As the new season begins, if I could make one change to football for the next year, it would be to remove the extreme tribalism that only continues to fester. It is easily the worst thing about the culture of football. Everything negative, destructive, abusive and alienating stems from it. Everything you and I dislike about the game, the things that make us turn off the phone-in, the stuff that make us roll our eyes at the match and make us cringe to hear on the streets and read on the internet, it’s all football tribalism. It is especially but not exclusively present at the biggest clubs with the largest support – you can find it pretty much anywhere.
I don’t want to confuse this with allegiance and support for a club. That seems to me to be an entirely different and honorable thing that is more akin to civic and cultural pride than anything else. I am a Middlesbrough supporter and will be until my last breath and I love that thought. It is a constant in the shifting sands of my life and it has provided, shaped and expressed a strand of my identity.
But as much as it is a big part of me, I have never wanted to abuse anyone else because they do not share this love. I do not assume that officials, pundits, papers or anyone else have got it in for the club. If I read or hear someone saying something about Middlesbrough FC that I don’t agree with, I don’t care. You can’t wind me up by ‘insulting’ the club, because what other people think of the Boro means nothing to me and I don’t believe this makes me a less passionate or caring fan. I’ve just got perspective. Admittedly, I did get rather cross in the late ’80s when Arsenal fans chanted ‘What’s it like to lose your job?’ at us. Sadly, my attempt to respond with by chanting “What’s it like to have a house in negative equity?” never really caught on as a witty retort. Yet the club suffers from tribalism too. As ever, there are fans who are intolerant of any criticism of the club in any way whatsoever.
Confusingly though, like most of us, I am actually quite a tribal person in life. This isn’t unusual. We all have our tribes – the people who we feel most comfortable around, the people we have something in common with and who share our passions.
But that isn’t what tribalism is in football. Here it seems to be an extreme, almost unhinged version of a supporter. I’ve known of fans of Manchester City who won’t have red in the house, and fans of Norwich who likewise will never buy anything blue. I knew a lad at college who simply couldn’t bear anyone saying anything negative about Newcastle United. He’d go puce and get really angry about it, even if it was only a joke about a player not being very good. Even aged 18 I thought this was very odd behaviour.
They would say all of this just makes them a loyal and true supporter, I suspect. Someone who bases a lot of their lives around the club and the club’s history, to such a degree that a comment about the club is a comment about themselves as a person. Insult the club and you insult them.
I’ve written before about Old Firm fans who would count words in a newspaper dedicated to their club and then count the number written on the other mob and actually ring up the paper to complain if their club didn’t get as many, complaining of bias. That’s how extreme it can get.
This gets rolled into paranoia that everyone is biased against you, especially the media. The media are always biased against your team, though exactly who and what the concept of this media extends to is never made clear. Does it extend to the sports report on the Today programme, for example?
Time after time in a season we hear people saying that the media are not giving their side enough credit. It is such an idiotic cliche. It beggars belief that it is still trotted out, like there is a credit-o-meter to measure these things. And it is compounded by the fact that clearly, the people using it have invariably not consumed the full panoply of media but have just drawn this conclusion from watching a game on MOTD. In other words, they’re prepared to confect their rage from very little material.
I suppose what I’m saying here is that the worst tribalist seems able to suspend rationality and common sense when it comes to their club and behave in a very odd, paranoid way, though for what reason is less clear. I don’t know what anyone gets out of this, except increased blood pressure. It must be the most extreme form of identity politics.
The last game I was at was Hibernian v Motherwell, sat just across from one fella who flew into an apoplectic rage at every decision against the home team. Like it was all part of a wider conspiracy. And this wasn’t faux in any way, it wasn’t postmodern irony, he was furious, hurling abuse at the officials, even though he was sitting next to and in front of boys aged under 10. He blindly saw the referee as anti-Hibs. Even though he wasn’t.
That’s the behaviour I associate with tribalism. That and jumping on people on the internet for having a point of view that does not correlate with theirs. The vitriol aimed at anyone and anything that does not conform to the level of blind worship of the club that they have defined appropriate in the quiet of their own minds is quite objectively unhinged. Not least because the tribal monster, almost incredibly, sees their own viewpoint as unbiased and true, when by any rational analysis it is the exact opposite of that. But the tribal monster is apparently blind and sees their perception as absolute.
Writing this behaviour down just makes it seem even more odd. Why are people behaving like this? Even though it must be a relatively small percentage of overall fans they are the loudest voices in any football context.
And that’s where the more sinister aspect of this comes in. Roll together some of these extreme people and you get problems.
I know several journalists and writers who will simply not write anything especially critical of some of the biggest clubs simply because they don’t want to put up with all the abuse it would engender, in return for the meagre wages they receive. Why would you trouble your mental health for such a trivial matter? Why would you want to be subjected to death threats for days?
So in this way, we can see the tribal football fan is a threat, not just to individuals, but to free speech itself. And yet we’re all very inured to it. It’s all become totally normalised and so we tend to shrug it off as just ‘those’ people, when really, we should be shocked or offended by it.
If you don’t believe me, expose a non-football following friend in your life to some examples of typical football tribalism and see how they react. The horror on their faces will tell you everything. Outside of the football context, this is extreme behaviour and it needs identifying as such. As much as anyone else, clubs need to point out that this is no longer acceptable and is not a prerequisite to call yourself a fan of the club.
John Nicholson
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Originally Posted by Baloo
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