Leaving early is a bit of a red flag. Booing your own players, obviously. Wearing a half-and-half scarf, purchasing a half-and-half scarf, expressing any opinion of a half-and-half scarf short of pathological hatred: forget it. Fake merch. Supporting a club from a place where you do not live. Supporting more than one club. Getting fewer than 10 out of 15 on a multiple-choice clickbait quiz.
Yes, these days there are multiple ways of outing yourself as that most abhorred of footballing species: “not a true fan”. Who gets to call themselves a football fan? Ostensibly this is a church open to all who want to believe, and yet somehow the very idea of fandom is constantly being challenged and contested, revoked and downgraded. English football has more words to describe ersatz fans than real ones: “plastics” and “casuals”, “fakes” and “frauds”, “tourists” and “day-trippers”, “trolls” and “haters”, “fair-weather fans” and “glory-hunters”.
It was the first of these terms that raised the ire of Ange Postecoglou last week, the Tottenham head coach cutting short a question on ticket prices to object to the characterisation of foreign fans as “plastics”. “That’s really harsh,” he said. “This club has supporters all over the world. It doesn’t make them any less passionate. I think it’s really disrespectful to fans who are willing to go to the expense of coming halfway around the world.”
The really interesting aspect of this exchange was the way it encapsulated an increasing cultural divide at the elite end of English football. For most of the Premier League era the foreign fan has been regarded as the bottom-feeder of the ecosystem: exiled by distance, alienated by culture and history, maligned for the recency of their conversion and occasional unfortunate habit of referring to it as “the EPL”.
And of course there was a clear hierarchy of devotion here, based around geographical proximity and physical attendance at matches. But the globalisation of the biggest clubs – allied with the increasing influence of social media – has upended traditional measures. For the modern super-club, the vast majority of their fans now live somewhere else, tethered to them only by an internet connection, unlikely ever to visit the stadium more than a few times. With the domestic market mature and saturated, this is also where new fans are going to come from. What happens to a community institution when the market drags it away from the community?
In commercial terms, it explains the big lucrative foreign friendlies, the tour packages, the network of megastores. None of which is necessarily a destructive force on its own. You only have to watch a big Premier League game in a foreign bar, or behold the flocks of Korean fans at Tottenham, for whom a trip to see Son Heung-min in the flesh is a kind of sacred pilgrimage, to understand the ways in which overseas fans enrich and deepen the meaning of a football club.
But of course there are also compromises to be made, cultural divides to be conquered, frictions to negotiate, frictions often played out on forums and social media. Take the “Cobhamsexual” divide, a notable schism that has opened up in recent years between (mostly) local-based Chelsea fans and (mostly) foreign-based Chelsea fans on the subject of the academy. Cobhamsexuals bemoan the departure of Mason Mount, urge Mauricio Pochettino to give more minutes to young players, resist the sale of homegrown talents such as Conor Gallagher in order to satisfy the balance sheet. Overseas fans scoff at the rose-tinted parochialism of the Cobhamsexuals, shrugging off the inevitable accusations of “plastic”, “casual” or “not a real Chelsea fan”. The result: perhaps the most fractured and permanently seething fanbase in the Premier League.
And really there are two concurrent developments taking place here. The first is the gradual realignment of fan hierarchy along the lines of one’s ability to pay: a development years in the making but now reaching a kind of tipping point amid rising prices and declining living standards. In his typically empathic and erudite way, Postecoglou was countering an argument that didn’t really exist. Nobody is discussing restricting access to foreign fans, who have always been able to rock up and buy a ticket. But in romanticising the devotion of the wealthy, amid price hikes that have enraged longstanding Spurs fans, Postecoglou offered up a justification that Daniel Levy and the corporate press office could scarcely have scripted more perfectly.
The other is the gradual erosion of the big club fanbase as a place of congregation and common ground. Broadening a fanbase also weakens it, weakens the ties that bind fans to each other, weakens their inclination to unite and organise. The mass of (mostly domestic-based) Manchester United fans resisting the sale of their club to a Qatari bidder were met by an equal and opposite wave of (mostly foreign-based) fans backing the Qatari bid. Meanwhile, how can we expect Chelsea fans to resist a future Super League if they can no longer even agree on whether Armando Broja is any good?
In a way these are wider existential questions, striking at the heart of what a football club is, and who it serves. How do you balance the idea that a football club is for everyone against the idea that it is a thing with roots, bound to a locality and a community? How do you balance a fandom expressed through longstanding ritual against a fandom expressed by getting up at 3am to watch Jonny Evans on a tiny screen? How do we reject the false oppositions between “local working class” and “wealthy tourist”, between “true fans” and “plastics”?
A fanbase splinters along multiple planes. But when it does, the only people who really benefit are those with an interest in exploiting it.
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