Football

The People’s Game Still? Games under the Shadow of Giants Part Two Gerry Hassan April 12th 2012 The story goes like this. Scottish football has always been about Celtic and Rangers. Live with it. Get used to it. This is increasingly the way of the world: oligopoly, closed competition, success following money. Leaving aside the early days of the Scottish game this perspective invites pessimism and fatalism. And funnily enough it isn’t true. The economic, social and cultural forces of Scotland from Victorian times onwards favoured the dominance of Celtic and Rangers from the moment the game professionalised.

Continue Reading The People’s Game Still? Games under the Shadows of Giants

Continue Reading The People’s Games Still? The State of Scottish Football

The Scotland of a Different Generation and The Last Game of ‘the 42’ Part Two Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, January 18th 2012 The whole day out to Peterhead was enjoyable and entertaining and made me reflect. This was a warm, sociable group of Celtic fans. There were no pub bores or people who dominated the conversation of the whole bus. There was leadership, organisation and a culture of soft collective discipline. Some of the songs being sung on the way up wouldn’t pass the Offensive Behaviour Act 2011. But what do I make of that? Singing of the hunger

Continue Reading The Scotland of a Different Generation and The Last Game of ‘the 42’

Football, Friendship and ‘the 42’ Part One Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, January 17th 2012 Many things matter to Scots: politics, culture, religion, the list is endless and varied. But to many nothing matters more in life than one thing: football or more accurately, their football club. In the last few years myself and my best friend Eddie have undertake a tour of the Scottish 42 football teams, from the big grounds of the Scottish Premier League (SPL) to the once big teams making up Division One, and the struggling minnows of the lower divisions. Nearly all human life

Continue Reading Football, Friendship and ‘the 42’

Argentina’s Dilemmas have Lessons for Scotland Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, July 30th 2011 For most of the last two weeks I have been located in Buenos Aires and its surrounding areas. This would seem at first glance to be as far from Scotland as you could imagine, excluding the ghosts of Ally’s Tartan Army of 1978. I was there for the Copa America football tournament, which saw the favourites Argentina and Brazil knocked out, and Uruguay’s free-flowing football triumph. Argentina in many respects felt very different. In the world of football, there was the celebratory nature of opposing fans,

Continue Reading Argentina’s Dilemmas have Lessons for Scotland

Rising Now and Being Four Nations Again! Gerry Hassan The Guardian Comment is Free, June 24th 2011 The Olympics are coming to London and apparently it has been decreed by the high-heiduns of the British Olympic Association (BOA) that there will be a ‘Team GB’ taking to the football field. They insist this has absolutely nothing to do with their 1.7 million unsold tickets which went on sale this morning, mostly for football, or the losses they think they can cover with ‘Team GB’ replica strips. The Olympics aren’t really about football, so you could say does

Continue Reading Rising Now and Being Four Nations Again!

It’s Only a Game: ‘Team GB’, Football and the Nature of the UK Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, June 22nd 2011 The story of the ‘Team GB’ football project entering next year’s Olympics has been rumbling on for a few years. Some people will think this is a sideshow and only about the game of football, but instead it goes to the heart of what the UK, who runs it, and how it is seen internationally. ‘Team GB’s’ role in the 2012 London Olympics was lauded by the British Olympic Association’s (BOA) claim of ‘a historic agreement’ with the other

Continue Reading It’s Only a Game: ‘Team GB’, Football and the Nature of the UK

A Tale of Two Scotlands Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, May 18th 2011 The last two weeks in Scotland have given many of us a glimpse of a different kind of land, one filled with light, hope, optimism and possibilities. And the weather was even nice for a while. It isn’t an accident that it has been called by myself and others, ‘a Scottish Spring’, but we always need to be careful not to transpose our own hopes onto wider political and national canvases. The turnout at the Scottish Parliament elections was just over 50%, and in parts of Glasgow,

Continue Reading A Tale of Two Scotlands

Scotland’s Shame Deniers and the Silence of Men Gerry Hassan Open Democracy. March 7th 2011 The power and pull of Scottish football reaches into every nook and cranny of Scottish society for good and ill. It obsesses us, transfixes us and blinds us to addressing so many things in our country. The most recent Celtic v Rangers game has shown that football has a life force of its own which takes over most of Scotland: three Rangers players sent off, 13 yellow cards, the Celtic manager and Rangers assistant in a bitter exchange, hundreds of arrests, and the number of

Continue Reading Scotland’s Shame Deniers and the Silence of Men

That Sinking Feeling: England against the World Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, December 4th 2010 The backlash has now begun in earnest about England not getting the World Cup in 2018. This tells us much about our southern neighbours, how they see themselves and the world, and are in turn seen. And about how the new global order of the 21^st century is evolving. First things first. I had wanted England to win the right to host the World Cup because I recognise that England – like Scotland is a nation with deep footballing traditions. I also have impatience with knee

Continue Reading That Sinking Feeling: England against the World