Film and the ‘people’s game’

Football has always been about the spectacular, about big matches and star players. As a number of the clips in BFI Player’s new Football on Film collection show, it was in one sense a branch of the entertainment industry from its early days. But what struck me most in browsing through the films in the collection was the extent to which they showed football as a product of communities; an activity which energised local populations and fostered senses of attachment and belonging that often lay dormant outside the context of the sport. Community appears to be the thread woven most conspicuously through the images and narratives of football in these films.

There are some fascinating sections among the 24 short clips in the ‘Edwardian Football’ part of the collection. Many of the northern powerhouses of the Edwardian Football League are featured – Newcastle United, Sunderland, Everton and Liverpool, for example – as are future giants of the English game such as Manchester United and Wolverhampton Wanderers. But these films, produced by Mitchell & Kenyon for local audiences, are about the crowd just as much as the players. Often the camera is turned on spectators, who would have watched themselves, and the game, later on cinematograph screens.

Particularly illuminating in this respect is Bradford City v Gainsborough Trinity (1903). This was City’s first match in the League’s Second Division having switched codes from rugby to soccer. The film focuses on the presence of the mayor and mayoress, seated close to the action, and the mainly male, bowler hat-wearing crowd in the main stand; as well as showing dozens of spectators sitting precariously on an advertising hoarding on the far side of the ground. The performance of the crowd is even more evident in Notts County v Middlesbrough (1902). The more exuberant, youthful, male and working-class spectators in the terraces contrast sharply here with the well-to-do, mixed sex and sedate spectators in the stands.

Many of the inter-war clips demonstrate the way in which football was evolving from a game of working people into a genuinely national sport. The FA Cup was crucial to this. Getting Ready for Cup Final (1923) shows views of the new Empire Stadium at Wembley mid-way through its construction and months before the famous White Horse final (also shown in Cup Final 1923). By the time the Topical Budget newsreel sent its cameras to cover the tie four years later, the cup final had acquired many of the characteristics of a national tradition. In Cup Final 1927, the teams are introduced to the king before the match, supporters pour onto the pitch at the final whistle and the winning team parade the trophy surrounded by fans in a chaotic screen. This was also the first live final to be broadcast by BBC radio, which helped to embed the cup final as an essential feature of the national sporting calendar.

The FA Cup projected local pride onto a national stage. But the 1927 final was about national as well as civic identities. Cardiff City beat Arsenal 1-0, becoming the first (and currently still the only) Welsh club to bring what was often referred to as ‘the English Cup’ to Wales. Leek in the Cup (1927) shows the huge crowds gathered on the streets to welcome the players (only three of whom were Welsh) home as heroes of both Cardiff and Wales.

Amateur and recreational football also had the capacity to galvanise community loyalties. Shippam’s Football Team (1930) documents the triumphs of the players of the food manufacturing company from Chichester, West Sussex. Playing on park pitches in front of a handful of spectators, the team nonetheless clearly meant a lot to those involved. The trophy presentations are miniature versions of the ritualised traditions that had by this point become associated with the Wembley final. The footage of the games – including a classic goal-line scramble and a group of boys behind one goal anxious to join the action – is particularly fascinating.

Football’s long-standing connection to a different type of community is explored in two editions of the cine-magazine Mining Review. In 1949, it followed Rotherham scout Joe Maguire spotting future stars at a Frickley Colliery fixture and included footage of the first team – including, remarkably, eight full-time miners – training and suffering a heavy defeat against York City. In 1960 the focus is on the then famous Charlton brothers, Bobby and Jack, and their mining family from Ashington, Northumberland.

Football’s changing culture, marked particularly by increasing crowd violence, is charted in some of the later films. But it is the continuities which are striking. In Shouts for City! (1975), presenter Sue Jay interviews supporters and followers of Stoke City past and present. Modern supporters such as ‘Red and White’ Rosemary, whose home has become a ‘shrine’ to the club, and the fanatic whose personal mood is determined by the Saturday result, are seen in the context of a longer tradition. Drawing on support from the same streets for over a hundred years, Jay describes the club as having “an atmosphere, a life all of its own”.

One of the later films in the collection, Nottingham Forest’s 1979 European Cup Civic Reception, demonstrates that football could still provide a focal point for community identity in a changing social context. Managers Brian Clough and Peter Taylor are absent but the players and the celebrating fans who line the streets are clearly enjoying themselves. Like earlier films of similar events, it shows the powerful emotional connection that people made with ‘their’ club.

This sense of the popular ‘ownership’ of football has been increasingly whittled away in the Premier League era. It remains to be seen whether rising ticket prices, hyper-commercialisation and foreign ownership of clubs will combine to dislocate the game from the communities that originally spawned it. But what is clear is that the football world depicted in these films, though still recognisable, has been radically transformed since the 1990s.