Across the UK, a growing movement of football fans groups are engaging ever-more explicitly with social justice causes. From the English Premier League to the lower reaches of the footballing pyramid, there is a growing sense of supporters not only as passive consumers of football, but as politically-engaged and active campaigners that see their clubs – and their fellow fans – as agents of societal change.
Whether it is Everton and Liverpool supporters joining forces to become one of the biggest providers of foodbank donations on Merseyside, or the explicitly anti-racist and anti-fascist fanbases at English non-league clubs Clapton Community FC and Dulwich Hamlet, football fans across the country are increasingly using football to both show solidarity with local communities and to consciously and directly campaign on some of the most pressing and defining issues of our time. On poverty, on race, and on a host of other social justice issues, football fans across our communities are mobilising.
But what is driving this mobilisation? What is it that the groups are acting in response to? And why do they believe that football can offer the power for change?
Political Football explores these questions and more. By visiting grounds and meeting fans across the UK, it will tell the stories of groups from clubs including Liverpool and Everton, Motherwell, Dulwich Hamlet, Newcastle United, and Clapton Community FC; all of whom are, in different ways, using football as a vehicle for the change they want to see. It will uncover the local contexts in which this particular brand of football fan activism is emerging, and unpack the broader national trends and threads that unite them.
In detailing not only the fan groups themselves, but also the factors driving their emergence, it will aim to appeal to anyone interested in how football fans are at the forefront and the sharp end of some of the country’s most defining social issues.
- ISBN13 9781919624044
- Publish Date 12 October 2023
- Publish Status Forthcoming
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Halcyon Publishing
- Format Paperback
- Language English