| Sumario: | This article examines the emergent cultural format of the British footballer's autobiography between the 1940s and 1960s, as a case study into how tensions in the post-war settlement evolved and were narrated. It argues that star footballers' efforts to maximise their earning potential—in tandem with publishers and sportswriters—created a new cultural space within which they functioned as authoritative narrator-hero, charged with negotiating and explaining their economic world to readers. Players' autobiographies advocated lifting restrictions on their pay and freedom of employment, against the backdrop of partial integration of British professional football into European labour markets and international competition. The article thus illustrates how popular cultural formats, amid the increasing expansion of British cultural industries, facilitated the pluralisation and evolution of dominant modes of perception during the post-war period, in ways that at least partly challenged dominant modes of political economy in football and more broadly.
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