http://go.warwick.ac.uk/eslj/issues/volume9/number1/pearson A commentary on ‘Little Hooliganz: The Inside Story of Glamorous Lads, Football Hooligans and Post-Subculturalism’ by Professor Steve Redhead (2010 Entertainment and Sports Law Journal 8(2) ). Dr Geoff Pearson, Lecturer, Liverpool Business School Issue 8(2) of this Journal included the article, ‘Little Hooliganz: The Inside Story of Glamorous Lads, Football Hooligans and Post-Subculturalism’ by Prof Steve Redhead. The author is professor of Sport and Media Cultures at the Chelsea School, Brighton University, and has been carrying out research on football fan sub-cultures, including but not limited to the issue of ‘football hooliganism’, for over 20 years. He describes his work on hooliganism as part of the ‘cluster’ of postmodern sub-cultural theory, which has been under-represented since extensive academic study on the issue of football crowd disorder began in the late 1970s. Redhead considers that the phenomenon of contemporary football crowd disorder has been diminishing significantly since the early 1990s (1993: 2) and he shares the views held by academics such as Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti that much of the attention given to the phenomenon, and indeed the actual social construction of it, is the result of a media- fuelled moral panic: ‘[football hooliganism] remains more or less an historical (and hysterical) mass media construction’ (1993: 3). 1 Redhead’s views on the diminishment of ‘football hooliganism’ in the 1990s were overstated. His charting of the ‘disappearance of soccer hooliganism into popular media and fan culture’ (1997: 102-3) was at odds with the ongoing serious disorder involving English fans, and rioting in Marseilles by hundreds of travelling supporters at the 1998 World Cup was as severe an ‘outbreak’ of so-called hooliganism involving English football fans as had been witnessed since the mid-1980s (if not earlier). Nevertheless, when we consider the nature, and reporting, of football-related violence in the domestic game, it is difficult to disagree with his contention that, ‘discourses on soccer hooliganism seem to have proliferated at the very time that the phenomenon appeared to have disappeared from public (media) view’ (1997: 98). Writing of the Brimson brothers, the turbo-publishing ‘generals’ of the hooligan memoir, Redhead comments that their books, ‘maintain that hooliganism has not completely disappeared [but] struggle to convince their readers that their examples of rucks and riots are really from the 1990s rather than earlier eras’ (1997: 10). Fighting talk from one of the top lads in the academic study of popular culture. 2 In line with the view that ‘real’ hooliganism has diminished at the same time that accounts, re-telling, and possibly mis-telling, hooligan encounters has flourished, Redhead (with the occasional help of a tidy little firm of graduate student researchers) has been conducting a research project monitoring the output of these hooligan memoirs, or ‘hit and tell’ stories, ‘low sport journalism’ (Redhead: 2010) or ‘hoolie-porn’. These accounts of hooligan gang activities are typically the result of a joint-writing process between an alleged ‘ hooligan general’ or ‘top boy’ and an established publisher or author with (in most cases) his or her finger on the sub-cultural pulse. The content of the memoirs are, in Redhead’s words, ‘who did what to whom, and when’. The appropriately named Chelsea School now has a library of over 91 hooligan memoirs and books written by other writers based upon the spoken accounts self-confessed hooligans. Most of these ‘lads’ claim that they are now ‘former’ or ‘reformed’ hooligans, although for some of them this is certainly not the case. Redhead’s research has documented an impressive 396 hooligan gangs in these accounts since the ‘watershed year of 1967-68’. In Little Hooliganz, he provides a fascinating account, based upon what must be hundreds of hours spent ploughing through the memoirs combined with a number of lengthy interviews with authors and publishers, of what the literature tells us about the history of British football hooligan subcultures. 3 However, what does his analysis of ‘hit and tell’ inform us about these accounts and the sub- culture they supposedly represent? Do they hold any value for those looking to understand the phenomenon of football crowd disorder and hooliganism, either historically or contemporarily? Professor Redhead summarises his view of their value by claiming: What the hit and tell/low sport journalism genre provides, as has been seen in this essay, is a possible cultural criminology supplement for post-subcultural studies – in other words what I call a ‘post-subcultural criminology’. Methodologically it allows 4