ABSTRACT

The proposed sale of Wembley Stadium in 2018 raised the possibility of a windfall that could be reinvested into the grassroots tier of English football. This bid was ultimately withdrawn but, as this article demonstrates, the episode highlighted the co-constitutive relationship between the everyday cultural base of English football, and those political and economic discourses, strategies, and trajectories that have been pursued within the sport and wider society. Developing a theoretical approach conceptualised here as ‘everyday’ cultural political economy, this article considers the cultural histories, objects, spaces and practices whose futures were both at stake in this transaction – namely, Wembley and the grassroots game – and the material effects that austerity and a skewed distribution of wealth have had upon the everyday cultural production of English football. The proposed sale of Wembley, it is argued here, failed to sufficiently account for and mitigate the impact that these political and economic effects have had upon the ‘everyday culture’ of grassroots football. The concluding remarks of this article call for a strategy that foregrounds the cultural base of English football and those quotidian practices that have come to be recast by the unequal power relations extant to the contemporary game.

摘要

2018 年出售温布利球场的提议增加了一笔意外之财的可能性，这笔意外之财可以再投资于英格兰足球的草根阶层。该竞标最终被撤回，但正如本文所展示的那样，这一事件突显了英国足球的日常文化基础与体育和更广泛社会所追求的政治和经济话语、策略和轨迹之间的共同构成关系. 本文开发了一种在此被概念化为“日常”文化政治经济学的理论方法，考虑了在这次交易中的未来都受到威胁的文化历史、对象、空间和实践——即，温布利和草根比赛——以及紧缩政策和财富分配不均对英国足球日常文化产生的物质影响。这里有人认为，出售温布利的提议未能充分考虑和减轻这些政治和经济影响对草根足球“日常文化”的影响。本文的结束语呼吁采取一种策略，突出英国足球的文化基础和那些被当代游戏中现存的不平等权力关系重新塑造的日常做法。