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What’s social about sport? Sport is part of the wider social and political world of today At the ESRC Festival of Social Science event held at the Sheffield United Football Stadium last March, David Goldblatt, co-author of D170 This Sporting Planet, spoke about his own experience as a broadcaster for the BBC World Service Thirty or forty years ago, making the case that sport is social would have met with considerable resistance.. This was a world in which the 1972 Olympic games continued despite a slaughter in its midst and in which commercialization was so thin that Tom Finney ran a plumbing business while playing football. Today the permanent and intimate relationship between economic and political power and sport stares us in the face, from the attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket squad to the rebranding of the London 2012 Olympics as prudent counter to financial investment. However, the ‘social’ remains more elusive. Sociologists have agonised over this type of question for more than a century, and when economic and political institutions have been factored out, what exactly is the social? We can speak of the realm of the family, of civil society, but sociology has always reached for something bigger and more conceptually inclusive. While innumerable areas of our collective lives can illuminate and test these ideas on aspects of out sporting life, for me the most profound is sporting crowds in general and football crowds in particular. While much of what I say today applies football offers the widest possible comparison between societies, for no game is as globally diffused as football. The time scale, flow and dynamics of football games offer an intensity of atmosphere that has proved more catalytic than any other sport in generating both Dionysian carnival and the entrenchment and reproduction of social cleavages and conflicts. For the sociologist, witnessing either has its own peculiar pleasures. In 2003, I visited Belgrade to watch Red Star vs Partizan Belgrade. Both clubs were founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Partizan was the team of the Yugoslav federal army, Red Star the team of the city’s police and communist party. Just 200 metres apart, the teams’ rivalry has been a shadow play, and sometimes a real conflict, between Yugoslav federalists in the city and Serbian nationalists, between military and political power. During the Yugoslav Civil War, Red Star ultras in particular served as looters in Bosnia and Croatia, while the fall of Milošević was precipitated by ultras from both groups storming public buildings. In 2002, their internecine warfare peaked when a naval flare was fired from the Partizan end into the Red Star ultras across the pitch – one person was killed and many injured. At the match I attended, Serbian riot police, styled by the creators of Judge Dread, were out en masse. Partizan fans were corralled into one end of the Red Star stadium and taunted the home fans with their banner, reminding them of their triumph in the previous year’s league, ‘Champions league: in your dreams’. Red Star didn’t seem too bothered and were 3-0 up after thirty minutes. Partizan fans responded by initially fighting amongst themselves, then fighting with the nearest police and the stewards who retreated behind an invisible line, demarcated by the furthest distance a plastic seat could be hurled from the stands. The stage was now set for Act 2. Partizan fans began to build pyres of seats and garbage and lit them across the stand; simultaneously the Red Star end was in full-throated song, waving banners and flags from every Serb enclave in the former Yugoslavia as well as the peripheral towns of Belgrade. Apart from me, perhaps the only Englishman in the stadium, no one was batting an eyelid. The flames were now spreading to the supporting poles of the stand. Suddenly, from behind the Red Star goal, a set of doors opened in the ground like a theatre trap door. This was the tunnel to the dressing room, and out of it came two neat lines of Serbian riot police, accompanied by large dogs. With the chorographical precision of a Busby Berkeley movie, all 200 of them divided and walked in file along the two touchlines. The game continued, the Red Star fans sang and the fires burned. The police now lined up on the same invisible line as the stewards had earlier and faced the crowd. As the last ten minutes of the game played out they steadily moved forward, dividing and trapping groups of Partizan fans, pushing them out of the back of the stadium, and dousing the worst of the fires. The game carried on, and I finally turned to my host, Dejan, a large Serbian journalist, and asked him, with a shrug of my shoulders, just what he made of it all. He replied, instantly, with an old Serb proverb, ‘He who loses has the right to be angry.’ There was no need for more explanation and he turned back to join the celebrations on the final whistle. The ESRC Festival of Social Science event was held at the Sheffield United Football Stadium on 9 March 2009. Kath Woodward and David Goldblatt presented their research for the Arts and Humanities Research Council: Tuning In at BBC World Service project on Sport Across Diasporas with material from D170 This Sporting Planet.