The Game of Our Lives: How Football Made Britain Great

When the dust settled on post-Thatcherite Britain its core working-class industrial and political institutions had been eviscerated. Social housing was sold off, and the local boozer was closing as the wine bar arrived. Blackpool was down-at-heel and Butlin's were closing their camps, good now for sit-com nostalgia rather than family holidays. Yet among the rubble of industrial Britain, football was still standing. And nearly three decades later football has made the transition from a dying sport to a booming sector of the entertainment industry.

Once merely popular, even widespread, now football is ubiquitous and its status in both popular and elite cultures greatly elevated. Football fills more pews than the Church of England and sells more tickets than the theatre; a publicly advertised interest in football has become the norm among Britain's politicians; and the nation's commentators have taken on football as a metaphor for the country's achievements and ills. How did it happen and what does it mean? David Goldblatt - author of the highly acclaimed history of world football, The Ball is Round - tracks the changes in the game which uncannily mirror the momentous economic, political and social changes of society generally in the post-Thatcher era.

In all of these domains, the last twenty-five years of English football have seen advances and reverses. The economic penury and dismal infrastructure of the past have gone, but the creeping anodyne uniformity of consumer capitalism has replaced it. Crowds are bigger, the football is better, but the atmosphere, more often than not, falls short of expectations. The culture of football has been opened up to women and minorities, but its ruling masculinities remain stuck in a narrow groove. Football fans are more organized and networked than ever, but the governance of the game feels less democratic.

We have been mourning the passing of industrial Britain for over two decades. The further we are removed from that era, and what we remember as its values, the more football has kept those notions imaginatively alive. Yet at the same time its ruling institutions have created an economic model and a system of governance that nurture their opposites. In The Game of Our Lives, David Goldblatt argues that football is among our last and most precious collective projects in an atomized society. Football is a social-democratic game in a neo-liberal world.