Skin in the game: diasporic spaces, psychogeographies, and genealogies within Liverpool’s racialised football cultures, 1878-1981

Jawad, Hyder (2023) Skin in the game: diasporic spaces, psychogeographies, and genealogies within Liverpool’s racialised football cultures, 1878-1981. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

The triadic relationship between Liverpool, its football culture, and the city’s black/black mixed-heritage communities was, from the birth of codified sports in the late-Victorian era up to and including the flashpoint of the “Toxteth Riots” in 1981, one of anxiety and hostility. Liverpool is the site of Britain’s oldest indigenous black communities and one of its largest black mixed-heritage populations. It is also the site of a global football stronghold, with its two main clubs, Everton FC and Liverpool FC, becoming among the richest, most successful, and most popular in the world. And yet, Liverpool’s principal football institutions, predominantly white, were among the last in Britain to incorporate black/black mixed-heritage players and spectators into the local game’s mainstream. The history of Liverpool’s black/black mixed-heritage football communities, who suffered from the city’s informal apartheid systems and colour bars, is one of isolation, segregation, racism and resistance. Indeed, Stephen Small contends that “...Liverpool stands out as an anomaly in the mapping of ‘racialised relations’ and the black experience in England”, stemming from “extreme residential segregation, a powerful white local sentiment and insular identity, and extremely virulent ‘racialised’ hostility”. By examining the tensions emanating from the city’s dysfunctional associations with its black/black mixed-heritage football communities, this thesis contributes to knowledge about Liverpool’s historically fraught racialised relations. It argues primarily that Liverpool’s football culture developed along geographical and diasporic lines, born of the city’s role as a geo-political and geo-economic maritime bastion. It also argues that Liverpool’s informal apartheid system– buttressed by both de jure and de facto methods of segregation; enhanced by racialised vernaculars and propaganda – structured the city’s football culture into a mainly white, proletarian/lower middle-class, Protestant/Catholic creation separate from, and often at the expense of, its black/black mixed-heritage communities

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