The demonisation of football fans is a class issue, and if the left fail to tackle it, the far-right stands to win, writes Sean O’Neill.
Following a football team is for so many of us a way of life. This is no truer anywhere than in Scotland, where the ecstasy and the agony of football are revelled in by the highest crowds per capita in Europe. Getting a good result at the weekend brings an inexplicable feeling of collective joy. A bad result has you dreading a slaughtering from certain workmates come Monday morning.
But one person’s way of life is another’s way of making money. The game is a business based on the financial exploitation of fans because our support for clubs – unlike other businesses – involves a deep emotional entanglement in a sense of community and identity stretching back generations. It makes no difference to me which supermarket I buy a loaf of bread from. But the idea of following another football team than your own – as a purely transactional relationship or a fleeting taste, as if we were customers – is unthinkable. How easily our loyalty can be taken advantage of if it will always be there. As a result, football fans line the pockets of domestic and, increasingly, foreign capitalists alike.
So it’s not just the ordinary punter that football matters a great deal to. It’s the owner class: the board of directors, the shareholders, the gambling and TV monopolies. The whole profit-making machine rests on the fact that working people’s wages will continue to be poured into it, year on year. And what do we get in return? Shafted by inflated ticket prices. Demonised by the mainstream media and the politicians. Repressed by the police.
That is why, in towns and cities across Scotland, football fans are uniting to demand a fairer deal from the authorities. In the final weeks of the professional league season, fourteen ultras groups coordinated displays at SPFL matches across the country and released a joint statement launching the ‘Fairer Deal for Fans’ campaign. It gives voice to the overwhelmingly positive impact of organic support culture, which generates atmosphere at games and builds solidarity in communities through food bank drives and mental health initiatives. The statement also calls out clickbait headlines, the misrepresentation of working class fans, and the return in recent times of heavy-handed policing.
As if to prove their point, The Herald’s chief sportswriter Matthew Lindsay declared on May 17th that ‘Scotland’s ultras aren’t working class heroes – too many are still fucking peasants’. Lindsay’s reaction demonstrated to the wider public two things football fans of all colours have been conscious of for some time. First, the Scottish mainstream media retains a deeply rooted class bias against us. Journalists like Lindsay don’t care to conceal this disdain. In fact it’s their brand. The second, related point is that when we start to set aside our own rivalries and work in combination to realise mutual aims, it provokes the most bitter reaction from these quarters.
This was proven during the years of the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Act (OBFA) of 2011, a piece of reactionary SNP government legislation designed to criminalise fans. It was predicated on a moral panic about fan behaviour that was largely manufactured by the government and media. Under the smokescreen of tackling sectarianism — for which laws already existed — the hated Act empowered police to intimidate, harass, detain and arrest any fan they decided was displaying “offensive behaviour”. In applying only to the football supporter and no other group in society, it was inherently discriminatory. Its repeal in 2018 came after years of extra-parliamentary action, including creative messaging in the stands and the streets.
But this idea of the football fan as a folk devil is still stubborn in the minds of the ruling class, whose ideas rule the epoch accordingly. Take for example John Swinney’s snobbish refusal to entertain ending the ban on alcohol sales at the football. The alcohol ban only applies to people of a certain class. Rugby fans can get a pint in the stadium no problem. And if you sit among the corporate class in the director’s box at the football, you get to enjoy all the complimentary drinks and champagne receptions a person could ask for. That’ll wash down the prawn sandwiches!
Seven years on from the popular repeal of the OBFA, why does this misrepresentation of fans as criminals who can’t have nice things remain so potent? Where does this notion that we can’t be trusted to have a drink without causing a rammy come from? It can be traced back to the emergence of the casuals in the late 1970s and 1980s, who enjoyed fashion and a fight as much as the football. The scene provided an outlet for young working class men to express a new form of collective identity as labour power was being hacked away with the dismantling of traditional industry. Aberdeen, for example, was hit hard by job losses in the oil industry in this period and was home to one of the foremost groups of casuals in Britain. The violent reputation of football fans stuck, with countless films and media portrayals reinforcing it in the decades since.
More contemporary insights can be drawn from the work of the social researcher Gavin Brewis. With the postmodernist turn in academia and the infamous ‘end of history’ thesis, the idea that capitalism had solved the problems of history – and that therefore Marx was wrong, and class struggle was dead – began to flourish. With it, so did conservative perspectives, writes Brewis, around behaviours, dress, accents and attitudes. The notion of the ‘underclass’ became paradoxical. It could no longer be treated as a class issue and shifted towards being (mis)understood as a behavioural issue, signalling for Brewis a return to Social Darwinist thought. This went hand in hand with the ‘War on Neds’ through the Antisocial Behaviour Act (2004).
Brewis’ analysis provides a grounding on which to understand later developments. With the rise of ultra culture in Scotland in the late 2000s came the need to repress a new underclass whose offensive behaviour could not be tolerated. In essence, it was the same social group being targeted and whose lives would be ruined by criminal charges, broken relationships and job insecurity: young men from schemes. The war on football fans through the OBFA came from a warped logic that originated in the denial of class, and at the same time from a socially backward view of working class youth as a group determined to behave badly, who must be corrected by the full force of the state, for our own good.
Such attitudes create a permissive environment for the police to campaign for more powers, as the Scottish Police Federation is doing today. Under austerity 2.0 the police feel starved of resources at the frontline, like any other agency, statutory or voluntary. Any opportunity to demand more resources must be taken. This might explain the kettling of a large group of supporters in Glasgow before the Celtic v Rangers match on March 16th. These scenes replayed the unprovoked riot control tactics that sparked mass public outrage over the treatment of fans at the height of the OBFA. No wonder the police operation that enforced additional Section 60 stop-and-search powers was immediately hailed a success. It was an audition. History will repeat itself again, and it is better to act now than react later.
If we don’t, very soon the far right will latch onto burgeoning issues around football as a vehicle for white-nationalist identity politics. The former BNP and Patriotic Alternative activist Kenny Smith, now Chair of the ‘sensible nationalist’ Homeland Party, tweeted the following on May 24:
‘Football meant a lot more to many of us when the teams on the pitch represented their local areas, with players we knew had a connection with the supporters. Many of them lived, shopped, ate and drank in the same places we did. Only 191 English lads played this season in the Premier League out of 599! I hadn’t considered it before, but another benefit of remigration is that it would improve sporting opportunities for our youngsters!’
It is only a matter of time before the more mainstream elements of the far right try to hijack the popular potential of issues around football as well. The message of ‘reclaiming our game’ could quite easily be bastardised by the likes of Reform UK and deployed as further ammunition in the culture war. The far right has gone to that well historically, from the days of National Front recruitment drives at the football through to the English Defence League’s lineage in football firms. All this is personified in Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who reinvented himself as Tommy Robinson to better appeal to football casuals as one of their own.
The Fairer Deal for Fans campaign can play a decisive role in outmanoeuvring these white-nationalists, by re-positioning ordinary football supporters at the forefront of class struggle. All trade unionists and like-minded people should get behind this campaign. The trades councils – as links between the workplace and the community – are organically placed to agitate around these issues and to offer our experience of grassroots struggle to the supporters’ movement. In turn this could help make the official trade union movement more immediately relevant to our class in a wider sense. The Glasgow Trades Council public meeting ‘Reclaim the Working People’s Game!’ on May 9th was a small step in this direction. We heard from a GMB shop steward in the Tennent’s brewery on the campaign against the alcohol ban, Fans Against Criminalisation on police repression, the Well Society on fan ownership of clubs, and Fans Supporting Foodbanks on fighting poverty in our communities.
There is a tendency among left intellectuals to dismiss football as a distraction that dumbs down the worker, dilutes class consciousness and derails unity. The defeat of the OBFA in 2018 showed that the total opposite can be true. With the emergence of a new front in the supporters’ movement in 2025, fan issues are being popularised as class issues once more.
Sean O’Neill is a GMB shop steward in Glasgow City Council and a member of the Glasgow Trades Council executive committee.