more…

The response of the authorities, at the time and later, to the crush involving Manchester United supporters at Lens would have been all too familiar to those who watch English club sides abroad, says Adam Brown

The problems experienced by some Manchester United supporters at their Champions League fixture in Lens may have attracted an unusual number of tabloid headlines, but they should not have come as a surprise to anybody.

Read more…

There was little to be positive about in 1985, the game’s year zero, till the founders of the FSA reinvented fan politics.  Adam Brown charts the body's highs and lows

It is now 20 years since the Football Supporters Association was formed by a handful of souls in a Merseyside pub and began to transform the landscape of fan politics in England. Before 1985 there was only the National Federation of Football Supporters’ Clubs, a federative body of officially sanctioned club organisations, their activities based on raising money for the club and organising travel. The “Nat Fed” was certainly not politically radical.

Read more…