ADRIAN GOLDBERG'S TALK SHOW #2 - ROGAN TAYLOR

6/12/2017

"What drives the business of football is, it sells suffering. Loving football is about pain" Typically provocative words from Rogan Taylor who I first met in 1985 when I interviewed him for the first edition of my football fanzine Off The Ball. That summer, in the wake of the Heysel Tragedy, he had founded the Football Supporters Association, a hugely influential campaigning fans' organisation. In 1997, he created the first university course for graduates who wanted a career in the game - the Football Industries MBA at Liverpool University which still attracts recruits from all over the world. Here, in typically entertaining fashion, he offers a fascinating reflection on the changing role of supporters over the past three decades.

FULL INTERVIEW HERE https://soundcloud.com/user-162001833/rogan-taylor-on-fans-and-football-1

1 Comment

Tim Baber link

29/9/2019 02:00:10 pm

In 1986 Rogan Taylor then at Lancaster Uni wrote "The Death and Resurrection show" about how the traditional shaman entertainers preceded the mass media and even religion with a mix of scripts that mesmerised, ecstat-ified and later on more and more traumatised the groups they entertained. This ancient pre lkiterate tradition has continued apace and now the mass media openly, covertly and sublimnally can disinfect our minds with inhibitors and disinhibotors on the form of powerful memes, tropes and motifs from a very big song book. He knows this, and my alerts to him seem to have modified the innocence of his book it was the ecsatic that ruled the roost. Now he is saying pain. I totally agree. Should you, dear reader, look at the TV schedules I defy u to not find a content analysis of trauma real, imagined or subliminal that is around or exceeds 80% of total material broadcast. I have an artworked poem that talks of the ..struggle and the joy...of life. That sums up life and football, but both by design have more trauma in them than ecstasy, something we all need to alter, lest we forget our goals. In football we are watching a gladiatorial fight between what is good and what is bad. The ecstatic was always a wild card in the deck whilst trauma is more easily calibrated and targeted and measured for its overwhelming mind control, never mind ball control.
While I am on this topic a book "Target Sports in Games" or similar by a Vicar argued football as a folk memory of the Romans. When they won the battle three spears would be erected (the goal) and the losers would have to walk through this arch of slavery or be killed on the spot. That is football That is mind control. When we see the faux combat of great teams playing we are seeing a tantalus of pleasure set against a counterploy of pain. Rogan has it exactly right. Desmond Morris wrote a great book about football and hinted at the self same obstacles to our complete enjoyment. Effort, reward, misplaced trust, slavery to a cause, facing the wrongs and rights of others, the falsifying gambles and games people play as fans, are all mechanisms we know and yet accept evidenced in league tables a Roman Senator would seek to achieve for his people.

ADRIAN GOLDBERG'S TALK SHOW #2 - ROGAN TAYLOR

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