Car stickers and coffee mugs : A study of football and everyday life.

This is an investigation of football as part of everyday life. It is an attempt to move the focus away from the footballing 'other' and concentrate on the mundane ways in which football culture is sustained as an unspectacular part of people's daily lives. It asks how the consumption of football and the enactment of football culture help to make everyday life more, or less, manageable. It explores the ways in which football's ubiquity is felt beyond explicit identifications as fans or supporters. The embedded nature of football as a part of the everyday has an effect on the lives of family members, work colleagues, friends and acquaintances. These relations are reinforced by football's presence within the powerful and ubiquitous contemporary cultural formations of celebrity, family life and social networks, all of which are also fundamental aspects of everyday life.Adopting Bauman's concept of liquid modernity, football is examined as part of a more fluid way of life in contemporary Britain. Questions are asked about how everyday life is made possible in such a world by seeing football culture as both constituted by and constituting of everyday life. The two main aims are to highlight the ordinary ways in which football is embedded in people's daily lives and to explore how football makes use of solid renditions of the world in making it more appealing to liquid modern living.The research utilises an unconventional methodological strategy. Through the creation of a dialogue between the epistemological views of Zygmunt Bauman and everyday life theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, the Surrealists and their contemporaries the topic is explored through the development of a heurmeneutic sociology. This operationalises the concept of the social researcher as flaneur which takes the researcher's own everyday life as a central resource for the exploration of other people's daily lives. The result is an impressionistic account of football culture that shifts between ethnographic description, reflexive narration and sociological analysis to create a montage of daily life that is appropriate to the interpretation of liquid modern living. Football is conceived as an alternative register for exploring everyday life that challenges readers to view in new ways their own everyday lives and their relationships with football culture.The study is contextualised spatially by exploring football's presence in the home, the workplace, the public house and other transitional spaces of the city. It exposes theories of consumption, alienation, interaction, community, identity and power to the (extra) ordinary realm of people's everyday lives.The interpretation this leads to is that football has become so well embedded in daily life because it has the capacity to adapt to individuals' own needs and desires for security and freedom, belonging and individuality, at a level that is reflexively undemanding enough to succeed on a daily basis. The way it achieves this is through a combination of a history rooted in solidly modern tradition that is also celebrated and promulgated through liquid modern forms of consumption. In everyday life of liquid modernity reflexivity has become habitual, the spectacular domesticated, public/private boundaries blurred, the 'other' is a consumerist fetish, the self a commodity and community exists through consumption. Football feeds this situation through its ephemeral presence in everyday life.