There is a reason why football is not merely a popular sport, but something far broader than that definition suggests. The analysis of tactics and their evolution, the revisiting of great matches, the biographies of legendary footballers and managers — these fill the pages of books, the minutes of radio and television programmes, and inspire films and other works of art. Yet all these are elements one may also find in other sports: in basketball, boxing, tennis, motorsport, and many more. What sets football apart from any other athletic activity that has ever existed on Earth is one singular element: its fans.
Football supporters occupy their own distinct space in books, in media broadcasts, even in the arts. They are not merely part of the culture of the sport — they create it. They transform an athletic club from an association of players into a focal point for an entire community. The history of spectators, fans, followers, and die-hards — from football’s prehistory to the present day — is what Paul Brown sets out to chronicle in his book Savage Enthusiasm: A History of Football Fans — and he does so brilliantly.
Brown traces the development of football as a sport alongside the changing ways in which the game has been followed and each club supported. He locates the origins of the first fans in the parishioners of church congregations, who formed the very basis of the village football teams. He explains how the earliest supporters emerged during the Victorian era — essentially from within the very clubs themselves — and went on to spread their unique love and passion for their football side throughout neighbourhoods and towns. He details how the grounds began to fill, how individuals chose their spot, and which activities sprang up in tandem with the match itself. He explores the evolution of fan paraphernalia, from handkerchiefs to scarves, from the first official shirts to the vuvuzelas. Particularly interesting is his overview of the fashion trends on the terraces, where club colours began to blend with the distinctive attire of the casuals subculture — a style still visible at English stadiums today, one that even helped shape broader fashion trends of our time.
When it comes to spectating, Brown takes us on a journey through time: from standing pitchside at a fence, to taking one’s place in the stands, then on to reading match reports in the newspaper once literacy had spread amongst the working class, to the first experimental radio commentaries, then television and Ceefax, the internet, and the modern-day habit of following highlights and games on a multitude of devices that are now readily available wherever one may be.
A crucial theme throughout the book — not so much a separate chapter as a thread running through the narrative — is that of the great stadium tragedies: the criminal “errors” that cost the lives of hundreds who had simply set out to watch their team play. Brown addresses the legal frameworks that were gradually introduced to prevent such disasters recurring, as well as the safety conditions demanded by supporters — a central issue for fan movements in every country.
The narrative is centred on England and Scotland, as these are the nations where the existence of football fandom can be traced continuously from the sport’s beginnings to the present day — and where many of the innovations in match-following first appeared. This provides the reader with the opportunity to observe society’s relationship with football through the evolution of society itself: the history of people, of politics, of economic and cultural transformations finds its mirror in the sport, through the mass participation enabled by the presence of fans. Without them, football might well resemble… fencing or golf.
For all these reasons, Brown’s book is a superb work of research and narrative craft, essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how society and football not only interact, but how the latter is fundamentally a product of the former — its form an enduring reflection of it, in much the same way we observe in art. Football, then, is a popular and beautiful art — and it is so because of the fans within it.
