Cultures of Memory in Football Fanzines. a Content Analysis

The increasing insecurity in the English society is countered by a resurgence of nostalgia and remembering the old times. This phenomenon can be found in football, too, but it differs from the need for nostalgia that is visible in society. High Street shops like Past Times are hugely successful in selling commodities that remember the English Commonwealth with goods from the countries that once belonged to it. Also, this becomes visible by the many replica items of daily life that are designed in a retro style but contain modern technology such as radios, watches, alarm clocks and furniture. Football fans can purchase replica shirts of their favourite club from the seventies and even earlier.In the field of football, the introduction of the Premier League in England has changed the face of football massively. After the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters football fans got active themselves and started to publish football fanzines. In these outlets they mostly opposed the view that every football fan is a hooligan. They also used football fanzines as a platform to remember their heroes and glories of eras long gone. For this reason cultures of memory did become a part of football fanzines and did so very vivid.

Chapter 3.2, Research Design:
To find a sample from the vast field of printed as well as online issues of football fanzines was one of the toughest challenges faced during the conduct of the study. For that reason printed issues of football fanzines were the preferred choice for this study. To underline the problem of finding a suitable sample, an example will highlight the problem: There are 92 clubs in the English Football League, including the Premier League, the Championship and Divisions One and Two. Presumably each of them has at least one fanzine, thus there would be 92 fanzines to examine. This example focuses on the Football League clubs only and excludes those clubs playing below this level such as Gravesend&Northfleet and Welling United. Clubs such as Manchester United might even have more than the one fanzine that other clubs might have and it can be assumed that other clubs, not all, in the Premier League, the Championship and all other divisions of the Football League also have more than one fanzine published alongside the official match day programme, which makes it difficult to grasp the whole field of football fanzines. Match day programmes are published for each home match no matter if it is a cup game or a league match whereas fanzines are issued on a monthly or a bimonthly basis. To round up on that example: there are at least 92 fanzines each month or every second month depending on the publisher(s) of the fanzine. This does not include the online versions of fanzines which might differ from the printed ones and there are fanzines that are published online only. This dissertation examines printed issues of football fanzines only. This example gives an idea of the huge field the fanzines represent. The spread of the internet was not apparent in the early and mid-1990s but has become one of the major platforms for fans to publish their opinions. Although being a huge success the internet could not stop fanzines from being printed. The Nottingham fanzine Lost That Loving Feeling for example went the other way. It started as an internet-based fanzine and in 2005 the fanzine went into print.
Although it was possible to get a hold onto a number of copies of fanzines via eBay, the Black Cat bookshop in Leicester and one bookshop in Manchester of which the name has got lost, it was not possible to get a huge stock of fanzines of about 300 or 500 issues, but only 67. The sampling frame includes these 67 issues of fanzines, including the biggest English national fanzine When Saturday Comes, a whole set of issues of Nottingham Forest s Lost That Loving Feeling from the 2005/06 season, all issues of Leicester City s The Fox from 2006 as well as a season s coverage of Arsenal s One Nil Down- Two One Up from the season 1997/98. The approach was to focus solely on England but also to cover the most of England in geographical and in footballing terms, ergo fanzines from the South-West as well as the North-East were sought for as was for fanzines from the London-based clubs, the Midlands and the Liverpool-Manchester area. This seems to have been accomplished successfully as the sample shows. It became more difficult to report on all leagues, conferences and divisions of English football. Therefore having fanzines from small clubs such as Welling United FC and Gravesend&Northfleet FC at hand - both issues of fanzines are issued at a time when both clubs were playing below league level in their regional divisions - proves to be helpful for a wider and more sophisticated analysis. To have a complete study the sample was divided into two parts. The first part contains fanzines that were published in the 1990s while the second part focuses on those published from 2000 onwards. This allows comparing and contrasting the development of fanzines in terms of cultures of memory. Also conclusions can be drawn about the publishing quality of the fanzines. A point where the fanzines published after 2000 might lacking depth is that t