Football, the People's Shame
How to Revolutionise a National Sport
by Micky P Kerr
Asks what has happened to English football and how we can launch a revolution amongst English fandom in order not just to take back control of the game but to invent new ways our society and economy can work in the interest of the people again. Despite thirty plus years of rampant commercialisation and marketisation, football and football clubs remain central to many communities: sources of solidarity, civic engagement and national and international pride. This book explores the history of the people's game, looks at how it has become less and less the province of the people and more and more the plaything of oligarchs, billionaires and commercial interests, and explains why and how we need to take it back.
We use the importance of football not only to local communities but also to local and national economies as a starting point to argue for a new economic model for the sport, which is based on the concept of the public-commons partnership. These partnerships, along with the reorganisation of production around them, offer a theoretically grounded and fully developed alternative to current models. They propose a completely different set of relationships between citizens, the state, and each other, one that is more in line with the principles that underpin the traditions from which football and its deeply felt and lived allegiances are derived. As neoliberalism continues to exploit English fandom's love for the game, loading up clubs with debt, hiking ticket and shirt prices, blasting them with advertisements, and exposing them to unscrupulous gambling companies, Football, the People's Shame seeks to be a clarion call to the fans to break out of their passivity and fatalism and begin to demand something new, offering a workable set of progressive alternatives while also daring to dream big about a complete transformation of the current depressing reality.
Football is more than just a sport. It's a way of life, a vital social, political and economic dynamo, and a fan's deep and abiding passion for the game can and should become the engine through which society is reorganised.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Micky P Kerr is a stand-up comedian, musician and primary school teacher. He made the final of Britain’s Got Talent in 2018 and completed a full UK tour in 2019. He’s worked in the education sector for over 15 years and has a lifelong obsession with football. He lives in Leeds with his partner and their two children.
DELIVERED BY ROYAL MAIL TRACKED 48
Publisher: Repeater Books
Published: 3 December. 2024
Price: £9.99
Paperback: 400 pages
ISBN-10: 1915672554
ISBN-13: 978-1915672551
Dimensions: 130 x 196 (mm)
