Clapton Community Football Club is a very special member-owned club in East London, just two Tube stops east of West Ham United. Its members saved its own ground, rebuilt it, host workshops on how to monitor police violence in the neighborhood, will host St Pauli’s women’s team from Germany in a few weeks - and have very good reasons for why they do not want to play too high up in the league pyramid.
Kevin Blowe, one of the a club's longest-standing officeholders and current treasurer, talked to me at the famous Old Spotted Dog Ground, London's oldest senior football ground, about the place, the club and the people that make it an unusual and heady and fun and beautiful place to love soccer: member-run, committedly political, community oriented, and rooted in the history of this part of East London. We recorded outside, in the stands, which gets you a good sense of the place I hope, and we’ll give you an audio tour - but it also means you don’t have studio quality, though the audio giot considerably better with mastering. I trust that is fine.
HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Clapton CFC, official website
Clapton CFC on twitter
Clapton CFC on YouTube, incl. games
Old Spotted Dog Ground, website of the trust, with photos of the ground
"Clapton CFC: How Our Antifascist Football Shirts Found a Global Audience," The Guardian, September 2018
"The Contested Legacy of the Antifascist International Brigades," Guardian, October 2020
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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind
Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/