The game’s gone! Nostalgia and the affective politics of modern English football

Echoed across terraces, as well as traditional and digital media, the phrase, ‘game’s gone’, has emerged as a pervasive refrain within contemporary English football discourse. This article argues that its force lies in articulating the contradictory structure of nostalgia under late capitalism. While this functions to reveal the ambivalences of contemporary spectatorship, wherein critique and complicity become structurally intertwined, it is through drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis that the article conceptualises nostalgia as an affective fantasy sustained by a constitutive lack, or a longing for a past that never existed. This fantasy oscillates between restorative appeals to tradition as well as paranoid convictions that the game has been ‘stolen’ by institutional or geopolitical Others. Ultimately, the article contends that the significance of the ‘game’s gone’ refrain lies not in its historical accuracy, but in its capacity to articulate and enjoy the contradictions underwriting the affective politics of contemporary football.