To start with I do think it is unnecessary to single out Football as singularly reactionary compared to other team sports. The motives and ideas at play are the same across rugby, cricket, baseball etc. Football in theory isn’t special as a ‘reactionary’ force it’s just that in reality the level of violence, the gangs and intensity of it all is jacked up to 11 in Football.
The supporters of a particular sports team usually do so based on how close you live to a certain club. I live in Newcastle, therefore by default I would be a Newcastle United supporter. Maybe you have family from somewhere and you inherit your team from them after they move away and even though you are born 300 miles from the club. A football team is for the most part inherited by blood. In England who you support is a part of your culture if your family are football fans.
A lot of identity is tied to football and because in football only one team can win (unless you draw) your team also needs rivals. This is normally picked by the club that is closest to you. Newcastle has Sunderland, which are only 14 miles apart and in terms of culture outside of football are very similar. This rivalry is bitter (when Sunderland is good enough to play in the same league as Newcastle, which over the last few years has been rare) to the point Sunderland has a photograph in their stadium of the most famous Newcastle player, Alan Shearer, missing a penalty.
Sports rivalries in all sports can be pretty fierce, but in football this can escalate to violence. The fact the word hooliganism is basically just associated with football tells you how common this is, with places like Brazil having major gangs built around specific teams who ties to organised crime and death is not uncommon when rival Torcidas organizadas meet.
Regardless of all this I do not think that looking at the worst possible sides of the football world is a fair way to look at it. Football brings a huge sense of community to a lot of people. If we look at the Hillsborough disaster (in which 97 people died due to the police poorly controlling the crowds at a football match) we see a community that banded together with a huge donations from supporters to an appeal fund that raised over £12 million pounds when it closed. However, the police turned and blamed the supporters, stating it was hooliganism and drunkenness that caused all the issues not their own gross incompetence (which thankfully was proven to be the case 38 years AFTER it has happened).
Tarring all football supporters with the same hooligan brush was an incredibly popular media staple in the 80’s and 90’s and it hasn’t really gone away today. A large community of predominantly working class people who has a small violent element used to be an easy distraction from other issues.
Today we see even left-wing groupings for major football teams in the UK, with most notably being the Celtic Green Brigade who are anti-fascist, left wing and have been vocal in their support of Palestine. See here’s the thing, any time you bring a large group of people together over a common interest you are just going to have a variety of political opinions. The level of community that football brings people is actually very compelling, allowing people from different class/political/racial backgrounds to immediately break down boundaries over their shared love of a team. The obvious downside being that this embracing of one team often requires a rejection of another, but this more often than not takes the form of playful banter as both people love the sport of football.
Considering any event that brings people together as innately reactionary just sits completely wrong with me. A protest is such an obvious example. Protest can represent the whole political spectrum. Far right riots, to centrist marches, to farms spreading shit to left wing circle jerks, they all protest, but their characteristics differ. Some fundamentally right wing people are pro-Palestine, and some left-wing people aren’t pro-Israel and would therefore attend demos that would align completely differently with what they actually think on basically everything else.
Anything that brings people together is going to be a fundamentally confused hodgepodge of different ideas and people, but giving people community is actually extremely valuable in this modern era. Engaging with people in person, building relationships and actually being able to gauge the mood of the people via a large, mixed community is good actually, and being a part of a community and coming together with disaster strikes or you need to defend the interests of your club or celebrate in victory actually builds a sense of solidarity and working together in people.
So yeah, I don’t think football is reactionary by default, it just unfortunately does have a more soft right vibe, but it isn’t always and won’t always be that way,
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