the conclusion to all that academic verbosity is both staggering and hilarious

and ultimately, pointless:

"Finally, the adoption of replica shirts by adults provides a lens through which to view the accompanying changes in football culture, from the ‘old’ rough and ready, working class football experience to today’s ‘new’ gentrified, sanitised and hypercommodified media frenzy. The simplistic yet established narratives of a ‘pre- and post-Premier League’, or ‘pre- and post 1990 World Cup’ schism ignore the need, in any gentrification process, for the necessary conditions to exist to underpin its early flowering: an unattractive but cheap, easily accessible and largely unregulated environment ripe for colonisation by a first wave consisting of the young and fashion-conscious but relatively impoverished. Their initial revitalisation, through introducing energy, ideas, and cultural capital, creates these necessary conditions (recognition, fashionability, and improved facilities), attracting a wider, wealthier segment of the potential market. This in turn can marginalise the first-wave gentrifiers.133

As such, the first two phases of shirt adoption map neatly onto the decline in English football’s attendances, stadia, and general well-being. In turn, this provided conditions that enabled an alternative football culture to flourish. Football’s emergence and capture of the youthful cultural zeitgeist attracted the attention of, and appealed to, a wider young adult male audience seeking the next big thing: the third phase of our process which, as our parading and production data indicate, began a couple of seasons before the 1990 World Cup. This likewise boosted mainstream interest across all age groups and social classes, so that football – and the replica football shirt – was ripe for commercial exploitation. Ultimately both the replica football shirt industry, or at least its focus upon adults – and the revival of football’s fortunes, so often painted as the result of Gazza’s tears, the invention of the Premier League, and satellite television’s investment – were initially fan-inspired phenomena that can be traced to the fan activism and tentative embrace of the carnivalesque found on the terraces in the late 1980s. However, this fan activism, initially directed at least in part at highlighting and resisting what was seen as persecution of supporters and neglect of facilities, is now directed against the commercialism and exploitation of ‘authentic’ followers, and their marginalisation in favour of more profitable ‘nouveau’ fans – including those who only watch on TV – and sports tourists.

In the late-modern football world, the sport is everywhere. You no longer follow football: it follows you via a multiplicity of media outlets. Even ‘fans’ who rarely attend a match feel the need to identify with a team. Such ubiquity and cultural hegemony ensures that replica football shirts – and their associated spin-offs – are likely to be a mainstream leisure fashion for a long time to come".

Posted By: Tombs, Feb 21, 09:15:03