A Study On The Influence Of British Football On Urban Culture

The article focuses on the influences of British football on urbanculture by applying Cultural Analysis and Comparative Sociology method, exploringthe ways via which soccer exerts impacts on urban culture and elaborating the realmsand results of the impacts. Football as the most popular sport in the world wasoriginated in city, and has been played a vital role in urban culture development.Football also as particular means is capable of fusing different cultures, aggregatingdecentralized cultures and thus forming common culture concepts and beliefs of the city.In other words, variant urban cultures cohere through football which meanwhilepromotes culture construction of the city. However, this newly-emerging research onfootball and city culture has not been carried forward vigorously until recent years.Therefore, this paper is of great significance.Considering the UK as the birthplace of modern football and the fact of football’slong history and rich cultural heritage in the country, it’s become the biggest and theonly sport that influences tremendously on British society and cities. On the other hand,the UK with such a long history has created unique football culture features at the timeof enriching urban culture research by its own cultural heritage. Therefore, as theprimary study object in the project, Britain has significance of typical demonstration.The article also focuses on representative cities with great research value in Englandand Scotland, and conclusions have been drawn as below:(1) Modern football origins from Britain, leading to a consistently converged andinteractive relationship between British soccer sporting and cities. City breed the soccersports, which in turn throb by relying on the cities. Therefore, there is no doubt thaturban culture would affect the formation of soccer sporting. The charm of British socceris that despite being a sub-system of urban culture as well as a subculture, this sport hasstill managed to mingle into the mainstream culture of British society and, on top of that,significantly influenced the formation and construction of British urban culture.(2) In the study of the ways and carrier of football affecting British urban culture,the author found that football penetration of urban culture was achieved from four ways,i.e. urban community culture, football fans culture, the national football museum andfans club and league. The article first mentioned that football combines the cohesion ofurban community culture and sense of belonging. Secondly football is the platform forthe fan culture, it reflects on the cultural characteristics of the fans enthusiasm andloyalty. Moreover, British democratic culture is strengthened by the free fan culture.Although football hooligans as negative urban cultural features in the UK have always been ‘tumor’ of British cities, they are worthy of our attention and reminding us that thepositive effect of football can be revealed only if we overcome the negatives. Thirdly,football club and museum as enrichment and sublimation of urban football culture andhistory have become the symbol of city. Forthly, football league promote developmentof the city from aspects of economy, education, etc..(3) The main results of football’s affections on urban culture are summed as:gentlemen features of football help stabilize the national spirit, multi-ethnic featureshelp to add the multi-cultural characteristics of the city. In addition, football easesopposing religious contradictions on the pitch, coordinates and integrates variantreligious beliefs in the city. Surely football has substantially become an essentialelement of enhancing city core value and belongings, and further improves the softpower of urban culture.