Far-right, nationalist football hooligans don’t realise who the real enemy is

The Southport riots are the kind of thing we like to pretend we didn’t see coming. But the men on those streets didn’t appear from nowhere. A generation ago, many of those same men were on the football terraces, wrapped up in Stoney and club lore, scrapping with rival firms for bragging rights, for a sliver of respect in a world that gave them little else.

But there was a strange honour to it all, in its own chaotic way. Football hooligans only fought other hoolies, men who understood the rules of engagement. You fought to show you could hold your own against game opposition, then shared bruised camaraderie in the pub. But with that ritual having been outlawed and their ranks cherry-picked by nationalist extremists, it’s all been replaced by a battle far less defined. 

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There was a time when academics saw hooligans – with their almost-ceremonial skirmishes – as Marxist freedom fighters rallying against the establishment. But that empathetic eyeball on a messy subculture of frustrated, alienated young men quickly fell out of vogue. Before long they became the ‘English disease’, newspaper bogeymen, a pox on our society whose behaviour cannot ever be tolerated. But nature doesn’t accept a vacuum.

Those rivalries, once fierce and local but far more small-time than headlines led us to believe, have been replaced by reactionary forces focused on a larger, existential threat. Those who once clashed at the match are now told the real firm they’re facing are the people stepping off boats in search of safety. Grandstanding commentators who once directed public ire away from deindustrialisation and gentrification and towards the folk devil of football hooligans are doing so again.

By spinning moral panics of refugee grifters and dinghies filled with hardened criminals, nationalist pundits and their attention-economy minions turn attention away, once more, from the real enemy: rampant, shameless capitalism. 

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In painting migrants as the greatest threat to our precious social order, the language is the same as during hooliganism’s heyday: lawlessness, chaos the erosion of values. Scum, basically. But now these same men – once vilified – march through towns like Southport, wrapped in their flag instead of a scarf, with a sense of vindication, finally: convinced they’re defending something essential that only they can stop. Their actions are orchestrated on WhatsApp groups once dedicated to football banter where Islamophobic disinformation now festers. In these spaces, shared frustration is spun into hatred, fostering a vulnerable (and, to some, valuable) milieu of conspiracy and fear. 

It’s easy to dismiss the rioters as mindless thugs, but that only lets the forces that create them off lightly. Calls to stand your ground and protect your turf are a direct lift from top boys of old. But in the past, their melees were often pre-arranged with men who could give as good as they got. Now, they’re pitted against people even more displaced than they are. Migrants, fleeing their own hardships, are cast as invaders, even as they are pushed into the same precarious margins, caught in the same currents of our socioeconomic precarity.

Here lies the real tragedy: the hooligans-turned-nationalists and the migrants they’re taught to fear are victims of the same forces. But that’s harder to see when you’ve been told that your enemy is the one standing beside you, not the ones pulling strings from above. For years, football provided an outlet for these frustrations, to fight for your place in a world that otherwise felt indifferent.

Now that’s gone too, gobbled by corporate interests. It’s a game that no longer feels like it belongs to the people in the communities that built football in the first place. And that, inevitably, becomes an easy metaphor to exploit.

The result is what we saw in Southport and across the country – men who have had their isolation manipulated into believing their anger should be directed at the people who, despite appearances, are more similar than they are different. These proud Englishmen have been told they are the last line of defence. But what they’re really protecting is a myth shaped by forces that couldn’t care less about their actual lives, nor the consequences of their actions. 

The men marching for Tommy, Nigel and St George are only protecting a vision of England that never really existed – where their communities were safe, unified and untouched by change. What they don’t see is their true enemy isn’t the migrants they’ve been taught to fear. It’s the system that stripped away their sense of safety and left them chasing shadows.

But as long as they keep clutching destructive myths to their crests, the deeper the country fractures, eroding any chance of rebuilding the sense of belonging they’re after, even as their imagined England drifts further out of reach. 

Sam Diss is the writer and host of the new Stak podcast documentary series The English Disease, which explores the lasting legacy of football hooliganism, available now.

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