The Spatial Development
of the Modern Stadium
JOHN BALE
School of Human Development, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, United
Kingdom
Abstract
The British football stadium is an example of highly territorialized space. In the past one
hundred years the environment of football has changed from one of unenclosed, multifunctional
space with considerable spatial interaction among players and spectators (weak
rules of exclusion) to enclosed, segmented and monofunctional space with impermeable
boundaries and efficient surveillance of crowds (strong rules of exclusion). The analogy is
drawn between the spatial changes in football space and Foucault’s description of the
growth of the prison. There has been considerable resistance to the confining of football
space and in the early 1990s there are some indications that intra-stadium boundaries are
"softening" and that "post-modern" tendencies might be emerging in the landscape of
British football.
Introduction
This paper seeks to explore and interpret the territorialization of the British
football stadium.’ The period of modernization, associated with the growth of
capitalism, has witnessed the spatial rationalization of many aspects of society. In
both rural and urban areas, open space has been replaced by confined spaces,
parcels of land replacing common land and multipurpose land uses being followed
by enclosure and land use zoning. Sports have been no exception to the increasing
spatial rationality and confinement of society; indeed, they can be interpreted as
paradigm examples of demarcated spaces since &dquo;by its very nature a spatial
activity, sport naturally lends itself to geometric quantification&dquo; (McClelland
1990), although it could also be argued that nothing in sport is simply &dquo;natural&dquo;
but is, rather, cultural or social. But spatial parameters are certainly found in the
rules of all sports and, being struggles over space and the defense of territory,
sport has been interpreted as standing out clearly &dquo;from all other recreational
activity, and even from work, by virtue of an essentially geographic attribute, its
time-space specificity&dquo; (Wagner 1981).
The seeds of this paper have grown from ideas on space, environment and
territory authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines. The concept of the
&dquo;civilizing process&dquo;, within which control or restraint have become more subtle
and the use of direct force less obvious than previously (Elias and Dunning 1989)
is clearly relevant to the changing nature of intra-stadium space. So too is
Eichberg’s (1988) notion of &dquo;achievement space&dquo; (&dquo;Leistungsrdume&dquo;), the
increasingly artificial and spatially bounded settings within which serious sports
take place. The basic ideas informing the present paper, however, come from the
work of Robert Sack (1983, 1986) and Michel Foucault (1979, 1980). Although
Int Rev for soc of sport 28/2+3 (1993)
@ R Oldenbourg Verlag GmbH, D-8000 Munchen
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coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, the work of each of these
scholars has considerable relevance to studies of space and territory in sport.
Sack, a cultural geographer, sees territoriality, not as some innate defense of
space but as a process- &dquo;the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence,
or control people, phenomena and relationships, by delimiting and asserting
control over a geographic area&dquo;. In other words, it is a &dquo;primary geographical
expression of social power&dquo; (Sack 1986) creating the idea of a space to be filled
and emptied at particular times. Simply stated, Sack’s &dquo;theory of territoriality&dquo; is
that &dquo;territories are socially constructed forms of spatial relations and their effects
depend on who is controlling whom and for what purpose&dquo; (Sack 1986). If
territoriality is used as a means of social control but results in an increase in social
tension, there are strong arguments for its abondonment and its replacement by
nonterritorial alternatives. In a sense, therefore, territoriality may contain the
seeds of its own destruction (Johnston 1991). Sport is not mentioned in Sack’s
work though he does note, in passing, that the idea of terrotiality can be applied at
a wide variety of scales and that the internal architectural layout of buildings (i.e.
in the present context, stadiums) can be explored in terms of their use of
territoriality to establish control over the building’s occupants (Sack 1983).
Sack’s definition of territoriality comes close to Michel Foucault’s view of the
idea of territory being &dquo;first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a
certain kind of power&dquo; (Foucault 1980). Central to Foucault’s work is the notion
that in order to save political and economic costs a series of basic changes, relating
to the use of space, has taken place in the exercise of power. Foucault’s (1979)
work on the micro-spaces of various &dquo;institutions&dquo; of internment describes the
major focal points (i.e. hospitals, prisons, asylums) of the application of spatial
power but he concludes that the penitentiary technique has been taken into the
broader social body - or &dquo;carceral archipelago&dquo; - in which I will include the
sporting environment of the football stadium. The stadium is therefore but one
part of a &dquo;carceral continuum&dquo; (Driver 1985). Indeed, many leisure environments
might be described as focal points for the application of Foucault’s &dquo;great
confinement&dquo;, consisting of the application of numerous small but significant
forms of &dquo;biopower&dquo; rendering, as they do, a form of docility in the population.
The relative neglect of Foucault’s work in sports studies is somewhat
paradoxical in view of his central concern with the human body, which, in
Harvey’s (1989) words, is &dquo;the ’site’ at which all forms of repression are
ultumately registered&dquo; . Foucault’s ideas have certainly been alluded to in a sports
context but usually en passant (e.g. Brohm 1978, Eichberg 1988, Penz 1990).
More recently, however, Harvey and Sparks (1991) have noted how in modernity
the body is subject to numerous social controls and powers and, invoking
Foucault, they note that the power over the body develops around two
complementary poles. The first of these is discipline which comprises techniques
of power providing various means of training and coercing bodies. Physical
education and sport (including, of course, football) are examples of such
disciplines. But so too is architecture, including, of course, the design and layout
of the football stadium. The second pole for providing power is made up of
regulatory controls, including a large number of repressive measures to regulate
the population. These include containment and surveillance, as found, for
example in prisons, and, as this paper seeks to demonstrate, in analogous
situations in the modern football stadium.
123
Having outlined some of the theoretical bases of territoriality I will now
proceed to trace the evolution of the British foootball stadium as an example of
highly territorialized space where an activity which was initially undertaken in
open spaces with &dquo;permeable&dquo; boundaries and where control was openly and
sometimes brutally enforced has, in little over a century, become contained
within highly segmented and specialized spaces and with increasingly invisible
forms of control. The main sections of the paper are made up of first, an
interpretation of the stages of immurement through which the British football
landscape has passed and secondly, some of the ways in which those who use the
stadium have reacted to, indeed resisted, such changes.
The Enclosure and Territorialization ofFootball Space
Folk Football
A major feature of pre-industrial football was its lack of spatial regualtion and an
absence of geographic confinement. The antecedent of the modern stadium was
therefore the multifunctional landscape of pre-industrial Britain. In folk-games
no standardized rules of play existed and games took place between villages and
towns - not simply in the sense that these places competed against each other but
also literally, between each other - in a spatial sense (Dunning and Sheard 1978).
Pre-modern football took place on existing landscapes - roads, commons, fields
and squares, public spaces holding spectacular but haphazard and imprecise
events analogous to the outdoor &dquo;spectacle&dquo; of punishment prior to its removal
from public space and the development of prisons. There were few places
specially set aside solely for &dquo;sports&dquo; for the masses and in many ways football
played in the medieval street and the eighteenth century common was similar to
carnival where the weak rules of exclusion meant that there was a tendency to
&dquo;not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators&dquo; (Bakhtin 1968).
Hogarth’s &dquo;Night&dquo; showed the street to be an untidy place, work and play (street
football) being inter-mixed.
Football was a rough and tumble affair with laughter and fun being central
features of such games. But like carnival it was often a somewhat subversive event
which was subject to public and often spectacular, but brutal, control. For
example, opposition to street football in Derby in the late 1840s reached its climax
when the Riot Act was read and the cavalry called in (Marples 1954) - a dramatic
case of a non-territorial form of control. Such control was undoubtedly costly, in
both economic and political terms, and contrasts with other examples where a
territorial approach was used, as in the banning of street football in Alnwick
where, in 1827, the inability of nonterritorial measures led to the provision of a
special site for the game at the edge of the town (Marples 1954). At the intraurban
level, therefore, the segregation of football space had commenced in the early
nineteenth century but the spatial segmentation of football space was to start
later, following the standardization of the sports’ rules, the subject to which I now
turn.
Rule-boundedness
As noted above, the growth of commerce in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries led to restrictions on public access to places like the commons and the
124
streets. Rudimentary concepts of town planning emerged where spaces would be
allocated to particular uses. An increasing division of labor in society was
accompanied with an increasing division of space and time. There was a time for
work and a time for play; there were to be specific places where various activities,
formerly undertaken on streets, squares and commons, could be accommodated.
These general societal changes, which were to lead to the development of the
specialized football stadium, were paralleled by developments in sport itself.
Activities became codified and various forms of movement culture like folkfootball
became &dquo;sportified&dquo;. The nineteenth century witnessed the progressive
refinement of the rules, football space becoming delimited by the application of
arithmetic and geometry. A crucial feature of all sports rules is the spatial
delimitation of the field of &dquo;play&dquo; and the unspecified spaces in which folkfootball
was played were replaced by straight lines defining where play could, and
could not, take place. Such development was incremental. For the best part of
twenty years following the formulation of the 1863 rules (Dunning and Sheard
1979), the boundaries between players and spectators remained relatively
permeable. With the absence of touchlines crowds often encroached on to the
pitch to the extent that only about 30 metres of playing space was left. As a result
players mingled with spectators for the ball, often dodging and fightingwith those
who had come to watch (Marples 1954). This inexact division of space was clearly
a residual of the folk-game tradition and was formally brought to an end in 1882
when the touchline was introduced into the rules.
The spatial confinement of football, initially a response to the standardization
of rules and a rational response to the unstandardized nature of early-modern
football, also had the effect of making the game more achievement-oriented. This
was achieved by isolating the experts (i.e. players) from the spectators, a
characteristic of modernity, further reflecting the rationalizing tendencies
present in broader aspects of nineteenth century society.
Commodification and segregation
It has been argued that a major characteristic of the development of capitalism
was the increased commodification of space (Lefebvre 1991) or the idea that
space should be made to pay. Football space was no exception in this respect and
following its enclosure, someone, somewhere felt that it would be worth charging
for admission to watch games. The next stage in the confinement of football was
therefore a response to economic imperatives. The sport became &dquo;paying
consumption rather than participating recreation and could be more easily
confined in particular locations and particular time slots&dquo; (Thrift 1981). Charging
for admission seems to have developed rapidly from the mid 1870s (Mason 1980).
Initially a roped or fenced off field sufficed but soon clubs began to segregate
their spectators, already segregated from the players by the white chalk line, by
providing superior forms of accommodation. Pavilions, often leased from cricket
clubs, could be used by those who wanted additional comfort or space to entertain
business acquaintances (Inglis 1989). As the popularity of the sport increased,
other forms of segregation could be adopted; grandstands with sections to
accommodate directors were built and standing on the terraces was supplemented
by seats. The social geographies of the new stadiums came to mirror those of the
125
cities in which they were found. Into the mid-twentieth century, therefore,
segregation - and hence power and control - was based on economic criteria
rather than on team affiliation and movement between terraces was widely
practiced as supporters changed &dquo;ends&dquo; at half-time. Boundaries between
particular parts of the terraces were still permeable into the late 1950s and the
pitch itself, long separated from spectators by the straight white lines, was far
from impermeable; crowds often spilled on to the pitch after the game to
congratulate players or, on occasions, to remonstrate with the referee, but the
term &dquo;pitch invasion&dquo; would carry all the wrong connotations.
A tangential point might be made at this stage. Although crowds did
occasionally venture on to pitches, the grass on which the sport was played was
essentially a form of monoculture; it was designed for the cultivation of football
and nothing else, in contrast to the land use of folk-football which was intended
primarily for agricultural and other commercial usage. Because the grass surface
was carefully tended and manicured it was of little value for alternative uses and
even football matches could be played on it with relative infrequency. In other
words, football space was colonizing existing land uses, multifunctional
landscapes giving way to monofunctional sportscapes.
Containment and panopticism
Economic (and by implication, class-based) criteria had formed the basis of
power and control (i.e. segregation) from the turn of the century but since the
early 1960s British football has witnessed a series of measures to further segment
intra-stadium space - this time on the basis of team affiliation - or placebased
criteria. But such segmentation was itself a response to two basic and inter-related
factors; first, from the increased need to &dquo;control&dquo; the perceived problem of
crowd misbehaviour and secondly, from the worsening economic situation in
British football. Attendances at British football matches fell steadily from a shortlived
post-war boom as the sport faced competition from competing leisure
activities and changing family life-styles. Declining attendances were also
blamed, in part at least, on the &dquo;hooligan problem&dquo;.
As a result, the parcelling of stadium space assumed a number of new
dimensions, including spatial demarcation by team allegiance, the sub-division of
terrace space on grounds of safety, the hardening of the boundary between
players and spectators by the erection of perimeter fences, the accommodation of
more exclusive accommodation for an economic elite; and the move towards all
seater stadiums.
I noted earlier the tendency during the 1950s for fans to change ends at half
time. In the mid 1960s crowds became more assertive and the popular press
identified gangs who staked out territorial claims behind each goal. Home gangs
increasingly watched matches from fixed locations but the absence of any barriers
to movement meant that some gangs were able to &dquo;take&dquo; the opposing &dquo;end&dquo;.
Such interterritorial rivalries and their associated exchanges did undoubtedly
take place but tended to be over-reported in the mass media with a resulting
&dquo;moral panic&dquo;. By this I mean the construction by the popular media of
&dquo;folkdevils&dquo; which served to initiate, through a self-fulfilling prophecy, the very
things that polite society was seeking to eradicate (Cohen 1972). The result was a
new phase of spatial control.
126
The &dquo;thin, blue line&dquo; of the police increasingly gave way to much stronger
exclusionary measures with the enforced segregation of home and away
supporters by the erection of physical barriers and &dquo;pens&dquo;. In the mid 1980s an
electrified fence was installed at one London ground but following protests was
dismantled before it could be used. The enforcement of power and control by
segregation on the basis of socio-economic status also continued to intensify and,
while the more lumpen of football’s fandom was being herded into insanitary
pens, the more socially and economically acceptable were increasingly distanced
from grassroot support by more expensive forms of segregated accommodation the
special, glass-fronted &dquo;executive boxes&dquo;. Such developments were often
accompanied by the destruction of the more popular parts of the ground.
As football increasingly came to lack commercial viability it therefore
experienced a specific kind of &dquo;crowd practice&dquo; - not the mixing of people as in
the cases of the earlier grounds which reflected too much the lumpen behaviour of
folk-football, but a more territorialized approach more reminiscent of the
bourgeois audience of the theatre. There were two important implications of such
physical changes in the stadium’s environment:
First, the image of the spectator as someone who can only be tempted to watch a game if it
offers standards of physical comfort which he would expect to find elsewhere. Second, it
implies a particular way of watching the game. Seated, dispassionately critical, the new
spectator waits to be entertained. The show is somethmg out there, not somethmg of which
he is part. In the gaps in the entertainment, he expects to be provided with food and dring,
music and spectacular demonstrations (Clarke 1978).
The luxury boxes identified a new kind of spectator; &dquo;no impassioned trouble
maker he - no physical involvement, chanting or swearing in these new stands&dquo;.
With &dquo;whisky in hand&dquo; he is the recipient of &dquo;instant entertainment&dquo; (Critcher
1979). Meanwhile, the community of local fans were relegated to insanitary,
alcohol-free pens.
The compartmentalization of space into socially homogeneous areas serves to
reinforce boundaries between such groups and people come to literally know
their place, with a stake in a particular territory, encouraging docility and a status
quo view of the world (Sibley 1981). But despite these measures considerable
concern about the bahaviour of fans inside stadiums continued into the 1980s.
The response was for all clubs to install closed circuit television in order to identify
trouble makers. This modern form of panopticism encourages comparison with
Foucault’s description of the prison; the spectator, like &dquo;the inmate must never
know whether he is being looked at at any moment; but he must be sure that he
may always be so&dquo; (Foucault 1979). Where people with a media-amplified
reputation for roughness had to be contained, efficient surveillance was a
necessity; surveillance provided knowledge while knowledge provided power and
control.
A further tendency in the territorialization of the British stadium, accelerated
following the Taylor report (Taylor 1991) into the Hillsborough disaster, was the
recommendation that British football should be watched in all-seater stadiums.
Seating was a response, not simply to the view (which is contestable) that it would
provide greater comfort and hence claw back those who had been lost to the game
or attract a new breed of spectators, but also to the view (which is equally
contestable) that seats would restrain the violent tendencies of the 1970s and lead
127
to safer stadiums. By doing so, however, the stadium would approximate to an
&dquo;enclosed, segmented space... in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed
space&dquo; (Foucault 1979). &dquo;Anchorage in a space is an economic-political form&dquo;,
noted Foucault (1980) and a numbered seat ment that &dquo;each individual has his
own place; and each place its own individual&dquo; (Foucault 1980). The all-seater
stadium therefore represents &dquo;a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism&dquo;
(Foucault 1979), achieving power through individualization, rather than the more
random approach used in putting down the folk games. The security system in
such stadiums is likened by some observers as being &dquo;more suitable to a prison&dquo;
(Arens 1980) or a fortress, given its need and ability to repel invading hoards
(Ehrenberg 1980) - reinforcing the Foucaultian analogy used earlier and the
Sackian notion that territoriality can serve as an exclusionary as well as an
inclusionary strategy. With computerized ticketing, the physical evidence of
spatial separation (i.e. barriers and &dquo;pens&dquo;) might be reduced as an electronic
means of surveillance that would extend beyond the video camera to data banks
derived from computerized information. Accompanying this would be a common
characteristic of modernity - people being treated less like people and more like
things (or numbers).
Some British clubs experimented with another form of spatial segregation, i.e.
&dquo;family sections&dquo;, but this move can also be viewed as an analogy of Foucault’s
description of the growth of the prison. As with the hierarchical &dquo;family&dquo; of
supervisors in progressive nineteenth century prisons, the nuclear family, seated
together as &dquo;docile bodies&dquo; replaces the fear of continual visual inspection with
the anti-institutional and natural weapon of the family - perhaps the ultimate in
the art of power relations (Foucault 1979). The modernist stadium, argues
Eduardo Archetti (1992), would be &dquo;full of spectators silently watching the
performance and not taking part in the drama, who consequently cannot change
the result (and is) the ideal image of modern sport... built on the clear separation
between players and spectators, between activity and passivity&dquo;.2 Football will
then have achieved the &dquo;critical distance&dquo; between performers and audience, a
situation already found in the modern theatre.
Reaction
In Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, Edward Relph notes that &dquo;it
is paradoxical that while analytic and rational methods of... planning have been
demonstably beneficial, for they have helped to improve living standards and to
increase material well-being, they have also resulted in the creation of landscapes
which are frequently judged to be inhumane or dehumanizing&dquo;, noting also that
the rational landscape is paradoxical because it is the result of &dquo;too much
rationalism and an excess of humanism&dquo; (Relph 1981). Such landscapes are often
described as &dquo;inauthentic&dquo; or &dquo;placeless&dquo; (Relph 1976) and will be typified by
some future stadiums - anonymous concrete bowls or bland forms of container
architecture. &dquo;Traditional&dquo; football grounds, however, generating as they do,
intense identification among fans, can be regarded as examples of authentic
places given the unselfconscious sense of place, sentiment, genius loci and
attachment generated by them (Bale 1991).
128
But as Hargreaves (1987) has observed, &dquo;the rationalization of spectator sports
has had counter-productive effects in relation to audience satisfaction&dquo;. The
paradox of the modern football landscape can be explored by applying the ideas
of Relph (1981) who argues that &dquo;progress&dquo;, as refelcted in the urban landscape,
is often associated with a &dquo;manifestation of rationalism pushed to its limits and
already turning against itself, becoming restricting rather than enlightening&dquo;.
Relph feels that little exists in the modern landscape of concrete and glass
that has not been conceived in terms of efficiency or improved material conditions. but there
is almost nothing in them that can happen spontaneously, autonomously or accidentally, or
which expresses human emotions and feeling. If this absence diminishes the quality of our
lives it does so sadly, quietly and unobtrusively, rather than with some overt, brutal denial.
Several aspects of the modern stadium, while demonstrating technical
progress, engender dissatisfaction by players and spectators alike and can be
interpreted in the terms applied above by Relph. The most obvious, in the present
context, are those of spatial confinement, surveillance and seating. These newer
developments contribute, therefore, towards the stadium becoming a site for
resistance to forms of rational progress which have led to dissatisfaction, even
active opposition, from those for whom the proposals were intended.
Reactions and resistance to the present state of confinement found in the
British football stadium come from various groups associated with the sport and
many have articulated strongly negative responses. For example, the Taylor
report itself noted that &dquo;the spectacle of these cage-like fences is inconsistent with
a sports ground being for pleasure and recreation... Having to stand in a cage for
your Saturday afternoon recreation inevitably causes resentment&dquo; (Taylor 1991).
The stadium is therefore all too often the antithesis of play and freedom and more
often a symbol of control and restraint. But dissatisfaction and resentment to
changes in the football landscape are not new and go back to the folk-game days
of the eighteenth century and earlier. There has, in other words, been a long
tradition of resistance to the enclosure of football space and I noted some
examples of defiance to the abolition of street football in the early part of this
paper.
The enclosure of common land and the appropriation of streets had great
implications for peoples’ leisure as well as for their work. The fact that folkfootball
was often banned does not mean that there was no resistance, or that it
was inevitably useless. Among many examples, it is recorded, that a football riot
was associated with the successful defiance of an eighteenth century attempt to
enclose Holland Fen, a folk-football site in Lincolnshire (Malcolmson 1979),
though law and order did eventually prevail. In other cases resistance to the
banning of folk-football appeared more successful, as in the case at Ashbourne in
Derbyshire where the game continues to the present day, albeit in a museumized
form. But it is impossible to tell the extent to which apparently successful
resistance to the banning of folk-football and its accommodation at particular
sites or in particular forms represent examples of ritualization, hence allowing the
consolidation of power more effectively than by violent means.
Over two hundred years later Coventry City fans resisted the introduction of
seats to their Highfield Road stadium by simply tearing them out. More recently,
fans have begun to stand on the very seats which were intended to &dquo;contain&dquo; them
129
arguably
a more dangerous way of watching football than standing on the
terraces (Foster 1992).
But perhaps the problematic and conjunctural articulation of opposition to
more recent developments in the confinement of football space can be found in
the literature of the somewhat anarchic fanzine movement (made up of
&dquo;unofficial&dquo; football magazines produced by and for fans themselves) which has
been a feature of the British football scene in the past decade. Such publications,
totaling around 400 and read by more than one million people, are fugitive and
ephemeral but almost certainly reflect the &dquo;insider’s&dquo; view of football better than
any other printed source. They can be interpreted as a form of cultural
contestation; they also constitute a valuable research resource. A letter to the
1970s fanzine, Foul, attacked the vision of society’s dominant groups by noting
that &dquo;Utopia is a spotless concrete bowl lined with thousands of little blue plastic
seats, lots of clean toilets, a restaurant, a sports complex, piped muzak, and 22
cleancut goal hungry zombies... on a plasti-grass pitch&dquo;. But for the blue collar
masculine fan it was from &dquo;those cold, forbidding terraces that you find the
central nervous system of football from which the adrenalin rises and the
lifeblood flows&dquo; (quoted in Redhead 1986). A decade later, fanzine editors were
echoing these sentiments. In Of the Ball it was noted that embourgeoisified
football &dquo;is reduced to ritzyglitzy hype, heavily commercialized with forced and
ordered excitement. This sanitized soccer becomes, to the hamburger culture
society, just another thing to do - last week the cinema, this week football, next
week the theme park&dquo; (Beauchampe 1986). Among the consistent features of
British football fanzines has been their opposition to the introduction of
territorialized means of control - the &dquo;executive boxes&dquo;, crowd segregation,
fencing and penning, as well as other forms of rationalisation such as ground
sharing by clubs and the escalation of policing (Jary et al. 1991).
Such qualitative statements as these can be supplemented with quantitative
data resulting from a number of attitude surveys into fans’ reactions to the
recommendation of the Taylor Report (1991) that all supporters in British
football grounds should be seated. Such surveys reveal that the percentages of
respondents who prefer to stand to watch a match range from 44 % (Canter et al.
1989) to 80 %.3 Of respondents to a survey undertaken by Millwall Football Club,
93 % believed that they should have the &dquo;right to stand&dquo;4 while a survey of
members of the Football Supporters’ Association showed that 69.3 % would
oppose seating in their own clubs’ grounds while 15.6 % stated that they would
not watch their club in an all seater ground (Sir Norman Chester Centre for
Football Research 1989).
In the early 1990s several events have suggested that resistance was not entirely
useless. The Football League is reconsidering its views on all-seater stadiums; the
perimeter fences around many grounds have come down; observers are talking
about &dquo;celebration&dquo; rather than &dquo;aggravation&dquo; among football fans (Taylor 1991)
and zany dress styles, face paints and a MUSIC-football nexus are bringing fun
back to the terraces (Redhead 1991). The Football Supporters’ Association and
the fanzines have become mouthpieces through which the voices of many of the
sport’s supporters can be heard, combining to create a form of cultural resistance.
In the case of the British football stadium, therefore, the confining tendencies
which I have described above have been resisted - with varying degrees of success
at
both the start and at the current stage of the &dquo;great confinement&dquo;. Such
130
resistance, indicating social tension, suggests that territoriality may not have been
a wholly appropriate way of solving football’s problems. This view is confirmed,
to an extent at least, by the apparent trend towards what might be loosely called
&dquo;post-modern&dquo; trends in the micro-spaces of British football.
Although it is difficult to talk about &dquo;post-modernism&dquo; in relation to British
football space - simply because the sport has barely started being modernized the
softening of the boundaries and the weakening of the rules of exclusion within
grounds invite analogies with post modern movements in other spheres. In
architecture it is widely regarded that the symbolic end of modernism was in 1972
when the Pruitt-Igoe apartment blocks in St. Louis (constructed in the mid 1950s)
were dynamited and demolished; they had become uninhabitable. In British
football, 1990 might be flagged as the beginning of the postmodern stadium when
the metal fences surrounding many grounds were taken down and scrapped. As
Hillsborough had demonstrated, the terraces (like Pruitt Igoe) had become
uninhabitable. The old suddenly seemed to be new again. And the ambiguity of
modernization itself was revealed in the short-lived presence in English League
football of the plastic pitches (subsequently replaced by grass) in a small number
of grounds. While disliked by players and fans, plastic pitches showed how
modern technology could be double-edged in its applications by temporarily
signaling a return to the multifunctional use of space - a return to mixed land use
where football could take place along side a range of other activities, many of
which were less &dquo;serious&dquo; and involved greater community use than was possible
on the monocultural &dquo;sacred turf&dquo; of sportscape. Whether technology produces
further innovations in playing surfaces, satisfactory to all participants in football
remains to be seen.
Conclusion
In this paper I have tried to show not simply how the environment in which sport is
played has changed over time but how some of these changes might be
interpreted. I have attempted to illustrate the fact that since the eighteenth
century football has been regularly subjected to forms of territorialization or
spatial confinement. The game has moved from being a form of corporal to one of
carceral participation. Initially, a limitation on playing space, then an exact
spatial definition of the pitch and, today, enforced segregation of spectators both
from players and other spectators, the story of the stadium has indeed been one of
&dquo;great confinement&dquo;. Whereas the intra-stadium space of the early twentieth
century included a number of &dquo;permeable boundaries&dquo;, in the modern stadium
the boundaries between various groups (players/spectators, home/away fans,
rich/poor fans) tend to be &dquo;impermeable&dquo;. In this sense, the stadium is an
archetype of modernity (Archetti 1992). In addition, I have illustrated how
surveillance is central to a major sporting activity. The paper has also shown how
the sites of football have assumed some of the characteristics of spaces of
resistance and contestation in which &dquo;marginalized&dquo; groups (in this case, football
fans) have shown themselves to be far from passive. Finally, the paper has
indicated the centrality of the spatial dimension in the environment of sport and
how a politics of territory, a geographical humanism and an awareness of
sociospatial interactions are crucial to an understanding of that environment.
131
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Notes
1
Throughout this paper the word "football" is used in its English sense to refer to "soccer".
2
From an unpublished English version of Archetti (1992), kindly provided by Pierre
Lanfranchi.
3
Quoted in When Saturday Comes, 51,1991, 22.
4
Quoted in The Lion Roars, 18, 1990, 20.
Le devoloppement spatial du stade moderne
Resum6
Le stade de football anglais illustre a merveille le concept d’espace hautement
&dquo;territorialis6&dquo;. Au cours des cent dernidres ann6es, 1’environnement du football qui
reposait sur un espace non clos, multifonctionnel et dans le cadre duquel on notait
d’importantes interactions entre joueurs et spectateurs du fait du peu de regles d’exclusion,
s’est aujourd’hui transform6 en un espace clos, segment6 et monofonctionnel, aux
demarcations impermeables et sur lequel on constate une surveillance intense allant de pair
avec l’instauration d’importantes regles d’exclusion. On remarque une certaine analogie
entre les changements spatiaux intervenus sur les stades de football et la description de
Foucault relative a la taille de la prison. Le resserrement de 1’espace du football a du faire
face a une importante resistance et l’on constate en ce tout d6but des ann6es ’90 certains
indices qui tendent a d6montrer un certain assouplissement des limites internes des stades et
la possibilit6 de voir emerger des tendances &dquo;post-modernes&dquo; dans le paysage du football
anglais.
133
Die raumliche Entwicklung des modernen Stadions
Zusammenfassung
Das britische FuBballstadion ist ein Beispiel fur einen extrem ausgegrenzten Raum. In den
letzten hundert Jahren hat das Umfeld des Fu(3ballspiels von einem offenen multifunktionalen
Raum mit unterschiedlichen raumlichen Interaktionen zwischen Spielern und Zuschauern
(schwache Regeln des Ausschlusses) zu einem geschlossenen segmentierten und monofunktionalen
Raum mit unuberschreitbaren Grenzen und wirksamen AusschluB der Masse
(strenge Regeln des Ausschlusses) gewandelt. Es wird eine Analogie aufgezeigt zwischen
den raumlichen Veranderungen des FuBballplatzes und Foucaults Beschreibung des Wachsens
des Gefangnisses. Es gab beachtlichen Widerstand gegenuber den Veranderungen des
FuBballplatzes zu Beginn der 90er Jahre und es gibt einige Anzeichen dafur, daB die Grenzen
mnerhalb des Stadions aufgeweicht werden, und daB &dquo;postmoderne&dquo; Tendenzen in die
Landschaft des britischen FuBballs eindringen.
El desarrollo espacial del estadio moderno
Resumen
El estadio de futbol britdnico es un ejemplo de espacio altamente delimitado. Desde hace
cien anos la base territorial del futbol ha evolucionado de un espacio abierto y
multifuncional - con elevada interacci6n entre jugadores y espectadores (reglas debiles de
exclusion) - a un espacio cerrado, segmentado y monofuncional con fronteras
impermeables y una eficaz vigilancia de cualquier aglomeracion (reglas fuertes de
exclusi6n). Se plantea una analogia entre los cambios espaciales en el futbol y los
desarrollados por Foucault para el caso de las prisiones. A principios de los noventa ha
tenido lugar una resistencia considerable respecto a esta confinacion del espacio futbolistico
lo cual hace pensar pue se esta produciendo una debilitacion de las fronteras interiores del
estadio y que tendencias &dquo;post-modernas&dquo; podrian estar apareciendo en el paisaje del futbol
britanico.