NEW DIRECTORS, CUSTOMERS, AND FANS - THE TRANSFORMATION OF ENGLISH FOOTBALL IN THE 1990S

In the 1990s, English professional football has undergone rapid and ma rked changes with the restructuring of the Football League, the signin g of new and lucrative television contracts, the construction of all-s eater stadiums, and the growing involvement of progressive entrepreneu rial capitalists-the new directors-in the game. This article examines one element of those transformations; the political use which the new directors have made of the concept of the the customer. The article ar gues that the use of this term has been important to the transformatio n of the relation between the fan and the clubs, facilitating and legi timating the profit-making projects of the new directors. Drawing on t he tradition of dialectical critical theory derived from Mannheim and Adorno, the article submits this notion of the customer critique to de monstrate its deliberate partiality and its intensely political nature .