Football
There’s something tribalistic about the beautiful game that makes it both enticing and disgusting
In 2016, I decided to ‘get into’ football. I picked a team I knew wouldn’t be expensive to watch near to where my mum lived (where I would be living after graduation), became a member, bought some merch, and in the 2016–2017 season I went to the majority of their home games, sometimes with friends but more often by myself. It makes for a lovely day out, and I met a lot of people; more than that, as a social experiment, it’s great fun going and peoplewatching, or rather, crowdwatching. And at some point during the season, I realised I actually cared about whether this team won or lost, and I started genuinely enjoying myself. Who woulda thought football could be fun?
There is something enticingly tribalistic about being a fan of a football team, a feeling of being a small part of a larger whole, something that we as humans perhaps need. There are few things that create as much solidarity between strangers as standing for ninety minutes in the pissing rain in some country backwater watching your football team get rings run round them. It’s an experience with which, as a fan of a very small fourth-division team from Potsdam, I am intimately acquainted. To someone who wasn’t there, who hasn’t done it, it seems ridiculous. But when you are there, and less than a hundred people are screaming mesmerising chants for an hour and a half to eleven men they don’t know personally and they’re certain are going to perform disappointingly, you understand what commitment really means. And all those defeats are worth more than you know when you finally see your striker managing to fumble the ball into the back of the opponent’s net; and very little beats the feeling of seeing your team, the one you know nothing about but support until you’re beaten into the ground anyway, become victorious in the derby you’ve heard so much about, the game that means more than all the others.
But this tribalism sometimes comes at a cost. Racism is a huge topic in football right now, and the politics behind German lower-league football especially are divisive and toxic. The main rivals of the team I support are infamous for a large portion of their fans being genuine neo-Nazis. They’ve been seen throwing Hitler Salutes in the bleachers and painting antisemitic slogans on their banners. And they’re by no means the exception: very recently in Rathenow, the ultras of the football team Optik FC scrawled ‘Juden 03’ (‘Jews 03’) across a train station underpass, in an antisemitic attack against the liberal, inclusive fans of the team I support, Babelsberg 03. There’s lots more going on under the surface of German football than you would know just from following the results. Politics is important, and racism, often specifically antisemitism, is rampant among especially lower-league clubs.
And it isn’t just in Germany. According to an investigation by the Mirror, racist incidents have nearly doubled over the last four seasons in England. Based on reported incidents, it could be that officials are simply reporting the incidents more than they used to, and that players themselves, who have been walking off pitches in response to racism from fans, are more willing to speak openly about it. Tottenham fans allegedly abused Chelsea defender Antonio Rudiger recently, and protocol was followed in which the fans were warned — three times! — that racism at a football game is unacceptable, as if that’s news to anyone. Bulgarian fans also threw Nazi salutes at black England players and abused them in October. And Ajax goalkeeper Andre Onana said recently that the colour of his skin prevented him from getting jobs at top football clubs, having been told that fans would find it ‘hard to accept’ having a black goalkeeper.
Gary Neville suggested recently that the political climate in Britain fuels racism — that if those holding the top offices in the country can get away with racism, it becomes acceptable in other areas of society. Perhaps there’s something to this: in Italy, where the populist, right-wing Five Star Movement and the Lega hold a lot of power in government, racism has been an even bigger issue. A report from June 2017, fuelled by Pescara’s Sulley Muntari’s walk-off, suggested that of the twelve reported incidences of racism that occurred across the season, none were punished. Muntari’s own leaving of the pitch was met with his being sanctioned — punished for protesting racism. Fans in Italy have thrown bananas at players and made monkey chants, and even held banners with things like ‘negro team’ scrawled across them. Interviews in the report with fans suggest that fans themselves don’t see a problem, referring to them as ‘just football jokes’. And what’s been the recent response to this? Artwork claiming to be anti-racist which uses imagery of monkeys to get its point across, for which the Serie A chief Luigi De Siervo had to apologise. It seems to make sense on the face of it, then, that a political climate which is itself xenophobic fuels racism in other places.
But people are doing things to mitigate this. Babelsberg have a B team made up only of refugees, and refugees get into the stadium for free. Cottbus, their main rivals, have a selection of fans who are stalwartly against the racism for which their club is infamous, and in liberal progressive Berlin one sometimes comes across stickers in left-wing pubs that read ‘Cottbus fans against racism’. Teammates of players experiencing racism have started to leave the pitch: Haringey Borough players followed Valery Pajetat and Coby Rowe off the pitch recently after visiting Yeovil Town fans threw racist abuse at the goalkeeper and defender. QPR’s under-18s also followed suit earlier in August after defender Trent Mahorn was the subject of racism during a match against AD Nervion. And the recent protocols which have been put into place are a good first step, but not a total solution to the problem. If we are to agree with Neville that racism being validated in the political sphere and in society at large is at least partly to blame, something much bigger has to be done to change attitudes towards racism across the board. And at the end of the day, football still brings more people together than it does divide them. Although it’s been so often in the news of late, racist fans are evidently the minority at grounds — or at least, fans who are open about their racism and direct it towards players.
As for me, I’ll continue to support Babelsberg 03, seeing as their politics more closely align to mine. Sometimes I don’t want to be there — the internal politics which takes place between different groups of ultras even within a left-wing team like mine is often petty and embarrassing, and seeing loss after loss is disheartening enough. But we’ve travelled hours on the Autobahn to watch games we knew we would lose, we’ve missed trains and run to make it for kickoff, and I’ve sacrificed many euros I don’t really have to keep the feeling of solidarity being at a game gives me. Knowing that they stand for a cause, that they’re progressive and actually nice, and seeing as I’m already three seasons in and have made friends precisely due to getting drenched in [insert stereotypically right-wing East German city here] watching them lose again, I can’t give up on them now. For those small moments of glory, when the semi-professional player whose name you don’t know manages to stumble into the goal with the ball somehow still at his feet, it makes it all worth it. Just.
