National, national Widzew Łódź. [Polish football team]
Football— the planet’s most loved sport.
But for all its beauty, camaraderie, and joy,
some of its hardcore fans have a pretty bad rep for violence,
bigotry, and hooliganism.
Ultras, casuals, hooligans.
The definitions change depending on where you are in the world,
but they’re all seen as the most devoted,
fanatical followers of the club.
They’re often highly organized,
following their teams around the world to show support
and occasionally to stage hyper-violent pitched battles
with rival hooligan firms.
This kind of impassioned, near-religious support
is rarely seen outside football,
except in one place—politics.
This is how,
from London to Belgrade to Jerusalem,
right-wing movements and political parties have attempted to co-opt
the testosterone-charged energy of the football terraces
and turn it into a ready-made weapon to silence opponents.
[Decade of Hate]
My name’s Tim Hume,
and I cover the far right for VICE World News.
It goes without saying
that the majority of football fans aren’t hooligans,
but far-right infiltration of football is a long-running problem.
It has its roots in the earliest days of hooliganism in the UK of the 70s,
where organizations like the National Front
would deliberately try to recruit new members from football terraces
and the pubs that surround them.
When I was a teenager and I was on the terraces,
you would see the National Front there,
you would see them trying to recruit,
they’d have their leaflets and so on.
Join the National Front!
But the crossover between football and extreme nationalism
reached one of its most violent expressions
during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Željko Ražnatović was a seasoned criminal
and worked as a security guard for the players and coaching staff
at the Serbian club Red Star Belgrade.
When war broke out in the early 90s,
he formed a paramilitary group called the Serbian Volunteer Guard, or SDG,
and recruited from the Delije,
Red Star’s hardcore supporters group.
Ražnatović was nicknamed Arkan,
and the SDG became known as Arkan’s Tigers.
The Tigers were involved in massacring large numbers
of Croatian and Muslim civilians.
They’re closely involved in ethnic cleansing operations.
Basically, what we see is the Tigers being used as a force
to perform the dirty work of the Belgrade regime.
But the links between football hooligans and politics
didn’t stop in the 90s.
So in contemporary Serbia,
we see close relations between the ultras and organized politics.
Allegations that they’re instructed to do things
that will aid the political landscape.
And it’s not just in the Balkans where we see a crossover
between football violence and nationalist politics.
This volatile manifestation has also reared its head in Israel.
In 2020,
as anti-government protests kicked off across Israel,
it looked like then President Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on power
was loosening.
But as the unrest took hold,
a group of men stepped in to defend the government,
beating up protesters, hijacking demos, and at one point
hurling a Molotov cocktail at a Palestinian man.
These men were from La Familia,
a far-right hooligan group affiliated to Beitar Jerusalem.
It just happened to be Netanyahu’s favorite club.
Beitar Jerusalem is basically the sporting branch of the Likud Party,
and it’s been like that for many years.
La Familia was always part of a political movement.
The connection between Beitar Jerusalem,
and right-wing Israeli politics goes back decades
and will likely continue into the future.
La Familia connections are useful for politicians.
They are a branch who can do some dirty work for you,
who can intimidate the protesters against you.
No Arabs at Beitar at all.
This use of hardcore fans as political muscle
has been seen throughout Europe.
From Ukraine,
where nationalist militias recruited from hooligan firms
during the war in Donbass.
To Poland, where ultra-nationalist hooligans
have mobilized against progressive anti-government protesters.
But given that most football fans
have nothing to do with extremist politics,
what is it about the hardcore end of football fandom
that makes it a target for infiltration by far-right groups?
We ran a study in Brazil with a wide cohort of Brazilians,
and we asked about their national identities,
religious identities, and football identities.
And we found the same psychological mechanism, this identity fusion,
explaining the most extreme pro-group behavior.
So that’s been willing to fight or die in the name of your group.
And it was the same psychology,
whether you were religious, a nationalist, or a football fan.
And because that psychology is very similar,
we can see why hardcore fan groups can often be a good pool
to recruit membership for far-right groups
and other extremist groups.
When football hooligans aren’t engaging in street politics,
they can usually be found fighting their fiercest club rivals
in the stands, forests, and MMA gyms.
However, when international football matches come about,
hooligan firms in the same country
will often put aside their differences
in the name of patriotism.
You’ve got a football identity and a national identity,
both heavily invested.
So when they come together,
it’s a really potent recipe for what we might call as passion.
So in the case of hardcore fans or traditional hooligan groups,
fans can come together for international matches, say,
put aside their club-level differences,
and come together for what they see as the greater good.
These dynamics took on a new form in the 2010s
in the historic home of football hooliganism, the UK.
But now, instead of established far-right groups
targeting football ultras for recruitment or support,
groups of football hooligans themselves
formed their own far-right movements.
These groups, like the English Defence League,
brought separate and often rival firms together
to advance a bigoted, Islamophobic agenda.
We know from research that has been done
on the EDL, especially in the early days,
at least 30 to 40 percent of activists
came from football backgrounds.
And whilst the English Defence League wasn’t just about football, you know,
what it did, it grew out of that seedbed that was provided
by the football spaces.
The EDL initially claimed to be only opposed to militant Islam,
but it quickly became apparent that the target was Islam in general
and individual British Muslims in particular.
We know the enemy is within,
and no one’s doing anything about it.
What really happened very quick
was that there was that transition from Islamist extremism to Islam,
and then all Muslims were actually presenting a threat
to us, our way of life,
our culture, our values.
And the Islamic community
will feel the full force of the English Defence League
if we see any of our citizens killed, maimed, or hurt
on British soil ever again.
At their height, the EDL were able to draw thousands onto the streets
and even bigger numbers online.
The movement replicated aspects of British fan culture
that had been diluted by soaring ticket prices
and more effective policing of games,
helping to broaden its appeal.
Admittedly, what we get on the terraces
is very different to what you get at an EDL march, for example,
where it’s much more Islamophobic.
But the banners, you know,
the kind of the drinking together, the getting boozed-up,
the coked-up stuff, you know, all of these kind of things.
While the EDL fell apart amidst scandal and poor organization,
it inspired new movements, such as the Football Lads Alliance
a few years later,
as well as similar groups in other European countries,
like the Hooligans Against Salafists movement in Germany.
Today they’re butchering sheep and cows,
tomorrow may be Christian children.
Hooligans against Salafists.
We don’t want a religious state.
Despite those movements having collapsed,
their poisonous legacy lives on.
Seven years on from the EDL, when they first emerged,
the real legacy that they’ve left really
was the increase in normalization of Islamophobia.
Tommy Robinson was given a platform within the media
to espouse this stuff.
I think it resonated with an audience that was much bigger
than the thousands of people that actually were on the street.
In recent years, the footballing community
has become increasingly vocal in its rejection of racism.
However, pockets of far-right fans remain a potent force
in extremist street politics,
mobilizing to defend their political causes and attack their enemies.
The connections of La Familia and the Likud are not going to go away.
When elections get nearer,
they are political activists who will use whatever they have
to create chaos and create problems for their current government.