| Andrés Martinez
One of the more intriguing sights I encountered on a book reporting trip to England this month was a poster in a restroom at the University of Leeds entitled “Recognising Microaggressions.” Among the expressions listed that could, even unintentionally, amount to discrimination against members of a “marginalized group” was “You sound so Northern!”
As a visiting Yankee, I don’t pretend to fully understand the nuances of Britain’s north-south divide and the extent to which it correlates (or doesn’t) with notions of class. I have noticed, though, that many people in London tend to talk about “the north” as if it were Siberia, even though to us Americans the distances between all British cities seem modest, certainly not enough to get you into another reality. Leeds is closer to London than Washington, DC is to New York City, and my hometown of Phoenix is twice as distant from Albuquerque in our neighboring state of New Mexico than Leeds is from London.
I’m also aware that just about every time I visit Britain the news seems to include stories about some promise being made or broken by some political leader to invest in northern infrastructure and transportation networks, to offset the disproportionate investment and wealth flowing into London and southeast England. The political discourse is all about a hollowed-out region that has suffered from deindustrialization. A headline in the Times of London during my recent visit read like a parody: “BBC Boss: We need to hire more northerners.”
I understand that by some measures northern living standards lag the London metropolis, and that this is a legitimate source of concern for British policymakers, but I also find much of the depictions of the north as a cultural backwater quite mystifying on account of my football tunnel vision. Because, let’s face it, it’s the north, not London, that is the epicenter of the world’s most popular sport. .
This is where football was born and grew up in the late 19th Century, with clubs often established by churches or employers to keep young industrial workers out of trouble on their one day off. The oldest existing football club in England is Sheffield FC, founded in 1857, and it was in that same steelmaking northern city that English football suffered its darkest tragedy that forced a reckoning that altered the game’s trajectory. At Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough Stadium in 1989, 96 fans were crushed to death in a horrific incident, victims of shabby infrastructure and even shabbier policing; the disaster represented the ticking time bomb of a generation’s abandonment of the national game to its own toxicity.
At the risk of overstating the case, you can trace some of this abandonment to the biases and prejudices manifest in Britain’s north-south divide. Football was the working-class sport developed in the gritty northern industrial cities, and to the extent that cultural elites in London appreciated the game in the 1970s and 1980s, part of the draw was its spiky image, its association with toxic masculinity and hooliganism. It wasn’t the sport that Britain’s governing class considered its natural habitat – those would be “public school” (in that confusingly British sense) games like cricket, rugby, squash, and crew. Football was for adventurous outings with the lads, or to watch from a safe distance on the BBC’s Match of the Day, and to banter about at the pub to prove one’s bona fides as a regular bloke.
Everything changed in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, as public authorities intervened to clean up the game, which then benefited from tidal waves of investment in subsequent decades, fueled by globalization and the rising importance of sport to media. The top division of English football was relaunched as the rebranded “Premier League” in 1992, and since then has become the most globalized sports league on earth. Those clubs founded in the 1870s and 1880s by churches and local employers have become among the world’s most coveted assets, owned by billionaires from America and the Middle East. And much like U.S. professional leagues, the concern now is that middle class families will be priced out of the gameday experience by tourists, wealthy thrill seekers, and corporate hosts entertaining clients on an expense account.
And still, it’s remarkable that in this altered context, given the dynamic of how most things work in Britain, the largest, most successful Premier League clubs – judged by their commercial revenue, global audience, and success on the pitch – remain firmly in the north. Sure, the capital is home to big clubs like Chelsea, Arsenal, and Tottenham, but they trail the two giants in Manchester – City and United – and Liverpool (which, in a sign of these globalized times, is owned by the Fenway Sports Group out of Boston).
But back to Leeds, the proud and revitalized Yorkshire city to the northeast of Manchester, where I attended my first match at fabled Elland Road. (I love how some stadiums are still named after their street, a nod to the English game’s dual identity as a deeply local and hyper globalized affair.) It turned out to be a lackluster 1-1 tie against West Bromwich Albion. But never mind, Leeds fans were in a good mood as they remained in the pole position to win promotion back into the Premier League from the second-tier Championship.
Elland Road (first opened in 1897) is one of those idiosyncratic English stadiums built in stages over time, lacking any symmetry. I sat in the penultimate row atop the East Stand which was so much higher than the other three stands bordering the field that the overhang above us cut off the sightlines, blocking the screen and scoreboard across the field. All I could see over there, tempting me throughout, were ads to something called “Flamingo Land.”
Leeds are yet another case study of the transatlantic sporting convergence we are keen to follow at the Great Game Lab, as the club is owned by the San Francisco 49ers (which fans seem ok with, given some of the unsavory owners that preceded them) and are sponsored by Red Bull, one of the more intriguing transnational sporting conglomerates (which fans seem less ok with, as they fear being asked to surrender their club’s distinctive identity to become England’s Team Red Bull).
That distinctive identity of the club’s includes a great deal of poignant adversity. Even when Leeds did win trophies in the 1970s under coach Don Revie, the rest of England called them “Dirty Leeds” for the manner in which they played. After that the club experienced a rollercoaster of ups and downs in subsequent decades that included winning the title the last season before the Premier League was launched, a subsequent brush with bankruptcy, and too many years languishing outside the top division. The club’s most recent moment of glory was Argentine coach Marcelo Bielsa’s three-and-a-half-year tenure, when he transfixed the fanbase with a beautiful style of play they’d never witnessed before, though this was ultimately a beautiful failure that landed the club back outside the Premier League, to which it is now striving to return.
One thing I didn’t realize before visiting Leeds is the club’s strong ties to Scandinavia. At the match I met visiting Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and a couple from Iceland sitting next to me, who travel to Leeds several times each season to attend games.
They seemed to find it perfectly normal that someone from Arizona would also want to make this pilgrimage, but I pressed the husband as to why Leeds. He explained matter-of-factly that as a kid in the 1970s on Icelandic TV they usually just showed two teams that were dominant in the moment, Leeds and Liverpool.
“And I chose the wrong one,” he said. I laughed but he didn’t, which was unnerving. Was he being serious or was this deadpan humor? Sports fans are funny when it comes to the pride they take in the pain their passion inflicts on them.
I was tempted to say he sounded “so northern” in his stoicism, but I refrained.