Popular culture is an often under-explored area for those studying the extension, shaping, and reproduction of political values. Where formal institutions fail to offer recognition, voice, or participation, cultural spaces take on heightened political significance because they are sites where belonging is rehearsed and identities are shaped. In contemporary Britain, football occupies a particularly prominent such place, with political implications rooted in the defeat of the organized working class some forty years ago. This article suggests that the collapse of working-class institutions has shifted the burden of belonging from political and community organizations onto cultural spaces like football clubs and fan culture, leaving in their wake a political vacuum that has enabled far‑right actors to appropriate fan culture, using its rituals, networks, and symbols to support an illiberal mobilization.
Working class decline
The post-Thatcher era has been one of profound trauma for Britain’s working class, which has not only suffered a demographic decline, but also witnessed the unravelling of the dense web of social ties that once underpinned daily life. Traditional anchors—workplaces, trade unions, political parties, and a thick network of associations such as pubs, clubs, and local sports teams—have withered over the past four decades. These institutions had long served as focal points of solidarity, pride, and stability, embodying a shared culture and sense of rootedness. It is well-documented that this erosion has left many communities disoriented, exposed, and vulnerable amidst the rapid transformation of Britain from an industrial to a service-based economy. The working-class identity remains particularly strong in Britain but is now disconnected from the political levers which it once had access to and the associations which gave it a clear cultural expression or representation at the national level.
This decline goes far beyond the loss—and transformation—of jobs typically available for the working class. As Michael Sandel has argued, the damage wrought by economic restructuring is not only material but moral. In societies increasingly organized around meritocratic ideals, those who lose out are encouraged to see their struggles as personal failures rather than the consequence of structural change. Work ceases to be valued as a contribution to a common good and instead becomes a marker of individual success or worth. For working-class communities in post-industrial Britain, the decline of industrial labour did not simply remove jobs; it stripped away a widely shared source of social esteem and civic recognition along with their spaces of belonging, where dignity was affirmed through everyday practices of mutual recognition. When forms of work that once anchored identity and status were devalued or disappeared, so too was the sense of being needed or respected by society. This loss of recognition produces what Sandel describes as a moral injury: a feeling that one’s efforts no longer count.
In this context, other spaces—cultural rather than political ones—have come to carry the burden of belonging, though they remain more disconnected than before and do not offer the same benefits for their members. This reflects a deeper form of alienation, one that I have argued is bound up with the dismantling of worker agency. The shackling of working-class institutions, such as trade unions, stripped working people of a collective voice in shaping their economic destiny. As I have emphasized elsewhere, the white working class is but one subgroup which finds itself in an unusual and precarious position: racially aligned with the majority but often politically and culturally excluded, without some of the recognition sometimes afforded to minority communities in mainstream political discourse. Their sense of alienation is not simply a reflection of economic insecurity: it is also moral and cultural. As services closed and people drifted apart, working-class life and identities became increasingly devalued, its contributions rendered peripheral in our national narratives; its members became nostalgic for their past democratic power and their uniting tradition that once located its value in contribution, mutuality, and solidarity.
The white working class […] finds itself in an unusual and precarious position: racially aligned with the majority but often politically and culturally excluded, without some of the recognition sometimes afforded to minority communities in mainstream political discourse.
We thus see a working-class identity which remains strong but is politically disconnected and socially fragmented. This helps explain the appeal of ethnonationalist populism, which offers recognition where mainstream institutions have failed, even if on ultimately false or exclusionary terms, by harkening back to a situation some four decades ago where, especially white men within the working class were more uncomplicatedly “better off,” with easier access to strong, industrialized, unionized work, vibrant social spaces, and a clear place in the national story.
What are the consequences for football?
In spite of this decline, elements of working-class culture continue to carry within them the potential for dignity and solidarity. While workplaces and unions have faded as centers of everyday life, and the Labour Party has moved away from its historic commitment as the inclusive party of the working class, football clubs often continue to offer repositories of community and identity. Rooted deeply in local communities across the country, football clubs historically emerged out of the very associations—church groups, factories, neighborhoods—that once defined working-class life. Today, they remain one of the few surviving institutions of mass participation, ritualized gathering, and mutual recognition. Indeed, 37 percent of people see the local club as an important part of their identity and around 25 million people in England regularly watch the sport.
In this sense, football culture, despite its commercialization, still provides a unique space for collective belonging. On match days, individuals are re-embedded in a collective identity that affirms pride in place, loyalty to community, and the dignity of participation in something larger than themselves. For many, football has replaced—often by default—the pub, the club, or the union hall as the central site of association and recognition. It provides continuity amidst the rupturing of communities, offering a framework of belonging in which the working class can still potentially see itself reflected. To explore football, then, is to acknowledge one of the few surviving sites of associations capable of addressing, however partially, the traumas of dislocation and alienation.
Football culture, despite its commercialization, still provides a unique space for collective belonging. On match days, individuals are re-embedded in a collective identity that affirms pride in place, loyalty to community, and the dignity of participation in something larger than themselves.
Progressive clubs
Football as a site of association presents a useful space for the development of community politics or an inclusive kind of fandom. We see examples of this around the world. The most famous example is the “hipster” club St. Pauli, in the German Bundesliga. Based in the red-light district of Hamburg, near to the city’s docks, it has developed a distinct identity as an activist club since the 1980s with origins among dock workers, and a strong commitment to community and solidarity. Since then, it has sought to bridge these commitments with wider social and political values, including anti-fascism and inclusivity (which is not to say that the working class are opposed to these values; the impetus for change has just come from other sources, including a younger, university-educated influx of fans). Beyond fandom itself, the club is also owned according to the 50+1 rule common in Germany, in which fan groups must retain majority voting rights on the boards of clubs. This transforms the football club into an association in which fans themselves retain the capacity to shape its future and the club remains accountable to its community rather than distant owners.
The deliberately politicized identity of the club further renders it a unique site of political agency outside of electoral politics. St. Pauli represents the views of its supporters not only symbolically on matchdays, through banners, chants, and iconography, but materially through community action. The club targets its outreach towards supporting Hamburg’s homeless population, hosts meetings, concerts, and political events, and mobilizes its cultural capital in support of causes championed by its fans. In doing so, it demonstrates its values and functions as an association embedded within everyday life, rather than the depoliticized entertainment brand which football clubs can become. The club is by no means perfect, and is itself in the process of coming to terms with the tensions between its working-class roots and its growing gentrified, younger, often more international, fan base. However, for now, it retains a spirit and ethic of symbolic inclusion, the cultivation of solidarity, and a community activism which enables the club to operate culturally and within the political sphere. FC St. Pauli illustrates how football, when structured as an association, rooted in the fans, can sustain forms of collective agency and belonging that have largely disappeared elsewhere in working-class life.
Hooliganism and the far right
Football has also historically provided a setting for division and conflict and, increasingly, operates as a cultural space for far-right recruitment.
Yet, football has also historically provided a setting for division and conflict and, increasingly, operates as a cultural space for far-right recruitment. The rise of hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s illustrates how the game became an outlet for frustrations, particularly among sections of the working class facing economic decline, deindustrialization, and the erosion of stable community life.
There are several reasons why football clubs became a site of hooliganism. Very simply, clubs often come to embody the areas they represent. Matches become contests of identity, marked by the imprint of political, social, geographic, and historical divides or differences. Keeping this in mind, and contrary to popular belief and early sociological studies of the phenomenon, hooliganism should be understood as a structured practice, organized by hooligan groups, better known as “firms,” as a way of asserting masculinity, performing toughness, and achieving recognition within a peer group and even the nation. The firm could operate as a surrogate family, supplying belonging and loyalty in contexts where other institutions—the workplace, neighborhood, trade union—were in decline.
As Lisa McKenzie notes, it is no surprise that fan violence exploded during the economic struggles of the 1970s and then became an even more organized affair in the 1980s, as unemployment skyrocketed and young men in particular found their paths to meaningful, decent work effectively cut off. Indeed, Lamont suggests that work is a key source of meaning and a place where unwritten codes of conduct and dignification, for instance, through hard work, are practised. This dignification was particularly rooted in traditionally “male” forms of work: in industry, the shipyards, mines, and factories. Here, physicality, hard work, and commitment to supporting the family as the breadwinner helped to forge an identity in which work was a cornerstone of a meaningful sense of self alongside respect in the local and national community. When that work faced decline, so too did this rooted form of masculinity. With men increasingly out of work or “on the dole,” to the extent that over 200,000 jobs in mining alone were lost in the 1980s and early 1990s, we see a collapse of that system of prestige.
Raymond Williams’ emphasis on culture as a site of contestation sharpens this perspective. For Williams, culture is a lived, contested practice through which groups assert identity and negotiate meaning. We see in the advent and substantial growth of hooligan firms an attempt to assert an identity and create a feeling of belonging for their members. Hooliganism was an attempt to reclaim agency and identity through ritualized violence. The “success” of hooliganism in (violently) mobilizing a group of disaffected, often young, men necessitated a response by the Thatcher government, which opted for strict regulation, without any kind of social policy to alleviate the conditions which made hooliganism so popular, further marginalizing a subgroup of people who felt they had been “left behind.” Today, as a result of the inaction of successive governments, such left behind men are increasingly insecure and vulnerable, and are more likely than any other group to be picked up by the far right.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s organizing was rooted in hooliganism. Dubbing himself “Tommy Robinson” after a prominent Luton Town hooligan, he began building a network at games before moving to a combination of closed WhatsApp groups and public social media accounts in recent years. This background gave him connections, networks, and credibility among working-class men already somewhat attuned to confrontation and street mobilization, who he has relentlessly sought to turn towards political action. The recent St. George’s Day protests by the far right resemble, in many respects, a football fan culture with drinking and chants; many wear football shirts and fly the English flag at these rallies. The familiarity of these rituals makes them easy spaces for erstwhile political outsiders to slip into, while their theatricality reproduces the same sense of belonging and purpose that might be found in the stands.
The recent St. George’s Day protests by the far right resemble, in many respects, a football fan culture with drinking and chants; many wear football shirts and fly the English flag at these rallies.
This process of politicization is also aided by a flourishing far-right social media environment, who have been freed to share their content on X and face less regulation on other platforms like Facebook than they have done in the past. Indeed, far-right groups like the Football Lads Alliance and Football Lads United predominantly recruit members via Facebook and WhatsApp. Other informal supporter networks—WhatsApp groups originally set up to coordinate away travel, ticket exchanges, or pre-match drinking—have increasingly been repurposed as propaganda and organizing tools for regularly sharing details of rallies and protests and talking points on immigration, the “woke agenda,” and Islam. Such WhatsApp groups played a role in the widespread reach of disinformation after the Southport murders in July 2024, which soon produced violent riots.
Here, football becomes a vital means of mobilizing perhaps otherwise apolitical individuals into a collective political force—a space in which they regularly consume media which supports the views of their “fellow fans.” The far right is thus able to exploit belonging and has successfully integrated aspects of football culture into its activism in ways that both make it more accessible and attractive. The “everyday” and familiar nature of these interactions, embedded within the culture of fandom, normalizes such a position.
Emotion and belonging
This coalesces with the terraces, or standing areas in arenas, upon which working-class, predominantly male, groups gather en masse and practise shared rituals—from the walk to the ground to the pre-match pub—that cultivate fellowship, loyalty to place, and collective identity. While some clubs, such as St. Pauli, demonstrate football’s potential to anchor communities, the terraces are simultaneously felt as sites of exclusion, to the benefit of far-right actors. Beyond the violence of hooliganism, they are spaces in which particular forms of masculinity are regularly performed and a unique subculture is created, one where outsiders may be rendered unwelcome.
This perception of football as a closed cultural space reflects deeper contradictions in the preservation and fragmentation of working-class culture. Unlike union or party organizations, a politically disconnected football culture can redirect frustration into tribalism or machismo. In the absence of institutions capable of translating anger into agency, this more symbolic belonging often hardens into a defensive identity. Illiberal movements have proven adept at operating within this terrain precisely because they recognize how meaning and identity are produced here, building on the success of football hooliganism in the 1980s. They understand that chants, symbols, shared journeys, “us vs them” rhetoric, and matchday rituals do not merely express identity but actively generate it. Grievances are introduced from outside but are woven into the existing narratives of loyalty, betrayal, and pride that come with fandom, and are reframed in the context of cultural displacement; anger towards distant club owners, politicians, or institutions is extended toward migrants, minorities, and a vaguely defined liberal elite.
Within these closed WhatsApp groups, and on social media, disinformation circulates alongside banter; national symbols are fused with club identity; and calls to “defend” football culture slide easily into calls to defend the nation. Matchday rituals are then used to translate online discourse into embodied action, whether through coordinated chants, symbolic clothing, or mobilization for protests that closely mirror the aesthetics and rhythms of football fandom. Illiberal actors exploit this by presenting themselves as defenders of an embattled community, mirroring the language of fandom—loyalty, honor, territory—while offering confrontation and visibility in place of a deeper representation.
Within these closed WhatsApp groups, and on social media, disinformation circulates alongside banter; national symbols are fused with club identity; and calls to “defend” football culture slide easily into calls to defend the nation.
Crucially, mainstream politicians offer little to challenge these narratives in the fan space. MPs are often reluctant to engage with football culture, viewing it as volatile, unfamiliar, or detached from formal political life. Clubs, meanwhile, frequently avoid political engagement, wary of alienating sponsors or supporters, and remain committed to more “big picture” campaigns, such as Give Racism the Red Card, which can be fairly easily named in their messaging, but which face their own problems in becoming deeply rooted amongst fans. While these concerns are understandable, their cumulative effect has been to leave the space open to capture.
The terraces retain immense cultural potency given the type of mass association they offer. They have become a contested cultural terrain in which competing visions of community, belonging, and nationhood are enacted, with illiberal movements often better attuned to the affective and symbolic power of these spaces than mainstream politicians. These frustrations find their outlet through the sport which so many love and rely upon as a form of catharsis.
Can the terraces be reclaimed?
It might be too simple to suggest that mainstream politicians take it upon themselves to engage seriously with football culture. However, those concerned with the decline of the working class need to understand the football rituals, loyalties, and identities that generate meaning and which are so easily exploited by the far right. Too often, those who partake in fan culture are dismissed in the mainstream as politically suspect, culturally regressive, or simply irrelevant to contemporary democratic life. Yet, as I have suggested, this dismissal itself offers a view into the ways in which British society has failed over the past forty years.
If this cultural space is to be reclaimed from the far right, beyond examples such as FC St. Pauli, we must first recognise that football remains one of the few surviving arenas where working-class forms of solidarity, pride, and collective identity are still practised at scale. Any effort to counter illiberal mobilization has to begin with the reality that many supporters drawn toward the far right are politically homeless, feel a lack of agency, and are deeply frustrated. We need a more deliberate attempt to engage with this dynamic, both within football and across the wider political sphere.
A practical starting point would be to push for the further democratization of the game, building on recent legislation introducing an independent regulator in England, which has been mandated to maintain compliance of clubs with the wishes of their fans. However, this change has still fallen short of giving fans a vote, or other forms of power, in determining the future of their clubs. Further efforts could include campaigning for clubs to work more closely with supporters’ groups and invest in community infrastructure. Behind these proposals lies a deeper point: mainstream political actors—and academics—must recognise the terraces as significant political spaces and treat the sport as a key site for mobilization.
Sam Taylor Hill is Programme Manager of the Orwell Youth Prize, Teaching Associate at University of Bristol, and author of Challenging Alienation in the British Working Class: Building a Community of Equals.
Image: “SS Lazio Supporters (411251443)” by Oscar licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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