Professional football and local identity in the ‘golden age’: Portsmouth in the mid-twentieth century

The idea that professional football clubs and their supporters are material and cultural expressions of the local has assumed axiomatic status in the academic literature without anything like the depth of empirical evidence that might be expected. Moreover, social trends and changes in the organization of professional football have gone some way to severing these sorts of links between football clubs and their localities. This article presents detailed historical evidence of the complex and multiple local identities surrounding the production and consumption of professional football in Portsmouth, England, in the late 1940s and early 1950s – a period commonly regarded as the ‘golden age’ of football in Britain.