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:
“A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.”
—Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)