Football is a competitive and highly commercialised sport played out in various forms at both amateur and professional levels. Prefixes include: Association, American and Australian. As the most established variety, Association Football (soccer) has long since been identified with a hyper-masculine, working-class Englishness (Critcher 1979). Viewed either in terms of its occupational or its social characteristics, football is a strictly gendered affair. Its relational dynamics, its working practices, its commercial ventures are replete with images of maleness.
Like other modern-day sports (e.g.
rugby), football was codified within the all-male English public schools of the mid-nineteenth century; a time (in Britain at least) when sporting practice was regarded as a training ground for the development of moral character, physical health and military and colonial pre-eminence (Mangan 1981). The key protagonist here was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, whose beliefs in the combined benefits of religious purity and physical exertion (subsequently termed ‘muscular Christianity’) transformed pre-industrial (folk) football into a more regulated and ordered activity whilst also serving to re-validate masculine norms amidst the perceived feminisation of a rapidly changing society (Crossett 1990). In turn, football established its own formal playing code and governing organisation. The Football Association (FA) was formed in the 1860s, at the same time as the Rugby Football Union, each body framing the rules, regulations and procedures that were to shape their respective sports.
English professional football is a social setting that openly despises deviation from heterosexual orientation on the part of its participants, embracing and manifesting an aggressive, almost virulent conception of masculinity alongside a sharp-edged and highly sexist humour. Despite the global influences that have changed the way in which football has been organised and played out in recent years, and the affluent circumstances of its top stars, its embedded sense of working-class ‘manliness’ remains pervasive (Cashmore and Parker 2003)
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