David Goldblatt Meet the Author

is not likely to be discovered up the chimney in decades to come. That

is a great story. Now on BBC News it's time

for Meet the Author. David Goldblatt is a writer,

journalist, sociologist And last month he won the ?27,000

William Hill Sports Book The Game Of Our Lives:

The Meaning And Making Of English Football is a brilliant cultural

history of what has happened to football - not just in England,

but in Wales, Scotland, David Goldblatt, you stake a claim

for football at the beginning You compare it to religion,

to the theatre, to music, to soap operas,

and you say it beats them all. About a million people

are going to the Church of England services, on a weekly basis,

but three quarters of a million are going to professional football

on a weekly basis and that is not taking into account the great

hinterland of playing Moreover, nobody is running home

after the Church of England to catch If you want collective

ecstasy, which is of course part of the religious

experience, that makes something spiritual, OK, Protestant

evangelical churches are doing their best

in this country, but simply nothing can compare to,

at its best, at its loudest, the collective ecstasy

of football clubs and One of the points

you make in the book is that in many cities now

the football club is just about the last remaining

expression of sort of We have such an extraordinarily

overcentralised system That local government,

once upon a time the centre of local pride, authority and

distinctiveness, has Distinctive local traditions,

local retailers, major local industries have often

been bought up by foreign The media is fabulously

centralised in this country. Football remains one

of the most distinct, sometimes, as you say,

the only representative of a neighbourhood of civic identity

of any significant culture. What you have done in

this book is you have looked at the way the game has

developed, since the 1980s, and the arrival, of

course, of the Premier And enormous amounts

of television money, and the upside is that the Premier

League in particular, and football generally,

has got a lot richer. The stadiums have gotten

more comfortable, safe. The football, you argue,

has got better. Look on a thousand chat rooms

of a thousand football clubs. Everywhere you will see the same

disquiet, the atmosphere is not The average age of the Premier

League audience, in the stadiums, In the mid-1980s, from

what we can see of the data, Over a quarter of the stadium

would have been over 21. As a 50-year-old man,

I can tell you I am not the kind of person who makes

for the ecstasy, the atmosphere, You need to have the youth there,

and that is just one I mean, the idea that it is richer

is automatically a good Who is making more money -

the person that is having to stretch to pay for their season ticket

at Anfield or the person who is being paid through

some sort of offshore One of the eye opening

revelations about this is the extraordinary financial

state of many of the clubs. They have all this

money and yet enormous A lot of them go bust,

often more than once. What does that tell us

about the management and ownership I am not a great fan

of Sir Alan Sugar, but on this He described the economic

model of English football As fast as the money goes in,

it goes out the other way. Of course, these

are institutions that The idea, and we talked

as if football is a big business, but this

is completely absurd. The people who run football clubs

are not profit maximisers, They want as much good football,

and the status and coverage that comes with that, for their money

as they possibly can. Whether they make money or not

from the club itself is a matter One of the changes you do note,

one of the improvements, is that over racism

in the game - crowds chanting insults at black players and so on -

that has almost entirely gone but, you argue, there is still a lot

of institutional racism in a game. You know, football managers

in this country are drawn almost exclusively from

the ranks of ex-players. 25% of players over the last,

let's say a decade or so, are of mixed heritage or BME

heritage in England. They make up approximately one to 4%

of not just the managers but also the backroom coaching staff

of English football. Now, usually under representation

of Afro-Caribbeans and ethnic minorities in this

country can be accounted for by questions of

class, predominantly from a working-class background,

or without educational qualifications, but neither of these

things are a barrier to becoming Indeed, they are the sine qua

non in this country, to have those kind of

working-class roots. So I have to say, with 25%

of the labour force, and one to 4% of actual places

in the labour force, I mean, if that is not institutional

racism on the part of boards and chairpeople in this country,

I simply don't know what is. You are not only a writer

and a football fan. You're also something

of an activist. Earlier this year there

was something you were instrumental in cold the Football Action Network,

which was trying to apply pressure before the General Election to

improve football. Specifically with reference

to racism, but more generally, what would

you as an activist like to see happen, and do you believe

that it will happen? Well, I think, as with all things

in politics, you get what The Premiership model,

but over-commercialised model that we have now,

is actually just one amongst many ways of

organising football. I mean if I could just say

there was one thing that I wanted to change, I think we need to change

the legal status of football clubs. At the moment, they are treated

as any common or garden limited company, but I think the idea idea

that these things could be privately owned or unregulated

is simply absurd. You know, it is not

the stadium, because that Football clubs are the collective

creation of the fans The accumulated cultural capital

of narratives and meanings invested in that club, without

which the whole thing is meaningless The idea that that kind

of collective cultural capital can be bought and owned, by anyone -

be they foreign or not - seems to me completely absurd

and a category mistake. And these institutions need

to be legally protected. So that they cannot be

treated the way in which David Goldblatt, thank

you very much indeed. This weekend the weather is going to

be a little bit mixed. Then again, when is it not? The north of the

country, certainly know the wells, northern England into some whale --

rain, possibly