Changing Football Culture
At the time the Spice Boys emerged, certain players like Lee Sharpe, Jamie Redknapp and Ryan Giggs had become icons in football already, and football stars had become idols on par with rock stars and pop stars, in and around the mid- to late 1990s. Though this trend has largely carried on and is normative in football these days and where it is common for modern day footballers to be associated with scandal, women and drinking culture, the reason why the Spice Boys are notable is largely down to the fact that they were doing this en masse in the public eye for the first time, and a good decade before concepts of footballers exploiting their fame, getting caught up in scandal and doing modelling became mainstream media material and widely accepted in football culture. The obsession with celebrity, fashion and hairstyles also raised a new side to footballers as icons, a decade before the era of the metrosexual and several years before the rise of David Beckham, and a decade before the rise of Cristiano Ronaldo and the era of the marketed footballing fashion icon.
Read more about this topic: Spice Boys (footballers)
Famous quotes containing the words changing, football and/or culture:
“It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general with their vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)