Dave Proudlove: ‘Three Figures to Watch Fulham? Come on Lads’
A new book about grassroots football and its industrial past sheds light on neglected spaces of working-class experience. Tribune sat down with its author Dave Proudlove to talk gentrification, escapism, and the radical potential of the non-league game.
A statue at Stoke City's Britannia Stadium depicting English footballer Stanley Matthews at the beginning, middle, and end of his thirty-year career. (Credit: Steve Edwards via Flickr)
- Interview by
- Alex Niven
Dave Proudlove is one of the most eloquent advocates of the greater Potteries area on the Midlands/Northern England border. A columnist at the Staffordshire Sentinel for many years, and an enthusiastic champion of local sites and subjects on social media, Proudlove has regularly given voice to the hopes and dreams of Stoke-on-Trent and its backcountry, a post-industrial corner of England that has suffered terribly through the neglect of successive neoliberal governments since the 1980s.
As an author, Proudlove has mainly worked to foreground questions of class and industrial legacy in English football culture. His 2022 book When the Circus Leaves Town examined the demise of traditional football grounds in England from a socio-political perspective. His new book, Work and Play: The Industrial Roots of English Football, is a sequel of sorts to its predecessor, though with a more optimistic subtext. Work and Play is an encyclopaedic survey of the origins of English football in the history of proletarian labour, as well as a lively tour around the grassroots clubs of the modern game. Above all, it is a humane exploration of contemporary working-class experience that puts to shame any number of patronising travelogues about the so-called Red Wall.
Tribune’s Alex Niven caught up with Dave to discuss the themes and implications of the book.
How did you first come to explore the industrial roots of English football?
Fundamentally it comes from my relationship with my dad, who was born in the north of the Potteries in the middle of the Second World War. He worked mainly in the pottery industry, but he also worked in a foundry, he worked in a brickworks, and he had a spell working for an ordnance factory just outside the Potteries. He was just an ordinary working-class bloke who absolutely loved his football. And it was through my dad and his love of football — and Stoke City in particular — that I developed my own interest in the game.
But the spark for this particular book was my involvement with Alsager Town in the Northwest Counties Football League. One evening we were playing Vauxhall Motors— obviously a works team — and I was talking to one of their management committee before the game. He asked me if Alsager were a works team. We actually weren’t, but our ground is next to the Radway Estate, which was built for munitions workers, so inevitably munitions workers would have played for the club. And then we got to thinking about it — Cammel Laird were in our League at the time, as were Avro, Pilkington, and Cheadle Heath Nomads which came out of the Linotype factory in Altrincham — all works teams. And I thought that this was probably something worth exploring further.
There’s a fascinating ambiguity that emerges from the book. You explore this incredible fact that so many English football teams, from the non-league works teams you mention up to the likes of Arsenal and West Ham derive their nickname, their historic identity, and in some cases even their actual name from a factory or specific form of industry. But these were still capitalist industries, with capitalist owners who often exploited their workforces. How did this ambivalence shape the development of the game?
It’s always been there. If you go back to the origins of Preston North End, for example, to their ‘Invincibles’ team of the late 1880s, their chairman and manager William Sudell was involved in controversial ways with a local mill. So there was certainly ambiguity there in terms of how the team and the club were financed. On the one hand, you know, we’re not talking the sort of money that’s involved these days. But it was still a substantial amount, and in some respects it was an exploitation.
But I think — and this is how I think my dad saw it — that that 90 minutes away from work was a kind of freedom. It was our escape. If you go even further back than football as we now know it, and look at how football was played on the streets, and how the powers that be attempted to tame it, you got to a point where the Shrove Tuesday games were accepted by lawmakers on the basis of: right, you guys, you go and let your hair down, you go and have a tear up. You do what you need to do for one day, and then after Shrove Tuesday the status quo returns. So we got freedom for a day.
There are still those elements of control, and it’s all about capital at the end of the day. You know, I look at the top end of the game — and I include Stoke in this — you look at Stoke City. It was formed as Stoke Ramblers, a completely different animal to what it is now, when it generates its wealth from morally questionable means. If you take [gambling company and Stoke City sponsor] bet365 away from the football club, it disappears, in effect. And it’s an uncomfortable tie, isn’t it? Obviously you know this, because you’re a Newcastle supporter, and you’ve got the folk at Manchester City. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been more attracted to the grassroots game over the last fifteen or twenty years. Because that connection, it’s still there, just about, down at that level, and it really does have some meaning, and there’s more humour there as well.
Your book keeps returning to the rise and fall of working-class community, and of how football embodies that narrative. Across the last 150 years or so, we’ve gone from a context where football clubs were known as the Potters, the Hammers, the Bullets, the Colliers and so on — of clubs being more or less synonymous with the labour of their supporters — to our present tense of petrostate owners, gambling company sponsors and the involvement of global corporate figures like Jim Ratcliffe and Todd Boehly. Is this a narrative about deindustrialisation, and what it has left behind?
I think that after the 1980s there was a deliberate gentrification of what was traditionally a working-class pursuit. Simon Inglis was saying that when he was working on The Football Grounds of Great Britain in the nineties, and they were talking about Arsenal looking to move away from Highbury, they were looking at building a stadium with a capacity of 60,000. And they wanted to have a huge swathe of the new ground for middle-class supporters, but equally, they could have had a good chunk of the ground for I think he described them as ‘rabid youths who wanted to shout’, or something like that. But those rabid youths aren’t as welcome in football stadia these days.
I was looking at Fulham, and some of the ticket prices for certain games are in three figures. I mean, with all due respect, Fulham is a great little club, and Craven Cottage is one of the great existing original grounds. But three figures to watch Fulham? Come on lads. But if you go to see Cammel Laird, or whoever, it’s still mainly a working-class pursuit. And they’re just genuine people who care for the community, and they care for the football club and want to keep it going.
I recently watched a documentary about the England football team in the 1990 World Cup in Italy, and despite having been obsessed with that tournament since I was about six, I didn’t realise that the England team was deliberately based in Sardinia — an island — so the fans couldn’t cause widespread havoc. And the Thatcher government collaborated with the Italian authorities on this, assuming that the England fans were all hooligans — which is a big contrast to now when politicians will put, say, ‘Villa season ticket holder’ on their social media bio. Was 1990 a turning point in football history?
It was, in effect, disaster capitalism. You look at what happened in English football in 1985, at the back end of the ’84/’85 season, which was one of the worst seasons I’ve ever experienced. Stoke broke every record going in the old First Division that season because it was so terrible. Towards the end of it you had the riots at Luton — Luton’s chairman at the time was David Evans, who was a Tory MP — and they went ahead and banned away supporters for four seasons. Then on the last day of the season you had a riot at Birmingham City, and a young Leeds supporter was killed. And then obviously you had the Bradford Stadium Fire on the same day. The Sunday Times ran an editorial the following day and it was an absolute disgrace. They said that football was ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums, watched increasingly by slum people’. The Sunday Times was an arm of the establishment that encapsulated the mainstream political view of football at that time. Obviously, Thatcher had talked about football supporters being one of her ‘enemies within’.
Then you get Hillsborough in ’89 and we all know the story of Hillsborough, which is one of the biggest disgraces this country has ever seen. There’s some good research out there — I think it was referred to in Adrian Tempany’s book about Hillsborough [And the Sun Shines Now] — about how it reshaped Britain, and the economics of it. It was deliberate. It was a deliberate policy to squeeze out the ‘rabid youths’. And so here we are. I mean it’s laudable that Stoke keep their tickets as affordable as they do. But you know, we played Liverpool in the third round of the FA Cup in the ’87/’88 season, and I think my ticket was £2.50 or something like that.
My first Newcastle junior season ticket in 1992 was £49.50 for the whole year! In spite of the sorts of negative developments you mention, English football is still very geographically grounded. You talk in the book about positive examples of grassroots activism, like FC United and AFC Wimbledon. Do you think, firstly, that football’s industrial roots are still part of its biology, and secondly that football still retains some potential for collective organisation and resistance?
Oh absolutely. Based on my own experiences over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve increasingly started to feel more positive. About ten years ago you’d go to grassroots semi-pro clubs, and you’d see the same faces every year. And obviously they’re all getting older. They’re all of a certain age, and you just thought: what sort of longevity have these clubs got?
But I think there’s been a reaction towards what’s been happening with football further up the food chain. I refer to a couple of examples in the book. A friend of mine, he’s been all over the place with Stoke, and he’ll always be a Stoke supporter, but he’s just lost his love for watching them. And he’s become an official at a local non-league club. There’s a new generation of club officials, and when people go to watch semi-pro grassroots football it provides them with a reminder of what they enjoyed about football before its gentrification.
There are other examples, like [County Durham grassroots club] Horden in your part of the world, and some of the things they do as a club in their community, and you think: hang on a minute, these places could actually come become real hubs of positive activity in their communities. Where else could this go? I hope there could be a revival of more progressive thinking, let’s say, in some of these post-industrial communities.
It’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? How do you make that happen? How do you nurture that culture? Are you optimistic about the potential of football and of its industrial legacy being revived and put to towards radical ends in the twenty-first century?
I am. It’s not an industrial club, but there’s certainly that sort of vibe at West Didsbury and Chorlton in the North West Premier Division, and I refer to Cadbury Athletic at the end of the book. Last year it was their thirtieth anniversary, and I think it might have been the 150th anniversary of the Cadbury chocolate business as well. They have a formal link with the Cadbury factory, so they’re kind of a new works team, if you like.
Football’s underestimated in a lot of people’s eyes. But it’s potentially a very powerful thing, and you can use that. It’s a soft power if you like – you can channel that soft power towards doing better for communities that have been let down by organisations that should have done better for them. I’m all for that.