England is caught in the throes of a profound identity crisis. Decades of mass migration have quite literally changed the face of the nation, with the dogma of multiculturalism erasing the ethno-cultural elements of English identity and flattening them into an enthusiasm for tea and queuing. But amid these more glaring shifts in the nation’s identity, one marker of Englishness that has been completely warped beyond recognition, yet somehow rarely gets discussed, is football fandom.
Ever since the advent of the Premier League in 1992, the organic elements of English fan culture that made its supporters so famous and admired across Europe has been increasingly suffocated out of the game. What was once an authentic expression of ritualised Englishness and a major part of people’s lives has been so relentlessly corporatised and gentrified over recent decades that going to a match these days feels like being stage managed by TV executives who want you to behave like you’ve been cast in a live action Coca-Cola commercial. Today, the Prem offers one of the most sterile matchday experiences in all of Europe and increasingly caters to foreign tourists rather than local supporters.
In many ways, the changes that have swept English football over the last 35 years or so mirror those that have occurred in the country at large: rising prices, elite capture, nanny state overreach, and demographic scrambling, have become as pronounced as they have in England’s urban centres. On the most banal level, the cost of attending football matches has roughly skyrocketed as much as London property prices since 1992. In the inaugural Premier League season, the cheapest adult season ticket at Liverpool — then the nation’s most successful club — cost £250. Adjusted for inflation, that same ticket would set you back £534.45 in 2024, which is still less than the £713 it cost at the beginning of the 2024-25 season.
Yet Liverpool isn’t even the outlier here. That accolade goes to Arsenal, where season tickets start at £1073. Rising prices have led to a socioeconomic cleansing of English football stadia.
Match-going fans are much older these days, with the average age of supporters at most Premier League clubs estimated to be somewhere in the mid-40s rather than the late teens, as was the case 50 years ago.
Exorbitant ticket prices also suggest that the fans are far more affluent too, which might explain the unbearable tweeness that has become such a marker of English fans these days. Where Dynamo Dresden ultras once expressed their displeasure at the rampant corporatisation of the sport by flinging a severed bull’s head towards the pitch during a game against Red Bull-owned RB Leipzig, Arsenal supporters compose songs to the tune of Shakira so they can sing and dance like hired entertainment at a children’s birthday party. No wonder the atmosphere at the Emirates stadium feels more like a tennis match than the Belgrade derby.
But it’s not simply that English fans have become much more genteel and geriatric on average than their European counterparts, they are also forced to operate within the confines of a far more restrictive state. Britain might pride itself on its democracy but its political system operates as an “electoral dictatorship” and although its class hierarchy isn’t quite as rigid as it once was, there is still a definite sense that society is made up of rulers and the ruled. Having lived in Serbia, England, Germany, and Italy, over the course of my adult life and attended football matches in each, nowhere have I felt more like a naughty child sent to the headmaster’s office than in the UK.
England is, after all, a nation often described as a nanny state, where a politically incorrect joke on social media will put you at risk of police harassment over a “non-crime hate incident” — a form of legislation that, along with ASBOs, feels like it’s been pulled straight from Orwell. The country is ruled through a form of petty authoritarianism that I’ve only ever experienced in Germany. This tutting tendency smothers almost every aspect of everyday life but it’s most pronounced in football stadia, where you’ll be threatened with expulsion if you dare sit in a seat that doesn’t match your ticket. Europe, by contrast, is far more permissive: the section where the ultras gather behind the goal is generally treated as a semi-autonomous zone where varying degrees of delinquent behaviour, from pyrotechnics to offensive banners, are tolerated in accordance to local mores.
Supporters are expected to spend their money and leave quietly
This attitude doesn’t exist in England, where supporters are expected to spend their money and leave quietly. Nothing is allowed to occur on the football terraces without the approval of the relevant authorities. This is best exemplified by a recent farce at Arsenal, where the club turned down a fan request to unveil a choreography depicting head coach Mikel Arteta and a handful of the team’s star players playing chess – an utterly inoffensive display of arts and crafts that would be considered adorably quaint by even Scottish standards, let alone those in Poland.
The Arsenal hierarchy chose to produce their own one instead, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be as impressive as a desktop wallpaper and made the club a target of raucous mockery. To make matters worse, the supporters meekly accepted this decision without so much as a whimper of defiance, which is illustrative of just how tame English football fandom has become.
In Germany, by contrast, match-goers across the country derailed a commercial deal that the German Football League tried to strike with U.S. private equity firms by flinging masses of tennis balls onto the pitch during matches and steering remote-controlled cars onto the field of play, causing numerous games to be delayed until the league eventually relented. Meanwhile, the ultras of Italian side AS Roma intimidated the club’s chief executive, Lina Souloukou, into resigning after the team’s head coach and former legendary player, Daniele De Rossi, was sacked from his post earlier this season. On the continent, supporters demand to be treated like stakeholders in their clubs and will fight back when they feel affronted. In England, however, they seem to have accepted their roles as docile consumers.
But it’s not just that English football culture has been reengineered from the top down, change has also come from the bottom up. These days, many English football fans come from African or Asian households, where the traditions of native supporters are completely alien concepts. Instead of forming hooligan firms or ultras groups, your modern fan is more likely to launch a YouTube fan channel where they imitate SkySports TV pundits as they commentate on their teams’ matches over a livestream. The most popular creators in this corner of the internet are overwhelmingly from immigrant backgrounds and exemplify the “Yookay” aesthetic.
The modern fan isn’t an ultra, they are a parasite
Instead of going to matches to cheer on their club and harass the opposition into underperforming, these FanTV influencers typically sit at their computers on matchday, streaming performative tantrums to their followers as they react to in-game events.
Unlike in the stadium, where supporters submit their individuality to something bigger than themselves, these influencers effectively use clubs as a hook to attract monetisable clicks and views from people who like to watch grown men act like angry toddlers. Social media algorithms favour negative emotions, so it’s the FanTV channels of underforming giants like Arsenal, Manchester United, or Tottenham Hotspur that have the greatest reach. This means that creators are actually incentivised to denigrate their own side — a role typically reserved for rival supporters — in the pursuit of profit. The modern fan isn’t an ultra, they are a parasite, and what is most worrying is that this appears to be the model for the future. It is often said that the past is foreign country and that they do things differently there, but in England the same could be said for the present. Time to change tactics.
