Author's abstract

Using autoethnography, this chapter charts my career as a fan of Liverpool Football Club and, as a colleague and friend, my relationship with the football photographer Stuart Roy Clarke. I try to analyse here how and why these two significant experiences interconnect. I firstly describe my life as a fan-scholar during a period when English football was undergoing transformative change in the early 1990s with the arrival of the Premier League, a new global construct with strong local roots, but funded by, and produced for, television. I have spent much of my academic career writing about this transformative change and its social and cultural impact. Meanwhile, Stuart Roy Clarke was recording, through photography, aspects of the same process, but by bringing an artist’s eye and vernacular to expressing what is worth conserving about ‘old’ football in Britain and the homes that staged it, but also what is appreciative and valuable about its forced modernisation. I argue for the importance of photography in this context. We have worked fruitfully together since, and in a recent book we try to combine some sociological analysis with his extraordinary photographs to provide an accessible popular history of the game in Britain.