Due to their public and publicized nature, sporting events have been recognized increasingly as venues in which broader social struggles have been reproduced and redefined. Examining violence and racism in British football shows that from the late 1960s anxieties about race politics, class relations and state repression were represented and contested through violence and racist aggression at football matches. Class violence and racial abuse in football not only reflected broader cultural struggles and fractured social relationships in post-war Britain, but also produced new social anxieties and political questions. The state and leading political authorities responded to the presence of violence and racisms in one of the nation's central cultural institutions by re-examining policing and disciplinary policies for working-class citizens.

Rather than examining football per se, my principal aim is to investigate how this distinct cultural milieu became a site for the reproduction and performance of racial and class tensions, masculinity and racist violence. The environment of British football serves as an aperture through which to reassess the fundamental social and cultural processes within late modern British society, as well as the way politicians, lawmakers and grass-roots organizations approached them. Evidence will show that social conflict, allegedly eliminated by the post-war social democratic compromise, re-emerged in cultural contests over physical space and policing in football stadiums. Class discourses and practices resurfaced in football conflicts as global economic crises and retrenchment of social welfare apparently betrayed post-war social democratic promises.