Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

Footballers were generally boys plucked from the club’s local area. Unlike the spoiled plutocrats that some Premier League players have become, for much of the twentieth century ‘footballers were often worse off than the crowds watching them from the terraces on a Saturday,’ as footballer Stuart Imlach’s son has written. Back in the early 1950s, there was a maximum salary for players of just £14 a week during the season—not very much over the average manual wage—and only one in five players were lucky enough to earn that. Players lived in ‘tied cottages’—houses owned by clubs from which they could be evicted at any moment. Little wonder one footballer, speaking at the 1955 Trades Union Congress, complained that ‘the conditions of the professional footballer’s employment are akin to slavery.’53 Football has gone from one extreme to another. The cold winds of free-market economics had largely been kept out of the football world during the 1980s. In the 1990s, they hit with a vengeance. In 1992, the twenty-two clubs of the old First Division broke away to establish the Premier League, freeing them from the requirement to share revenues with clubs in the rest of the League. Part of the new commercial ethos was to keep many working-class people out of the stadium. In its Blueprint for the Future of Football, the Football Association argued that the game must attract ‘more affluent middle-class consumers’.54 When the old terraces were abolished after the Hillsborough Disaster, t...