Wednesday, June 09, 2021

"I was trying to capture the spirit of the times"

The Premier League era has seen top-tier football drift further and further away from its traditional working-class fanbase. The so-called Big Six's attempt to break away as founder members of a European Super League and the strength and scale of the reaction from their own supporters, let alone those of other clubs, just underlined how big the gulf now is.

But fans have changed too, and those changes were afoot back in the early 1990s, before the Premier League began. When Steve Redhead set out to write about what he called "new football fans" in a book called Football With Attitude, he commissioned Manchester-based photographer Richard Davis to provide accompanying images - some of which can be seen in this Huck article and in a new publication from Cafe Royal Books. His photos illustrate the collision of youth subcultures (music, fashion and football) in the North West before working-class supporters were sidelined and TV rights and revenues took over.

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