Thanks everyone for your info, reminisces and opinions. It's interesting and invaluable in terms of this project.
For those wondering why Uni researchers are investigating this, (and suggesting it's a waste of tax-payers money
, then I'm happy to reassure you that this project is not funded by any sort of public money. As per my sports statues work (
sportingstatues.com) and our football shirts research, it has involved very little money, and where some has been required, it's funded from statistics training courses I have run. Neither are these football-related projects my day job - nor Joe's or Nick's - it's essentially a hobby project, with both academic and hopefully some more populist outputs. We are doing it cos' we all love football, and are curious about the culture and history of the game, and what it can say about wider society. My day job is doing the statistics for far more orthodox and obviously worthy projects to do with the workplace, health, well-being - and training people to analyse data properly. Nick is a teacher and Joe has just finished his undergraduate degree.
In terms of the aims of/ideas behind this particular project, there's the what and when - the preserving history angle in terms of the music used, when it changed - and also the why... we're keen to see how changes in style, type of music used relate to a club's status, wider music fashions, the wider fashionability of football, how clubs have attempted to commodify the match going experience, the balance of localism and globalisation.
cheers
Chris Stride, University of Sheffield