An Ethnography of English Football Fans: Cans, Cops and Carnivals

In the latest book in the ‘New Ethnographies’ series from Manchester University Press Geoff Pearson has provided us with a much needed fresh perspective on football fan research. It should become a leading text in the field. There are three excellent participation observation studies presented here, all conducted by the author, from a period of fifteen years of fieldwork. They focus on fans of Blackpool FC, Manchester United FC and England; in Pearson’s words ‘the loud and noisy subculture of wider football fandom’. I have argued for many years that sociology of sport should produce better and more rigorous ethnographies of football fans to counter the litany of misinformation and fantasy which abounds on this topic, often stemming from tabloid journalism, the hooligan memoir books and internet sites and the ‘media hooligan wars’ that have been created. Geoff Pearson has certainly answered the call. The book is outstanding. Max Gluckman, and his colleagues, who founded the Department of Anthropology at the University of Manchester in the 1940s and created ‘the Manchester School’, would be proud of Pearson as one the new practitioners of that ethnographic work in a book series explicitly building on their fine legacy.