Complete the following phrase: football without fans is … In the current climate, it can feel like the only acceptable response is “nothing”. This is a conceit in which we are all, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit. Not least in the media, where certain journalists have built entire careers on exalting the intrinsic nobility of the humble matchgoing supporter while sitting in their complimentary press box seats consuming free food. Without fans, the game is nothing. It simply ceases to exist. It’s a travesty. Send tweet. Eat sandwich.
Except that is not quite true, is it? At least, certainly not on the evidence of the last few months. The players and staff certainly care just as much. The levels of effort do not appear to have dropped, even if the levels of performance appear increasingly erratic. Most importantly of all, football is still happening. The cameras are still running. We’re still talking about it. Football without fans may well be colder, stranger, less lovable, less equitable and by most measures less good. But it’s not nothing.
The more unexplored question, to my mind, is what is happening to fans without football?
What does it even mean to be a football fan these days? Not so long ago, it was an easy enough question to answer. You turned up, you watched a game, you went to the pub. If you really wanted to indulge your fandom, you could buy a season ticket or travel enormous distances to follow your club away from home. Beyond this, anyone could call themselves a fan, but the hierarchy of devotion was rigidly taxonomised, defined above all by geography (supporting your local team) and physical presence.
All this, needless to say, has been stripped away by the pandemic: the songs on the train, the songs in the pubs, the songs in the streets, the clatter of seats as everyone stands up for a corner. But it’s not just the rituals and the colour that have been cut adrift by the absence of fans from stadiums, but the very nature of fandom itself: the long shared car journeys, the 8am coaches, the pub and the work canteen. Even the simple act of going to a friend’s house to watch the game has been curtailed. Now that the act of following a football team has migrated entirely to the online sphere, the dynamics of fandom are shifting accordingly.
How might this manifest itself in practice? In the physical world, commitment to the cause could be logged in ticket stubs and shared memory. But the online world operates by different value systems. It is above all a performance space: one defined by bravado and bluster, the flaunting of opinions and the fetishisation of conflict. Most crucially, it is largely blind to geography or history. The season ticket holder of 45 years gets exactly the same voice as the teenager from Kansas or Kolkata who may not be able to name any of his club’s players before 2004, but has a full working knowledge of gifs and an almost bottomless reservoir of rage.
To some extent, of course, this is no bad thing. Is the guy in Indonesia who stays up until 5am to watch Arsenal games on a tiny phone screen any less of a fan than the Islington resident who strolls up to the Emirates from his £2m townhouse? Maybe not. But the rich tapestry of football fandom has always derived from its multiplicity of outlets: the physical and the virtual, the stadium and the messageboard, the singing crowd and the howling void. Now, only the howling void remains.
What might this look like in practice? You only had to witness the dramatic online feud between Everton and Liverpool fans over the recent injury to Virgil van Dijk. Last week it was reported that Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford had hired personal bodyguards to protect him and his family after receiving multiple death threats online for his challenge on the Dutchman. And maybe this would all have happened anyway, but the speed and ferocity of the escalation felt like a product of all this pent-up frustration – a reckless challenge, an injured player, a disrupted title defence – being channelled into a single blunt outlet, the thousands of eyes fixed to thousands of screens, all steadily getting angrier.
Where this all leads us, of course, is anyone’s guess. Away fan culture feels increasingly under threat: for now the priority for clubs is getting their own supporters back in, not the opposition’s, with all the security and logistical obstacles entailed. The bigger clubs, meanwhile, are already beginning to reorganise their fanbase based not on geography but by their ability to pay. The Premier League’s pay-per-view gambit is a crucial stress-test of its basic business model: the idea that no matter what, diehard fans will always try to watch every game.
And yet. If the digitisation of fandom offers new forms of alienation, then perhaps it also offers new forms of communion. One of the more heartwarming sights of recent weeks has been the online fundraising efforts of fans spurning the Premier League’s greedy offer and donating £14.95 to local food banks. Marcus Rashford’s school meals campaign owed much of its wildfire momentum to the fact that we were all essentially stuck at home, glued to social media. And as the nation goes into its second lockdown, as the sport retreats a little further into itself, you only hope that our urge to congregate, to gather to seek each other out – the very impulses that make football our sport, not theirs – find a way to endure.