Football has historically provided men with a sense of community and was intertwined with everyday life, work, family, and friendship. It was a collective social experience that was passed down through generations. Important matches were widely celebrated and remembered, with individual and collective memories structured around football. However, since the 1980s, football has been transformed into a more individualized and consumer-led experience with all-seater stadiums and irregular scheduling. As a result, maintaining collective memories through artifacts like photographs and memorabilia has become important for establishing continuity with the past.

1. Football & its fans: Memories, Matches &
Meanings
Dr David McGillivray

2. Historical perspective
• Football fandom provided (men) with affiliations to
place, people and industry
• The game of the working man inseparable from the
rhythms of everyday life:
– Work
– Family
– Friendship
– Play
• Football fundamentally a collective social experience
• Continuity a key feature of the passing of time/rite of
passage from one generation to the next

5. Meanings, Matches and Memories
• Football was (and is) the stuff of informal public debate
- it gave meaning and structure to people’s lives
• Historical matches, giant-killing feats and important
victories were celebrated widely at the time and
remembered long afterwards
• Individual and collective memories structured around
football
• Physical attendance at a football match always a
collective experience with powerful roots in the
sensory dimensions of the stadium: the sounds of the
crowd, the smells of the half-time food and drink, even
architectural oddities of the ground

7. The times they are a changin’
• Since the 1980s, football has been transformed
– All seater stadia
– Out-of-town stadium developments
– Irregular scheduling
– Media saturation
– ‘Shareholders’ rather than supporters
– Widening gap between players and fans
• Football increasingly an individualised, consumer-
led experience

9. Football Reminiscence
• Changes reinforce the importance of
maintaining collective memories through
heritage artifacts:
– Photography
– Film & documentary (e.g. the Football Years)
– Memorabilia
(badges, programmes, newspapers, scarves etc)
• Recreating the environment of the past as a
means of establishing continuity in the
present