Diagnosing The English Disease: The Culture Division meets Sam Diss
In his gripping new podcast series The English Disease, writer and creative director Sam Diss maps out his 10-year obsession with the topic, unravels the nuances of a watershed cultural movement, and offers a fresh perspective on the people it left behind.
It takes years for an idea to germinate, and one demented, early-hours, stream of consciousness email to bring it to life.
At least it did for Sam Diss, whose podcast series The English Disease ossified his decade-long flirtation with one of those back-of-your-mind conceptions that so often fade into abstraction.
“I read it back a couple of weeks ago,” he tells me, referring to the email he sent to the producers at Stak that ignited this whole journey. “It was genuinely like I’d cornered you at a party.”
“But…” he reflects, “you could feel the energy in it.”
Rightfully showered in plaudits since its conclusion, the six-part documentary effortlessly weaves together the anthropological origins and modern misnomers of – as the opening soundbite signals – England’s two favourite pastimes: football and fear.
The English Disease, the myth-making moniker that categorised an entire generation of football violence across the second-half of the 20th century, is not an unmined subject. Immortalised in cinema, on the troublemaker-turned-author ‘celebrity hooligan’ circuit, in fashion, and even in academia, hooliganism is a visceral part of English football’s identity.
But in stepping outside of his usual storytelling medium, Diss, an accomplished writer and brand strategist by trade, was eager to ensure a base level of authenticity.
“I wanted to make something that felt naturalistic, that was open to the messiness of life, rather than this very clean narrative,” he explains. “I think there’s an intimacy and a texture to audio storytelling.”
And in searching for that authenticity, Sam stumbled upon a story that pulled at a number of the topic’s most important threads: his own. “It’s funny because that wasn’t the way we planned it at all,” he admits. “I must’ve driven my producers fucking mental.”
For anyone who’s spent the last decade-or-so navigating football’s gradual slide towards endless greed and perpetual self-consumption, examining that shared sense of inertia – through the lens of his own disillusionment as a West Ham fan – is an easy entry point to the series.
“It became a chance to reckon with its personal impact on me: where I’m from, my own ideas of masculinity, community, family, history – all these big ideas…” he pauses, before asking: “Why is it that I feel this way?”
Like a sort-of emotional Sword of Damocles, his contemplation of those big ideas and their personal impacts flashes up sporadically throughout the series, as Sam pilots the listener through a vastly complex subject matter.
“‘What is The English Disease, and can it be cured?’ is the question I started out with. Everything in this subject is so much more complicated than people would have you believe,” he states, passionately mapping the topic. “Hooliganism is a scourge on British football. But to the people who were involved, it was the best days of their lives. Football clubs like to pretend it never happened, but also, these were the people that built the cultures from which they now profit.”
Regurgitating the iconography of those days has become regular practice for clubs and brands alike, reducing down what was once a vessel for identity into a piece of commerce or a marketing campaign.
“Look at the ceremonial aspects of it all,” Sam continues. “The clobber, the songs, the ‘we meet here’, ‘this is our pub’... it’s performance art. It’s a way to make sense of the world.”
But decades on, as old realities have shifted and meaning becomes murkier, where does that leave the people who used to embody that identity, or those who crave a modern iteration of it?
“As much as we might want [in football] a return to tradition and community and ideas like these, they are ultimately just ideas,” Sam explains. “They’re subject to manipulation, nostalgia, rose-tinted glasses.”
As the communities from which these football movements spawned become maligned and isolated, victim to a political practice of managed decline, the call of society’s more fringe and sinister corners becomes ever more alluring.
Parallel to this vague sense of loss has been the fanning of culture war flames by the far-right, which benefits from the swapping of one identity – one ‘tribe’ – for another. As The English Disease unravels, weaponising that slide has been an effective modus operandi. Despite attending a rally for St. George’s Day, navigating a polarising election cycle and a violent inflection point in Southport, a WhatsApp group for football banter – Football Lads United – became the best encapsulation of this mood.
In the journey of Sam’s story, this swirling vortex of complicated madness represented something far more significant.
“I wanted to know what the impulse of that group represented,” he explains. “I can’t speak for them all, but a lot of the people that I saw in there are just… lonely. Their human yearning for connection was being manipulated into something darker, mobilising their tribal loyalty and nationalism into something completely destructive.”
Where most mainstream commentary on the phenomena of football violence and the far-right falls into the trap of treating people as a monolith, The English Disease decisively does not.
“I don’t believe any of these people are evil. I believe they’re scared and wrong, and they think this thing will fix their fear,” Sam says affirmatively. “I think a lot of these feelings come from a feeling of isolation, of alienation. And naturally, in lieu of actual answers, people gravitate towards the things that make them feel heard.”
What shapes the direction of travel in the series is a compelling cast of characters: a motley crew of former faces – some more eager to double-down on the halcyon days of their youth than others, an expert on working class culture, a whimsical Whatsapp admin, and even, in a heartwarming finale, Sam’s old man.
“I really wanted to be very understanding of the individuals, and ruthless with the powers that create them.”
Guiding his guests through the profound themes of their past lives – masculinity, violence, class – in a way that colours our ability to empathise with who they are, as human beings, is perhaps Sam’s greatest achievement.
“Ultimately, I wanted to make something that felt like it was an article that had come to life,” he explains. Being led by his instincts as a writer was something he leaned into. On the series’ early success: widespread acclaim, a consistent climber of the podcast listening charts, and a general appreciation by those who know that he did the topic justice, Sam reverts to modesty.
“We’re so often taught to aim low to get the most eyeballs. But if you do something that feels true to what you actually want to make, it will find people,” he continues, circling back to the whole reason this thing came into being: one decade-long obsession, and one demented email.
Listen to The English Disease on Apple, Spotify or Acast.
Discover more of Sam’s work here.
