Abstract
In September 1992 British TV’s Channel 4 premiered its first live Football Italia – a weekly magazine and live match show that would broadcast Italy’s Serie A matches. Just one month before, in the UK, The Premiership, was born. At that point, we were in between Liverpool FC and Manchester United FC’s dynasties in the UK, but in Italy AC Milan, headed by President Silvio Berlusconi, were reigning supreme. AC Milan were really good and Italian football was capturing our imagination.
As a 12-year-old boy at the time, I wondered if I should even adopt an Italian team. In the end, I decided not to but a friend at my school in Wigan, John, certainly did. His team were Parma. A year before his team had been Liverpool. These days I see him and greet him with a nod and a smile at Wigan Athletic matches. Life, in many ways, has changed. Around the time of Channel 4’s Football Italia launch, Rogan Taylor had observed ‘[e]ven our biggest football clubs are financial equivalents of corner shops when compared to the giants in Italy and Spain’ (1992: 193). This year Deloitte’s global football finance reports show that teams from the English leagues account for 17 out of the top 30 revenue-generating clubs in world football. In comparison, Italy trails a distant second with five clubs. Football in Italy – and Italy’s place in football’s global order – has, in many ways, changed.
In his book, also called Football Italia, Mark Doidge produces a tour de force that explains the rise and fall of Italian football, sometimes set against other leagues such as those in England. C. Wright Mills (1959) saw the ‘sociological imagination’ as the awareness between the relationships of personal experience and the wider society, or biography and history. In Football Italia Doidge gives the sociological flesh to understand John’s (and my own) experiences in tandem with the changes in football finance across the 25-year period.
Organised into nine main chapters, the book successfully charts the histories (in the recent and longer-term senses) and present of football in Italy, addressing themes such as the design, development and condition of stadiums, the policing of supporters and the ‘meanings’ of fandom. On this latter point, I particularly enjoyed Doidge’s chapter on ‘Ultras’ – a category of fans that are often mistaken in the media to be right-wing ‘hooligans’ (accepting the problematic nature of this label) – which explores their solidarities, codes of behaviour and connections to the football clubs they support. This is not to say that no Ultras are right wing and/or ‘hooligans’ and Doidge captures the complexities of the terrain across the chapter. The chapter on Ultras is followed by one which is headed ‘Other Forms of Fandom’ and, if I were to be critical of this book, the collection of material on official supporters’ clubs and supporters’ trusts (although valuable in the analysis fandom unto themselves) still only covers highly ‘committed’ types of fans. On this point, I would have been fascinated to learn more about fans of Italian football clubs who consume matches predominately through other modes (TV, radio, newspapers, internet/social media etc.). Indeed, as Doidge notes, there is a sizable segment of fans of large clubs in Italy who do not attend matches that they deem to be of lower significance. It struck me that a deep understanding of these fans would be a really important avenue in the sociology of cultural consumption.
Overall, Football Italia makes a strong contribution to literature on the sociology of sport, unpacking professional football in Italy in a way that is hugely commendable. However, Doidge’s sociological contribution extends beyond sport: his critical analysis of collusions between the police and government (see his discussion of the Pisanu Laws on pages 110–121, for instance) alongside the policing of football fans offers much to critical criminologists, his discussions around neo-patrimonial networks in the political economy of football make contributions to qualitative social-network analysis and across the book he makes multiple contributions to understandings of post-racial racism. Above all else, though, Doidge’s monograph is a book about the practices, quirks and cultures of both ‘high power’ and ‘everyday’ life – including football – in Italy, and it is under this banner his research is most clearly understood and will be appreciated.