The Premiership’s founding coincided with and destroyed working-class football culture.

Evidence

If the brave new world wouldn’t arrive for the working class, it did arrive for Clough personally. Instead of being at the vanguard of a newly assertive working class, Clough’s period of greatest success coincided with the ebb tide of postwar proletarian collectivism. Clough was sometimes sneered at as a “champagne socialist” because he saw no contradiction between being a leftist and achieving success. Like many born poor, Clough was never able to fully believe that he had finally vanquished poverty from his life — hence, all those TV appearances, ghosted columns and the bung-rumours. In his review of The Damned United for the Guardian, Chris Petit argued that Clough “embodied many of the forthcoming dilemmas of Thatcher’s Britain, his career a constant argument between self-proclamation and partnership, between probity and the demon drink, between financial irregularity and the belief that football was about more than acquisition.” The Premiership terminated this, finally destroyed what was left of Clough’s crumbling world — a world in which working-class managers could outwit and overcome puffed-up patrician patriarchs, a world in which unfancied provincial clubs could outdo the established colossuses — and his final decline was all-too punctual. With Clough an ailing Lear at the helm, Forest were relegated in 1993, at the end of the Premier League’s first season. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1553

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s wider capitalist-realism thesis — the 1992 Premier League as an institution of marketization — evident across this whole book.
• SEED: A usable cultural-history angle: the Premier League’s 1992 launch as a punctual ruin of a working-class institution, using Clough’s decline as synecdoche.