Now Playing Everywhere: Soccer Nostalgia

Given how much of soccer’s cultural space — the clothes it wears, the films in which it tells its own story — that era now occupies, it is safe to assume others feel the same way.

The late 1980s, the early 1990s — that liminal time between soccer’s pre-modern age and its rebooting in 1992, with the launch of the Premier League and the Champions League — seem to speak to fans more loudly than ever, whether they remember those years or not. It is more than simple nostalgia, not just a cynical attempt to charge fans a fare for a journey down memory lane.

Its appeal is deeper: A time familiar enough not to seem like the distant past — as, say, anything that exists only in black and white might — but, as Kapadia said, still somehow exotic, its earthiness a contrast with the sanitized, corporatized, globalized sport that is slickly produced and relentlessly packaged for our consumption now.

It is a reminder of what soccer looked like before image-rights deals and super agents, before its clubs sold themselves off to oligarchs and hedge funds and nation states. It was more dangerous, of course, for the players and even more for the fans — a grimier, less-refined experience where violence and racism were commonplace. Much of what has been lost would not be welcome back.

Still, though, the demand for the films and the admiration of the jerseys suggests there is a yearning for some of it, at least. “That era hooks into the idea of life before the Premier League, the sense of a connection between the club, the area, the players and the broader tribe of fans,” said the journalist and author Amy Lawrence, a producer of “89.”

“The Arsenal team that won the league that year not only reflected its community in terms of its diversity, but it was a group of players you could drink with, you could talk to, you could know,” Lawrence added. “There was a shared culture that is impossible now.”

Source: The New York Times

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Keywords:

Association football • Nostalgia • Association football • Culture • Space • Narrative • Liminality • Time • Association football • Modern history • Premier League • UEFA Champions League • Say Anything... • Black and white • Corporatization • Globalization • Consumerism • Association football • Oligarchy • Nation state • Racism • Premier League • Arsenal F.C. • Culture •