Over the last ten years or so football has become cool. Those who previously scoffed at the brashness or perceived unsubtlety of the football culture we were steeped in have decided it’s now for them.

Fading are the days of football fans described as “a solid mass of swearing, sweating, retching, belching sub-humanity” who “all had the complexion and body-scent of a cheese-and-onion crisp” *. Football’s image has been cleaned up, for the better. But the unintended consequence of this shift is a wave of gentrification in our game. In the topflight this manifests in century-old institutions morphed into international super brands, point of access impenetrable at £90 a ticket. But in the lower sections of the pyramid the more subtle forces of gentrification, cultural appropriation and selective borrowing are going on, muscling their way in armed with ‘vintage’ PSG shirts and £6 pints of Punk Squirrel IPA.

*Martin Amis (cunt)

The subtle gentrification of our game pinches in places other than just the spiking price of old football shirts on eBay. For decades non-league football has been propped up by dedicated volunteers, tireless chairmen/women and hardy supporters. While an injection of cash into non-league is undoubtedly a good thing and attending games should be encouraged, many clubs over the past few years have had their terraces awash with a new breed of self-interested football fan.

Previously floundering in the football wilderness, little existing club connection to speak of, thirsty for the new cool that football has, they’ve targeted non-league as something that works for them. What they seek, much like the malevolent billionaire owner, is something malleable, bought into with economic clout and reimagined in the image of whatever ideology they bring along - insensitive to what’s gone before and unwilling to blend in. The clubs, desperate for cash, rightfully welcome them in. Some of these new non-league fans supposedly ‘tired of the trappings of elite football’ are partaking in a kind of socio-economic imperialism: ‘we can take this over and own it.’ It represents a gentrification of our game, where our culture is for sale for those with the means to play with as they wish. Vincent Tan, Hugo from Hove, you’re both the same.

Previously floundering in the football wilderness, no club connection to speak of, thirsty for the new cool that football has, they’ve targeted non-league as something that works for them. What they seek, much like the malevolent billionaire owner, is something malleable, bought into with economic clout and reimagined in the image of whatever ideology they bring along

This sudden appeal of non-league football amongst hipsters is of course made easier by the precarious financial position a non-league football club finds itself in. It would be impossible to reform the culture of neighboring (and at times just as financially vulnerable) clubs such as AFC Wimbledon or Charlton. Moving in on a club of this size and history is not as easy to do, the culture is stronger, the existing fan base more sizable, the objection to an elite clique of newbies would have been more vocal. So, the football hipsters chose to ignore the ‘establishment’ and instead focus on an easier target. Clubs much more malleable and in a far weaker position to resist the cultural co-option through economic means - suggesting that the motivation is not for a love of the game or the community they find themselves in but more a kind of self-actualisation viewed through the opaque prism of their own satisfaction.

“Ordinary morality is for ordinary football clubs” states a banner draped behind the goal at Champion Hill. Extraordinary circumstances have contributed to the rise of Dulwich Hamlet, a beautifully ordinary club, transformed by the growing cool of football and an economic shift in that particular corner of South East London.

Fueled by IPA and bratwurst hotdogs, what has been created is a kind of bi-monthly piss up for Dulwich’s new swelling fan base. The football, an incidental backdrop. 2,000 mainly young upwardly-mobile professionals have steamed in and gradually reformed the culture and image of the club and imposed their politics, spending habits and ideals on an unassuming club, grateful for the huge cash influx and rising profile.

As Dulwich experience promotions, there’s an unease about their flirtation with the relative big time “Dulwich Hamlet will not be televised” they say and news about Peter Crouch joining the board, plus the camera crew he brought along for the ride, has been met with some grumbles of resentment. This feels like an attempt at keeping it ‘pure’ and keeping it for ‘us’ whilst stifling the self-sufficiency of the club, making them less reliant on the whims of their new followers.

On a local level we’ve seen a very subtle shift of disengaged former Brighton fans towards non league clubs in Sussex. For a time, by some, Lewes FC were wrongly held up as everything they believed the Albion weren’t, some fans were shifting to what they perceived to be ‘real football’. The numbers are by no means significant but what it illuminates is a consumer-like choice where your allegiances are flexible, your own needs primary and your spending habits whimsical - the actions of an individualistic consumer, not a fanatic.

In the early days of the Amex, some at Whitehawk zeroed in on the Albion as the enemy and lazily portrayed us as the local face of corporate football. Forgetting what we’ve been through, where we’ve come from, ignoring the fabric of our club - progressive, morally centered, community minded, economically stable; but most annoyingly from their perspective - successful. “I first tried Brighton, which felt a bit corporate.” Whitehawk fan Adam told the Libero Guide. The concept of being able to ‘try’ a football club is exactly what we’re getting at. Whitehawk’s new fans have stated that the appeal of attending a game at the Enclosed Ground is that “It doesn’t take itself very seriously.” But football is serious, it’s everything to us. Saturdays aren’t a toss-up between Bowlplex, Churchill Square or going to the football.

Many non-league fans justify their new association as a reaction to the corporate impersonal ‘premier league’, rightfully so. Starting from the correct opinion that the ‘premier league’ has lost touch with grassroots and the kind of amoral rampant ultra-capitalism, the top few clubs operate under. It’s a symptom of the creation of an elite ‘premier league’ where there is an ‘in or out’ philosophy in the media and hierarchy of the game i.e. if you’re in the ‘premier league’ you’re everything, out, you’re nothing. Non-league football is therefore seen as the only alternative and the other three other professional leagues are guilty by association. Save your disdain for the ESL cabal. Those you believe to be guilty by association - AFC Wimbledon, Charlton, Leyton Orient, Carlisle United, Wycombe Wanderers – they need your support as well, but unfortunately, someone in attendance might have a different opinion to you and they only serve Carling.

The football hipsters impose a kind of cultural tapestry of cherry picked ‘fan culture’ and seek to impose their own version of what they believe that should be. They naively hark back to an era of terrace culture - something presumably they never experienced in professional football firsthand.

The football hipsters impose a kind of cultural tapestry of cherry picked ‘fan culture’ and seek to impose their own version of what they believe that should be.

Culture by its very definition suggests something organic, developed over time. Something imported, inappropriate and short term such as donning a black hoodie and picking up a drum is at odds with a gently evolving match day culture grounded in tradition. Taking the ‘best’ bits and making it your own is textbook cultural appropriation. A kind of blinkered retro-ism seen in strange couples in North Laine who wear exclusively 50s fashion. How far do you take this? Does your wife do all the cooking and cleaning as well? This is commonly referred to as selective borrowing.

But this has tangible consequences for football as well. In 2019 OWNAFC was set up to allow fans to buy shares in an as-yet undecided football club. Their mission was to raise enough capital to buy a non-league side of their choosing, rumoured to be Hednesford, founded in 1880. The concept was that all the 2,500 investors had a say in the club through an app at £49.99 a pop. The tech savvy tepidly enthusiastic consumers swooped in, selected a club at random, and the plan was to dictate terms to a club with over a hundred years of history. Luckily it never got off the ground and fell away.

Ebbsfleet FC experienced a similar situation when they were taken over by website MyFootballClub in 2008 backed by 27,000 members paying £35 for a voting share, their average gate is around a thousand. The new owners rescinded the rights of the manager to have final say on player sales and signings. Membership gradually fell away and in 2013 MyFootballClub walked away. Leaving volunteers, tireless staff, struggling Chairman/women where they were before – dedicating their time to upholding a 140 year old institution. Both examples point to a similar issue - football clubs, helpless due to the promise of new revenue, treated as a kind of social experiment and those left behind picking up the pieces again.

Football is not about you it’s about being a part of something bigger than you, it unites us and throws a banner around a diverse slice of society. A broad church accommodates a variety of views, all inevitably represented in a 33,000 slice of society at any home game. Turning a football club by economic coercion into something which looks like you is a sickness in the game, dubious owners and football hipsters are all part of the same disease.

If the concern is genuinely for football and protecting the game. Work tirelessly to reform it from the inside. Distance yourself from the ESL-faction. Join the Football Supporters Association and apply pressure on your own club to improve, wherever you see deficiencies. Football is for everyone and all of it should be supported through adequate, regulated financial support and more sufficient ‘trickle down’ financing from the FA and solvent clubs in the area.

All the above represents a shift away from what we think football should be about - a true and strong alliance under the banner of something bigger than yourself. Following a football club is an inorganic pre-determined affliction, absent from choice or rationality. Saturday afternoons from the age of seven were decided for me not by me, this is my church these are my people. It’s illogical, expensive, time consuming, emotionally torturous, but there’s nothing I care more about in the fibre of my being than Brighton & Hove Albion. Deciding to follow a team for your own satisfaction is the opposite of the dogma we describe, and personally I pity the inauthenticity of those who do.

Many football clubs arose from organised labour and it is fitting therefore that bands of bored monied hipsters are forming alliances based around their own needs in this age of the individual - where the old structures are deemed impenetrable, are disassociated with and left to wither on the vine. It’s a statement for the age of the individual: local, organised and representative has been replaced with transient, polarized and passive. A world where money trumps all and the established institutions are a plaything for those with means.

This article was originally published in Dogma Issue 4, September 2021 and has been amended slightly for publication here.

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