Warm portraits of English football fans before the Premier League

In August 1991, just as the 1991/1992 season of English football was poised to kick off, the “beautiful game” had reached a crossroads. The past decade had seen multiple tragedies, most notably the Bradford City stadium fire, the Hillsborough disaster – a fatal crowd crush that killed 97 people, with its impact still being unravelled today – and the Heysel Stadium disaster, another crush that led to the deaths of 39 people, sparked by fan violence in the 1985 European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus. It led to a blanket ban of English football teams in European competition for half a decade, and football fandom was commonly tarnished with a reputation for hooliganism, both abroad and in the UK.

“Football in the 1980s was a dark place,” photographer Richard Davis recalls. “You had three major disasters, there was a real problem with football stadiums falling down, police were heavy handed and Margaret Thatcher’s Tories were in power – Thatcher hated sports and particularly hated working class culture.”

At the time, Davis was squatting in the Hulme Crescents in inner-city Manchester – Europe’s largest social housing estate that was often written off as a derelict failure. But it had also become a hotbed for radical culture, and in particular, the city’s burgeoning acid house scene. “Manchester from 1988 to 1991 was just crazy,” Davis says. “Music, comedy, popular culture, football, Madchester. And by default I had ended up in the middle of all that – I had the time of my life.”

All of a sudden, these various, disparate strands of British popular culture had come to intersect in the heart of the city, and Davis wanted to explore how English football in particular was changing as a result. He travelled with his camera across northern England to matches at the grounds of Manchester United, Manchester City, Everton, Liverpool and Oldham Athletic, taking portraits of fans heading to see their teams play in an attempt to understand if there was a “new football fan” emerging. Now over three decades later, he revisits a selection of them in Going to the Match, a new zine published by Lower Block featuring young football fans he photographed in and around the stadiums.

“I was doing a project at the time with [professor and writer] Steve Redhead that was about football coming out of the 80s and into a new era, and it was linked with acid house, ecstasy and young kids chilling out,” he says. “Young kids learning how to dance, instead of fight – there was no doubt about it, that was probably to do with ecstasy – but also the 1990 World Cup had gone really well and New Order’s ‘World In Motion’ had been its [official] song.”

The black-and-white pictures, often featuring young fans queuing up for turnstiles while donning their favourite teams’ kits, show off a warmer, more friendly side to English football’s fandom compared to what had dominated images over the previous decade. Warm smiles run throughout the pictures, as well as a calmness, which is particularly striking when stood around police presences – a contrast to images of conflict and violence that were often found among the pages of the printed press and beamed across screens by broadcasters.

Yet while Davis had set out to discover something new, he had inadvertently captured the final days of an old, now bygone era of English football. In 1992, the 22 teams of the First Division unanimously split away from the EFL to form the Premier League, which ultimately sparked a new, globalised era marked by lucrative television deals and the eye-watering sums of money changing hands that are associated with the elite level of the game today.

Those fans found at the grounds would soon change as well. “I caught football before the big money men came in and took over, commercialisation and all ticket prices going up,” Davis says. One shot sees fans queuing up with the box office, with a sign reading: “Away supporters £4.50”. For comparison, away tickets are currently capped at £30, while home tickets are usually found in the region of £45-£60, but can jump to more £100-plus depending on the team.

“I realised a lot of the photographs I was taking in ’91 were of a lot of young people at the football, which is different now – a lot of working class people can’t afford to go to the main football grounds now,” he continues. “Originally, football was working class, and music was working class – punk, mod, skinheads, rastas – we were all out of that working class culture. Once you have the Premier League, the TV money and overseas investors coming in, all of a sudden a lot of working class people are feeling pushed out financially – so there’s a constant friction between these forces.”

Going to the Match by Richard Davis is published by Lower Block

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