FOOTBALL MEDIA IN THE UK: A CULTURAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVE
Dr. Richard Giulianotti
INTRODUCTION
THE MODERN PERIOD
THE POSMODERN PERIOD
THE FOOTBALL FANZINE
THE FANZINE SPECIFIC QUALITIES
THE NEW FOOTBALL CULTURE
The Interdisicplinary Area of Sports Studies of the University of Buenos Aires, recently created in Argentina, has inaugurated its 1997 schedule with a Lecture delivered by Dr. Richard Giulianotti from the University of Aberdeen (United Kingdom). The name of the Lecture was "Social and Culturales Studies on Sports in Europe". This Lecture has been held on April 11th. at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the University of Buenos Aires.

Dr. Giulianotti has a PHD in Sociology and he is a Doctor in Sociology of Sport. He has published Football, Violence and Social Identity; Game without frontiers: football, identity and modernity, and Entering the field: new perspectives on world football. He has also published a great amount of articles edited in specialized magazines. His important work on football and identity and his research on hooligans and sport violence, represent a significative contribution to the sport field.

The Interdisciplinary Area of Sports Studies gets together researchers from different disciplines (sociology, antropology, history, education, culturales studies, physical education) and institutions. Its founder group has organized, in august 1996, the Ist National Symposium on Sport and Social Sciencies. Some of the Area's aims are to put together the existent bibliography and documentation, the organization of courses, seminaries and lectures, the supporting on foreign scholar's visits and the performing of current and forthcoming researchs on sports.

The actives members of the Interdisciplinary Area are: Angela Aisenstein, Pablo Alabarces, Roberto Di Giano, Julio Frydenberg, Tulio Guterman, Adolfina Jansson and María Graciela Rodríguez.

The Giulianotti's Lecture was delivered in english and simultaneously translated to spanish. As the translation has been literally transcript and the english text was given to us by the author, the two texts are not necesarily coincident in the exact words but they do indeed in the contents. For that reason, the english version doesn't include the questions made at the end of the Lecture. The pictures were delivered by Dr. Giulianotti and belong to the slides which illustrated his Lecture.

FOOTBALL MEDIA IN THE UK: A CULTURAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVE
Dr. Richard Giulianotti
Buenos Aires University, april 1997

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to this presentation. I am absolutely delighted to be here. Indeed, before I go any further, I would like to thank Pablo Alabarces for his very generous assistance, in helping me to give this paper, and to meet with his colleagues and other researchers of football culture. I would also like to thank Tulio Guterman for his kind help in translating this paper into two further languages and making it available on the internet.

As you may know, my visit to Buenos Aires is part of a longer excursion to South America. Thus far, I have been in Brazil and Paraguay, and on the 18th of April, I will travel to Uruguay. A large part of my travel budget has been paid for by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, which is a very generous institution, especially if you can show that your ethnicity is Scottish.

Today, however, I wish to speak about one particular aspect of my research, into football culture in the United Kingdom. That area relates to the role of the football media.

In looking at this aspect of football culture, I will divide this presentation into two main parts:

  1. Firstly, I will try to set out the social and academic context, through which a sociological study of football media emerges. I will try to explain what social factors are important in the emergence of 'new football media'. And, I will also try to map the field within the sociology of sport, to show what kinds of argument emerge on football media, and what relative degrees of influence these arguments tend to have.
  2. Secondly, I will try to describe and to analyse some of the major developments within the football media, in the past 5-10 years, in the UK. I will draw especially upon a case study of new football media - that is, the football fanzines that are produced by supporters of my home town team, Aberdeen FC. After this discussion, I think we might need a little break. So, perhaps we can stop for 10 or 15 minutes to allow people to enjoy their drugs of caffeine, nicotine or anything illegal but more pleasant to them.
That's what I intend to have as the format of this paper.

But, there is the question of presentation. To assist my discussion, I will also use some captions.

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Lecturas: Educación Física y Deportes.
Año 2, Nº 6. Buenos Aires. Agosto 1997