From fanzines to foodbanks: Football fan activism in the age of anti-politics

Introduction

This article analyses the changing nature of football fan activism over the last thirty years. It argues that a broader perspective, which encompasses the wider patterns of political (dis)engagement in the age of so-called anti-politics, should be adopted to adequately theorise the shift from a generally passive and apolitical supporter base to a more activist and politicised English football fandom. Notwithstanding that fan activists represent a ‘vocal minority’ amongst the wider population of ‘free riders’ (Olson, 1968), the article explores the trend from passivity to activism as well its wider significance for contemporary political participation. The conception of the ‘political’ constructed by most of the existing literature on fan activism is too narrow, tending to focus single case studies of club-fan relations (Cleland, 2010). But, football fan activism has shifted from an almost exclusive focus on football issues to a wider political agenda, with fan activists seeking to engage and build alliances with other groups and social movements. The article employs Numerato’s (2018) conceptual distinction of activism within and through football to highlight the increasing range of socio-political issues engaged with by activist football fans. We claim that the growing activism through football is becoming ideologically ‘thicker’ and has moved beyond largely symbolic gestures motivated by primarily material concerns (such as affordability) to engage in more ambitious campaigns to bring about social and political change. The article extends the literature on football fan activism (Millward, 2013; Numerato, 2018) by demonstrating that these emergent forms of grassroots fan activism are not only a countervailing reaction to the prevailing neoliberal political economy of football, but also a reflection of wider anti-political sentiment.

As we approach the 30th anniversary of the English Premier League (EPL), this represents an opportune time to reflect on how football fan activism, including its political dimensions, has evolved. The article explores the establishment of the EPL and its development into hyper-commercialised global product. While many of the economic forces, as well as the repertoires of fan activism in counteraction, pertain to other national leagues and contexts (especially European), the process of commodification has arguably advanced furthest in England (Numerato and Giulianotti, 2018: 344). We argue that this economic transformation of English football took place coterminously with the rise of anti-politics: the growing dissatisfaction with and alienation from traditional modes and arenas of representative democratic politics. More institutionalised forms of contemporary supporter activism have been driven by wider changes in political participation, as well as the commodification and globalisation of football. Synthesising the literature on relational sociology, social movement studies and anti-politics, the article sets the establishment of the EPL within a broader historical and political context.

The article offers a diachronic analysis of supporter activism within and through football. It posits the existence of three distinct phases of fan activism in the EPL era. The first period between 1992 and 2003 witnesses the consolidation of the fan networks and organisations (that emerged in the mid-1980s) to provide ‘cultural contestation’ (Jary et al., 1991) against the ascendant neoliberal logic of the EPL. This first period is covered extensively in the existing literature (King, 2002; Millward, 2011). This article extends that research through a more contemporary analysis of the evolution of fan movements across two temporal case studies of: ‘Love United, Hate Glazer’ and ‘Spirit of Shankly’ in 2004–2011; and ‘Fans Supporting Foodbanks’ (FSF) in 2015–21. Although there are lines of continuity throughout, we contend that this periodisation, characterising fan movements in three waves, helps to conceptualise the transition from activism within to through football in England.

The article traces the development of football fan activism through analysis of its coverage in the conventional media as well as fan-generated communication via football fanzines and social media platforms. This is supplemented by ten in-depth semi-structured interviews with key activists, conducted between June 2019 and June 2020 (via web conferencing software, as well as face-to-face), relating primarily to the contemporary post-2015 period. The research answers the following key question: how does the widening scope of football fan activism, in terms of its aims, repertoires of contention, and mobilisation, relate to the wider context of anti-politics over the last 30 years? The key contribution of the article is the analysis of the FSF case study, which serves an empirical referent for Numerato’s (2018) theory of activism through football and enables us to theorise fan activism within the broader context of anti-politics.

The article is organised into four main sections. The first places the establishment of the English Premier League into historical and socio-political context and highlights the key implications for the political economy of English football. The second section draws on the sociological theory of Manuel Castells to provide a conceptualisation of football fan activism. The third section offers ‘thick description’ of the two temporal case studies of fan activism under analysis: 2004–2011 and 2015–2021. The fourth and final section provides a multi-dimensional analysis of the central question regarding how and why football fans have become more politically active over the last thirty years. The article concludes with the claim that new project identities are emerging within football fandom and contends that it is an emerging space of political engagement and participation.

Money, Murdoch and movements: English football after 1992

On 18th May 1992 the English Premiership (later to be renamed the Premier League) was inaugurated. On that day in the Royal Lancaster Hotel, a deal worth £304 million was agreed with Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB for the rights to televise the Premier League for five years – a marked uplift on the previous terrestrial TV deal of £11 million (Penn and Penn, 2020). The breakaway league, in tandem with the advent of satellite broadcasting, has transformed the finances, culture and spatial scale of English football. Since 2013, the broadcast market has become more competitive with new entrants, such as BT and Amazon, forcing up the price of broadcasting rights (Beek et al., 2019). The domestic rights to show Premier League games over the three seasons from 2019 to 2022 was worth £4.8 billion to the EPL (Sweney, 2021). Since 1992, the EPL has transformed into a truly transnational media spectacle. Overseas broadcasting rights have come to represent a much larger proportion of the EPL’s overall revenue, rising from an initial £40 million for the first five seasons to a staggering £4.2 billion for the three seasons between 2019 and 2022 – an increase of over 10,000%. By 2019, EPL games were being broadcast to over 978 million homes in 188 countries (Premier League, 2019). The globalisation of the revenue streams in English football has been accompanied, and partially fuelled, by the rapid increase in the numbers of overseas players, management, and owners in the EPL (Millward, 2011).

The growing neoliberal logic of English football, involving the incremental decoupling of many EPL clubs from their traditional supporter base and communities, has provided the impetus for an increase in football fan activism since 1992 (García and Welford, 2015; Nash, 2001). Earlier fan movements, notably the Football Supporters Association (established in the wake of the 1985 Heysel disaster) and high-profile club-based campaigns – such as the protests against the Bond Scheme at Arsenal and West Ham in 1992 and the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association’s (IMUSA) fight against the BSkyB takeover in 1998–1999 – laid a template for future football activism. ¹ From 1985 onwards, fan activism, supported by a burgeoning network of football fanzines (Jary et al., 1991), was increasingly motivated ‘to protect a democratic ethic in football: its role, in other words, as a participatory, “people’s game”’ (Brown, 1998: 63). Writing in The Sunday Times, Peter Wilson noted that by the early to mid-1990s ‘fans emerge[d] as a political force in the game's future’ (Wilson, 1995).

The growing activism of football fans has taken place against a backdrop of increasing political and civic detachment. Since the early 1990s, there has been scholarly recognition of increasing public disengagement with traditional forms of ‘arena politics’, manifested in the notable decline of electoral turnout and party membership, and growing mistrust of politicians and key institutions (Hay, 2007; Pattie et al., 2003; Richards et al., 2019). A diverse body of literature, which identifies different drivers and alternative explanations for political disengagement, has come to coalesce around the term ‘anti-politics’ (Richards et al., 2019). In contrast to this narrative of decline, a range of scholars have highlighted the growth in new forms of political participation and activism (Inglehart, 2015/1977; Melucci, 1989; Norris, 1999), arguing that since the post-war period there has been a coinciding growth in engagement in public demonstrations and other modes of protest, such as signing petitions, boycotting products or companies, or joining new social movements (Marsh et al., 2007; Melucci, 1989). One feature of advanced democratic societies is the politicisation of areas of social and cultural life hitherto perceived as apolitical (or depoliticised). Sport, and English football, in particular, offers an example of such politicisation.

This article posits an iterative relationship between new forms of political activism within football and the wider context of anti-politics. It asserts that the shift to activism through, not just within, football on a range of socio-political issues reflects underlying changes in the nature of the British polity as well as the transformation in the political economy of English football. Key amongst these changes is the emergence of new political spaces, such as football, that serve as an anchor point around which to enact the key representative functions of liberal democracy (such as participation, linkage, integration, and aggregation) that other conventional institutions and actors – namely political parties – are failing to achieve in this era of anti-politics (Dommett and Rye, 2017). In doing so, the article explores how these emergent ‘mundane experiences of collective democracy’ can become embedded in people’s everyday lives (Lazar, 2008: 257) and offer an important case study of contemporary ‘post-tribal’ politics that operate ‘outside or beyond the established way of “doing politics”’ (Flinders, 2015: 254). The study of fan activism is therefore sociologically and politically important. Following Millward (2013) and Cleland et al. (2018), we draw on Castells (2000, 2009, 2010) to theorise how collective action by football fans is reflective of the changing nature of social relations in the ‘network society’.

Football fandom in the network society

At the core of the Castells’ analysis is the tension between globalisation and identity. As the process of globalisation has unfolded (entailing the restructuring of social and economic relations), people search for and construct identities that provide shared conditions of belonging and help them make sense of the world around them. This globalisation-identity couplet is well-suited to an analysis of modern football in the twentieth-first century. Football is the most globalised media entertainment industry, occupying a critical intermediary position in the cultural logic of late capitalism (Belanger, 2008). At the same time, football has not been completely decoupled from its traditional local communities: the ‘people and groups who can be affected either directly or indirectly by the existence and operation of a football club within a particular space’ (Morrow and Hamil, 2003: 1–2). Allegiance to a particular football club continues to be a core aspect of people’s personal identity, inextricably bound up with a deep sense of topophilia. The last thirty years of the EPL has been the era of glocalisation rather than globalisation, with traditional identities (or least facsimiles of them) becoming intensified rather than diminished in the face of universalising forces (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2004). Indeed, part of its cultural appeal of the EPL to global audiences rests on the putative authenticity of the clubs ‘local’ identity, which continue to be rooted – at least symbolically – in the same civic, predominantly working-class communities that fostered the genesis of the original Football League in the late nineteenth century (Webber, 2021).

Castells provides theoretical insights useful in framing this research. Firstly, his work helps us understand how digital networked technologies have empowered football fans in their mobilisation and initiation of collective action. Millward (2013), for example, draws on Castells to show how virtual communities have enabled the construction of both individual and collective fan identities. The advent of social media has fostered a ‘new species of social movement’ (Castells, 2015: 15) and generates ‘leaderless non-hierarchical, open-ended organisations that enhance the possibility to mobilise support and forge reforms’ (Hill et al., 2018: 689). Hill et al. (2018: 689) discuss how ‘Stand Against Modern Football’ (StandAMF) emerged as an Internet-based mobilisation in protest against ‘commercialisation processes designed to generate more manageable and profitable ways of “consuming” sport’. Second, and more substantially, Castells (2010: 3) provides a theoretical framework that conceptualises social movements – defined as ‘purposive collective actions whose outcome, in victory as in defeat, transforms the values and institutions of society’ – as the outcome of the interaction between personal and collective identities and the prevailing structural basis of society.

Castells posits a three-level schema of collective identities, which are formed in response to structural changes in society: legitimising; resistance; and project. A legitimising identity is introduced by hegemonic interests in society and reproduced via sets of institutions, such as the church(es), trade unions, political parties, cooperatives, and civic associations, that perpetuate their continued privilege, power, and sources of structural domination. Football, with its evocative mythologies of ‘the people’s game’, was itself once a legitimising identity. In the post-war era, the passion of the football crowd on the terrace was matched by their passivity and ambivalence to the way in which the game was run (Cleland, 2010). The very notion of a football supporter was premised on a sense of deep emotional attachment and loyalty and thus antithetical to any serious challenge to ‘their’ club (Fitzpatrick, 2016). While fans may have regarded themselves, however illusorily, as authentic members of the football club, there is little evidence of active engagement or agitation on their behalf (Critcher, 1979). For much of the twentieth century, UK football fandom was emblematic of the wider ‘deferential civic culture’ (Almond and Verba, 1963): the general acquiescence of football supporters with the existing power structures of football mirrored the relationship between the citizen and the state (Taylor, 2007).

Resistance identities relate to the construction of cultural communes constructed in people's minds often based on religious, national or territorial foundation, serving as a defensive reaction to the dominant discourses and institutions. Supporters groups can act as ‘trenches of resistance’ (Castells, 2010), based on locality, shared symbols, and collective memory, against the globalising commercial force of modern football. Castells (2010: 64) notes that these movements had three main sets of goals: ‘demands on living conditions and collective consumption; the affirmation of local cultural identity; and the conquest of local political autonomy and citizen participation’. The coalescence of activist movements in English football since 1992, such as the movement for Safe Standing ² the ‘Twenty’s Plenty’ ticket pricing campaign, ³ replicate these demands within sport. Castells (2010: 9, 10) portrays these acts of collective resistance as ‘the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded’, which expands ‘towards the transformation of society’. Fan activism in English football post-1992 began as resistance communities focused on affecting change in conditions for fans (as consumers) within football, but more recently football has become the site of the construction and expression of project identities performing their demands for broader changes in the political, social and economic life in contemporary Britain. Thus, these new fan movements are collective agents of social transformation, constructing new meaning around project identities (Castells, 2010: 70).

Mapping this evolution of collective identities with English football fandom is the focus of this article. By analysing the most prominent fan activist campaigns since 1992, the social and political profiles of those involved, their objectives and the repertoires of action, we demonstrate the emergence of a more politicised and participatory football fandom in England.

Case study analysis

By analysing the temporality of fan activism in the EPL era, the article argues that a transition from resistance to project identities can be witnessed in English football fan activism. The empirical analysis centres on two club-level fan movements and one that purposefully transcends traditional rivalries in English football. These two case studies offer a contribution to our understanding of how fan activism has changed over the last thirty years. We contend that in the first temporal case study (2005–2010) a shift can be witnessed from the prevailing resistant identities of the anti-Glazer protests engaged in by Manchester United supporters to embryonic project identities of the Spirit of Shankly (SoS) campaign group. This evolution is further evidenced by the emergence of groups such as Fans Supporting Foodbanks in the second case study period (2015–2021), which extends fan activism beyond stadium. In providing this analysis this article contributes a conception of change in English football fan activism. As Turner (2021) notes such temporal sensitivity has been underplayed by the existing literature on fan activism. As a corrective, we engage in a relational analysis of micro-level networks of football fan activists over fifteen years to examine the evolving nature of fan activism within the wider social, economic and political context (Turner, 2020).

Discussion: Fan activism in the age of anti – politics

At the core of this article lies the following question: how and why has football fan activism in England become more politicised since the establishment of the Premier League in 1992? The dominant explanation in the existing literature seeks to account for the political mobilisation of football supporters according to the relational aspects of football. The relational approach to the study of supporter activism forwarded by Cleland et al. (2018) provides a theoretical foothold. In their account they demonstrate the advantages of football for collective action: a ready-made network of actors with a shared collective identity; emotional, affective commitment; its sociability and provision of established spaces for communal gathering and the exchange of ideas and experiences; common aims and often an agreed ‘villain’. As Lestrelin (2012: 509) observes, ‘Far from being reduced to the consumption of a spectacle, supporting means organising, mobilising, and socialising’.

The notion that football fandom involves relational qualities, such as strong collective identities and communal feelings of membership, is not novel (nor casual of politicisation). Since the inception of football as a mass spectator sport at the end of the nineteenth century, professional football clubs and their supporters helped forge a wider civic identity, making a significant contribution to the reproduction of the imagined community of the burgeoning towns, cities, and regions of industrial Britain (Phelps, 2005). Also, it is important to note that the vast majority of English football fans remain passive and largely acquiescent. What is lacking from this relational account is an explicit theory of change. The neglect of the change in the nature of football fandom and activism is derived from this focus on the relational at the expense of the structural underpinnings of evolving football fan activism.

The key structural changes can be organised into three inter-related categories: (1) the political economy of football; (2) the technological and communications infrastructure; (3) a decline in the legitimation of authority in both professional football and democratic politics, allied to an enhanced critical reflexivity on behalf of fans. The changes to the political economy of English football have been well-documented (Grant, 2021), with the increase in activism characterised as a Polanyian ‘double-movement’ against the increasing hyper-commercialised, globalised trajectory of the EPL (Webber, 2017). The ascendancy of this neoliberal logic over the last thirty years can be seen as the primary driver of the increase in football fan activism. Important too are the advances in communications technology and their implications for grassroots activist media. The hyper-digitalised nature of contemporary football fandom has enabled fans to create dialogical spaces online in which to articulate their socio-political positions, build relationships with online and offline allies and connect the realms of street and screen activism (Monaghan, 2014) – in short, to ‘communicate, collaborate, and demonstrate’ (Garrett, 2006: 202). However, the focus of this article is not primarily on the quantitative change in the aggregate level of activism or politicisation amongst fans (which still only accounts for a small minority) but rather the qualitative shift in aims and scope. The relational and technological accounts of the extant literature fail to explain the shift from activism within to through football.

The growing politicisation of football and the attendant increase in fan activism cannot been explained by the structural dynamics in the political economy of football and communications technology alone. The broader legitimation crisis of English football and UK democratic politics in the last 30 years and the agency of fans in that process is also crucial. Since the breakaway of the Premiership in 1992, the untrammelled commercialisation and globalisation of football has given rise to the perception that the elite of the professional game have drifted from their roots, leading to a more existential crisis for ‘traditional’ supporters (Conn, 2010). The prevailing power structures of football, along with other enduring features of the Victorian era, are increasingly seen as anachronistic and have been subject to growing challenge and contestation in recent years. The legitimising mythology of ‘the people’s game’ – the notion that those in charge are benevolent custodians – has been undermined as football has become increasingly ‘commodified, professionalised and embourgeoisified, leaving the game’s core working-class supporters marginalised and alienated’ (Taylor, 2007: 6). The changes in structure and finance of English football have led to a recasting of the relationship between club and supporter.

What was crucial was that amid the tumult of the English game’s multiple crises, some fans began to take a more critical, reflexive position to their relationship with their clubs and the national governing bodies. The conception of fans as critically reflective agents, invoked by Numerato and Giulianotti’s (2018) ideal type of the citizen-consumer (or ‘citi-mer’ ⁸ ), has its basis in broader theoretical debates on late-modern reflexive modernisation (Beck et al., 1994). One parallel between the emergent literature on contemporary fan activism and wider political sociology can be found in Pippa Norris’ (1999) work on ‘critical citizens’. To paraphrase Norris, these critical ‘citi-fans’ are more reflexive in their consumption of football than the idealised ‘traditional’ supporter. The emergence of these increasingly well-networked fans (supported by national organisations such as Supporters Direct and international bodies like Football Supporters Europe) reflect the enhanced access to information and methods of communication that have exponentially increased with the development of online fan forums, websites, social media, podcasts and vlogging over the last thirty years. However, it is argued here that the emergence of the critical citi-fan is based on a growing realisation that the existing power structures fail to adequately represent their interests as football supporters, rather than any significant change in the demographic composition of the football crowd. The increased reflexivity of football fans, allied to the growing politicisation of football (in terms of its governance, relationships to fans, and wider social responsibility), has transformed who is perceived as the legitimate arbiters of the future of football.

In the mid-1980s football was held up as a metaphor for many of the ills of British society. The crisis of English football was attributed principally to the moral decay of people who watched it, rather than the decisions (or more accurately non-decision-making) of the elite who governed the game. The legitimation crisis that has enveloped football over the last thirty years is converse: it is the owners and authorities who are seen to lack competence, integrity and virtue, with fans increasingly seen as the moral bulwark against rapacious greed and venality. To adopt Castells’ terminology, many football supporters eschewed their legitimising identities as passive supporters and adopted increasingly critical reflexive attitudes to those in authority, with some fans beginning to assume resistance and proto-project identities.

Conclusion

The growing activism of football fans should be set within broader patterns of political and cultural change. In seeking to characterise the broad trends of both British and comparative politics, various scholars over the last decade or so have appealed to the ‘crisis’ (Richards et al., 2014), ‘the end' (Moran, 2017) or the transition (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014) of the prevailing institutions and politics of representative democracy. Running through all these studies is the concept of anti-politics. The literature of anti-politics identifies a range of complex, multi-dimensional phenomena, highlighting ‘numerous pathologies concerning power, democracy, legitimacy, representation, participation and accountability' (Richards et al., 2019: 334). We argue that many of these same trends can identified in the dynamics of English football over the last thirty years. Rampant commercialisation and globalisation of the English game led to a growing sense of voicelessness and dispossession amongst fans, who have become increasingly critical and reflexive about their lack of representation and participation in the governance of football. It is in this context of anti-politics that fan activism, setting itself ‘against modern football’, has burgeoned.

What can the literature on anti-politics tells us about the evolving nature of football fan activism in the last three decades? Two broad approaches to anti-politics – with contrasting diagnoses of the pathologies and the possible remedies for representative democracy – can be identified. The first tends to frame anti-politics as predominantly a crisis of ‘demand’ (in terms of the expectations of citizens on representative democracy); conversely, the second regards anti-politics mainly as the outcome of failures in ‘supply’ (in terms of the state and its related institutions’ ability to deliver politics [Richards and Smith, 2015]). Both perspectives offer analytical purchase for the study of contemporary football fandom. From a demand-side view, and analogous to some of the analysis of the wider ‘democratic malaise’, the fundamental problem with modern football can be attributed to the unrealistic and contradictory demands placed on clubs by fans themselves – for example, to engage in an ‘arms race’ of ever-increasing players wages and transfers while maintaining the long-term identity and sustainability of the club and surrounding community. From this perspective, fans, in a similar fashion to citizens vis-à-vis representative democracy, engage with their clubs and football authorities in ‘bad faith’ (Flinders, 2012). The argument presented here firmly rejects this perspective and adopts the supply-side approach, which is predicated on the need to modernise the way in which both contemporary politics operates, stressing the necessity of reform to the composition and practice of institutions, processes and actors involved in supplying politics (Hay, 2007). The vitality of grassroots fan activism reflects the deficiencies in the structure and culture of football governance in England, and indirectly some of maladies of conventional modes of democratic political participation.

Fan activism represents a new, and growing, type of grassroots political participation and an empirical referent for the supply side perspective of anti-politics – that is, a transformation, rather than diminution, in political engagement, participation and representation that is indicative of a growing frustration with mainstream politics rather than apathy. It has moved beyond club-based social movements to form coalitions with other supporters and public, private and third sector organisations to challenge local and central government, as well as the prevailing neoliberal logic of contemporary English football. In the context of declining associational life and other civic institutions (notably political parties, but also trade unions, churches, and charities) that hitherto served as anchors of community and place and enabled democratic participation, football, despite globalisation, continues to be geographically rooted and can act as a rallying point for identification and solidarity. As Monaghan (2014: 244) argues, in an era saturated by social media, where activism is increasingly orchestrated in the virtual sphere, there is a need to reassert a sense of place. In this age of anti-politics, the football stadium offers an affective reference point for political activism that can connect online and offline communities. This novel type of activism through football is epitomised by FSF, whose leaders ‘switched’ (Castells, 2013: 45) their focus from the more conventional political terrain of trade unions and party political campaigning to football. The enduring collective identity of football, which has been animated rather than diminished by the transformation in the political economy of the game, is an outlier in a political culture dominated by the notion that we should pursue our individual interests. Given the trends in anti-political sentiment and the importance of place in the increasingly virtual world of activism show no sign of abating, football looks set to become an important space of political and social change.