This Is Deep Play

We are awakened by our slumber to discuss our opposition to the 'League 3' plan to allow elite clubs' reserve sides to enter the Football League system.

Awards include: Journalist of the Year, Imaginary Team of the Year, Dead Club of the Year, Non-League Goal of the Year, Gentrifier of the Year, Fixed Capital Football Advancement of the Year and Player of the Year.

Loss, disappearance, death. A rambling wide-ranging discussion to kick-off series 2. Featuring extinct football clubs such as Nunhead FC and Middlesbrough Ironopolis, the Spectre of Marx, epochs in football, the similarities between squats and non-league grounds, the gothic horror of Roy of the Rovers and how death somehow seems more real in football. Concludes with a call to embrace morbidity in football.

In this episode we speak to Alex Niven, author of 'Folk Opposition', about the political potential of regional identities and how they can center around football fandom. Featuring: neoliberal regeneration, Kevin Keegan's Labourism & Sir John Hall's Thatcherism, supporters trusts, the political activity of Istanbul ultras, a west/east divide in unEnglish regional identities, the lack of a Cornish league club, 'The Year of Dreaming Dangerously', regionalism in Iberian football, Sicilians supporting Argentina, a hyper-conservative bourgeois inauthentic 'London' identity and the indisputable fact that Oasis were better than Blur.

Building on Roland Barthes' work on plaisir and jouissance we introduce the terms and place them in the recognisably muddy grounding of association football. Featuring the importance of cheating to the sport, Luis Suarez winning the Jouissance World Cup, meta-game thinking and video game tickling, Darlington FC's world leading absurdist drama productions, the moribundly simplistic pleasure of Manchester United title triumphs, the shift from mob football to public school football, Beethoven wallpaper and a possible RSPCA investigation into animal cruelty.

In this episode we are joined by Mark Panton, who is researching the relationship between big football club's stadium redevelopments and the local communities affected by them. We discuss Tottenham Hotspur's ongoing attempts to build a bigger stadium amidst local protests about housing and facilities, how their plans contrast with Arsenal's earlier development (itself controversial), Liverpool's 'tinning up' of local homes & the issue of 'state aid' in East Manchester and beyond. More deeply, we consider how positive community relations can be a source of pride for a football club beyond the myopic obsession with success on the pitch. Finally, we turn to the flipside of stadia redevelopment - where smaller clubs' grounds are at risk from developers, looking at the example of Dulwich Hamlet's Champion Hill and a supporters' attempt to have it listed as an Asset of Community Value.

In this episode we are joined by freelance journalist Harry Stopes to discuss changes in the policing of football fans over the last thirty years. We look at policing's role in the wider changes in football and the representation of football fan culture. Furthermore, we consider the links between this and the policing of political protests and even the gentrification of urban spaces.

We look at the current fashion for football tactics amongst fans of the game, arguing that by concentrating relentlessly on this technocratic minutia of a multifaceted sporting culture it ignores the wider social aspects of the game that have been so compromised over the last three decades. Indeed, this cheerleading for efficiency threatens to further accelerate football towards the contradiction of non-competitiveness.

This week we turn to the worlds of lost possibilities by asking a series of counterfactuals about English football. Expect stuff on Manchester United's Glazernomics, Wimbledon's move to Milton Keynes, the differences between the Football League and non-league and the elite destruction of the game's collective structure. Guest appearance from the X893 supercomputer.

We attend the recent football ticket price protest outside the Premier League headquarters. Features voxpops with fans and our own thoughts. Can the protest work? Is there scope for a wider political fan movement? And how does English football culture compare to the likes of Germany and, most topically, Istanbul and Brazil?