Inside the Grafters' game: An ethnographic examination of football's underground economy

Abstract

As the official football (soccer) economy has rapidly and globally grown to become one of sports' richest commercial engines, so too has its unofficial, or black, economy expanded. This article provides an insider account of some of the key features of football's black market, with a particular emphasis on ticket touting (scalping), fakery, forgery, and the murky independent travel business. In doing so, it provides a window into the deviant occupational subculture, lives, and lifestyles of the "grafters"-those characters who inhabit and make their living in this underground world. It concludes by locating the "grafters' game" in the wider context of the post-1980s urban-industrial landscape of Britain and theorizes the subculture in terms of classical and contemporary theories of deviance. © 2007 Sage Publications.