This book has a simple purpose: to explore the various dimensions of social inequality that currently afflict the game of football in Britain. The contributors have written variously against a background of euphoric public discourse about football, with waning concern about football hooliganism, a string of new stadiums, the incessant tinkling of cash registers at the top clubs and relentless media invocations of ‘the beautiful game’. This framing of the contemporary game has not, of course, gone unchallenged, and a paradigm of critical writing about British football and social division has been sustained. This paradigm, organised around the angry rhetorical question ‘Whose game is it, anyway?’, goes back.
