Status Anxiety | 9 February 2008

As an angry young man in the 1990s, I used to get extremely irritated when I read articles by left-wing intellectuals in the London Review of Books about football. To my jaundiced eye, it was a feeble attempt to shore up their credentials as men of the people. Back in those days, football was still a predominantly working-class sport and, as such, was frequently hijacked by middle-class poseurs in the hope that its ‘authenticity’ — key Nineties word — might rub off on them.

How distant that period seems now. Today, if a middle-class novelist wrote about his unswerving devotion to Arsenal — about how he had gone to every match this season, including the Champions League game in Prague — we would instantly suspect him of trying to big himself up. The implication would be that he enjoyed a substantial private income — or, at the very least, knew one of the club’s shareholders.