The Safe Standing movement: Vectors in the post-Hillsborough timescape of English football

Abstract

This article draws upon archival and fieldwork research to analyse the longer-term impact which all-seated stadia have had on football supporters’ consumption of the game in England. Consequently, 26 supporter activists identified as important in building a rich social history of activism were interviewed as a type of activist life story. By analysing empirical snapshots of a 30-year social movement against all-seated stadia, the article cross-pollinates ideas from sociology and social movement studies on eventful protests and temporality, to show how events and ruptures shape the dynamics of a social movement, and secondly, to show how discursive vectors indicate the developing understanding, by networked actors, of the stakes of a movement’s core conflict. In English football, historically significant events like the Hillsborough disaster continue to shape many of the key mobilisations of supporter networks, and their collective, but also complex and contradictory consumption of the game. This movement, Safe Standing, is sociologically important, because it evidences the complex interplay of cultural and technological vectors and their manifestation across the compelling timeframes and orientations which make up the consumption of English football in a post-Hillsborough timescape. By engaging in a 30-year struggle over Hillsborough as a restlessness event, Safe Standing sought to gain control over the interpretation of this timescape and is characterised by the complex struggle supporters face over the ritualistic expression of identity and solidarity.

Theorizing surveillance and social spacingthroughfootball: The fan‐opticon and beyond

“…Notwithstanding, where we extend these analyses and offer an original contribution, is by considering the overarching temporality in which the states disciplinary power, is reinforced in football, through specific discourses, institutions, and apparatuses which give the all‐seating legislation its legitimacy. Drawing on prior empirically‐informed analysis of the power and counter‐power of the 25‐year social movement against all‐seating, ‘Safe Standing’ (Turner, 2021), we extend previous Foucauldian interpretations of football stadia, by considering the long‐term legacy of all‐seating on supporters' consumption of the game. This, we argue, enables us to offer an original conceptualisation of football stadia surveillance and regulation, by paying attention to the relational and temporal dynamics, which help us understand social movement outcomes and successes.…”

“…Hitherto, the relationship between architectural theories of surveillance and social movements have been underexplained (Jeffries, 2011). By addressing this gap directly in this article, we contend that the social world of association football and its supporter cultures provide fertile sites for mobilizations relating to surveillance inside, and outside, the sport (Turner, 2021). While football seems apolitical and banal, it is widely regarded as the national sport in Britain with a truly global reach (Millward, 2011).…”

“…However, over the past 25 years, a hermeneutic struggle has unfolded within English football between those spectators who wish to stand at matches (and persistently do so), and the ‘risks’ associated with this form of ‘misbehaviour’ in all‐seated stadia. Amid this tension, fans have had to negotiate, and been disciplined by, an altogether more neoliberal and authoritarian regime (Turner, 2021). Thus, the contemporary social world of football in late modernity operates as a securitized domain wherein fans are commonly the subjects of security and surveillance‐related policies (Spaaij, 2013).…”

From fanzines to foodbanks: Football fan activism in the age of anti-politics

“…In providing this analysis this article contributes a conception of change in English football fan activism. As Turner (2021) notes such temporal sensitivity has been underplayed by the existing literature on fan activism. As a corrective, we engage in a relational analysis of micro-level networks of football fan activists over fifteen years to examine the evolving nature of fan activism within the wider social, economic and political context (Turner, 2020).…”

“… 2. Emerging in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster in the early 1990s, the ‘Safe Standing’ movement has campaigned for a change in the existing all-seater legislation that prohibits the introduction of purpose-built ‘safe standing’ areas in the EPL and Championship (see Turner, 2020, 2021). …”