Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Colin Glass is a prominent Glasgow insurance agent and a Rangers fan. He grew up in Dundee, but moved to Glasgow at the age of 18 to be near his team. Now he owns a house in Florida, and says that but for Rangers he would have moved there. “I didn’t become a Rangers fan because of religion. I did it because I liked the colors, the red, white and blue,” he assured me.

  “And Rangers get the image in the press of being the religious bigots! You know these stories about thousands of Rangers fans returning their season tickets when Johnston signed? Well, I happen to know the Rangers director in charge of season tickets. Do you know how many tickets were returned? One!” Yes, but other fans burned their season tickets in front of Ibrox. “A media stunt.”

  I said that Celtic fans were quite as convinced that the press was biased against them. “But they have got a general paranoia that there is discrimination against Catholics.” Then he said: “There is discrimination against Catholics, but not so much in the media. There is discrimination in jobs, by a lot of businesses in Western Scotland. So when, say, a referee’s decision goes against them for perfectly legitimate reasons, they get paranoid. A Catholic friend of mine told me that he walked out of chapel recently when the priest started on about how everyone was against Catholics, right down to soccer referees.”

  When it comes to job discrimination, Glass, given his position, is a strong witness. I asked for his evidence. “If you take a look and see the number of Masonic handshakes at places like the chamber of commerce. The police too. I remember once, at a police retirement do, the chief inspector talking about Catholics. He said, ‘I promoted two of them, and you know, one of them turned out not bad!’ This man had no idea what he was saying!”

  Glass told me that three of his four assistant managers were Celtic fans. But: “If someone called Patrick O’Leary applied, I wouldn’t put him in a job approaching normal executive businessmen, because when he phones up and gives his name, they’ll say ‘No.’ ” Catholics should dissemble more, he said. “They call their kids Bridget Teresa or names like that. My view is, why do they give their children that handicap when neither they nor I have the power to change people’s prejudices?” Could he tell a Catholic from a Protestant? “Catholics speak slightly differently. The police here will ask, ‘What exactly did the suspect say?’ Take ‘stair’: we say ‘steer,’ they say ‘stayer.’ ”

  “But it works on both sides: the Labor council of Glasgow is totally dominated by Catholics. There was a firm called Lafferty’s Construction, now bust. Every single tender from the district council that Frank Lafferty went for, he was just under the next bid. He used to sit in the directors’ box at Celtic Park.”

  “The worst club match in the world, without a doubt,” said Jim Craig, a well-coiffed, gray-haired Glaswegian dentist about the Old Firm game. What was it like to play in? “I loved it! I’m of the warrior class, and a warrior is trained to fight. Sometimes I went through the whole game without ever doing anything constructive, and got praised at the end.”

  Craig used to be Celtic’s right back, and he once scored an own goal against the Rangers. “Twenty-three years ago—people still tell me about it—and it wasn’t even a very good one,” he lamented. “I tried to glance it beside the post. It hit the inside of the post and went in. A few years ago Terry Butcher scored an absolute smasher in the game for Celtic: the ball came across and he threw himself at it and it screamed into the corner. I wrote to him, ‘I scored a mediocre own goal in the Old Firm match back in 1970 and I’m still reminded of it. You’ll be remembered for all time for that one!’ ”

  “The tribal supporters don’t want the game to change. It’s a great day for them, to go out there and hate the opposition. If you played behind closed doors, they’d stand outside at either end and shout. It’s hard for me because I’m not a passionate person. It’s hard for the players, because very often your whole season is judged on how you do in the Old Firm games.” We shook our heads and deplored the fans. Then Craig said: “Don’t forget, though: you’ll get a summer holiday, I’ll get a summer holiday, but they won’t get a summer holiday.” In Ulster in the 1970s, he had met a man whose father was dying of cancer. “The son asked me to come round and see the guy, who was a Celtic fan, and I did, I brought along some pennants and badges, and then I went back to Scotland and, I must admit, clean forgot about it. That November I got a letter from the son. His dad had lived much longer than anyone had expected him to, and all he talked about for the last six months of his life was that a Celtic player had been to see to him. Not ‘Jim Craig,’ but a Celtic player. It’s hard for players: you’re fighting with the manager, you’re injured, you’re carrying an injury, you’re coming back from injury, and it’s very much a job. You forget that that other side of soccer is a tremendous thing.”

  The most famous Celts in history are Jock Stein’s “Lisbon Lions.” In 1967 they became the first British team to win the European Cup, beating Helenio Herrera’s Inter Milan 2-1 in the final in Lisbon. Craig is a Lisbon Lion, and I asked what he remembered of the game. “I’m still always asked about it, and I still don’t think it was a penalty. I was determined he wasn’t going to turn past me, and I thought, ‘If I bump into him the referee isn’t going to give a penalty, not at this stage of the game.’ How wrong I was.” But later he set up Tommy Gemmell’s equalizer, and then Chalmers scored the winner. The post-match banquet was the one at which the Celtic coaches abused Herrera. “We had Scotsmen falling out of closets for weeks afterwards,” said a British diplomat in Lisbon. Three years later, Craig was on the bench when Celtic lost its second European Cup final to Feyenoord. What had gone wrong? He thought it might have had to do with the biorhythms of the two teams.

  Few soccer players go on to become dentists, I said. “Nowadays there are a lot of Catholic lawyers, doctors and so on. You didn’t have that forty years ago. These people were fighting a system. That’s why when Jock came and the team suddenly picked up, it was wonderful for these people.”

  I told him about my book. He shook his head. “It’s hard for someone from beyond Glasgow to understand the place. This is a strange city. I’ll give you an example. The other night, I was walking down the street, past this building that’s just been bought by the ministry of defense, and I saw a light on inside, so I climbed up on the ledge to see what was in there. This guy comes past, looks at me and says: ‘You’re a nosy bastard!’ Then he says: ‘What’s up there anyway?’ ”

  The Old Firm divides Scots all over the world, from the USA to South Africa, but the region it affects most is Ulster. The province, after all, is like an Old Firm game got out of hand, and when the Old Firm meet it grows tenser than usual. A week before Celtic vs. Rangers at Parkhead, I went to Ulster.

  I started from Dublin, capital of the republic. “I’m Irish aren’t I,” one Dubliner wrote to me, explaining why he supported Celtic. “From a very early age in Ireland your father embeds the words Glasgow Celtic into your system. You will be very grateful for this introduction to the world’s finest club, and it will probably be the only time in your childhood that you will obey your father’s orders most willingly.”

  From Dublin I took the bus up to Derry, in Ulster. Recently, a Derry family scattered a relative’s ashes over the running track at the Rangers ground only to watch groundsmen sweep up the ex-fan seconds later. From Derry I took another bus to the small town of Limavady. On its deserted main street, David Brewster has a solicitor’s office. I asked him whether I could leave my backpack at the reception desk. “Better take it with you,” he said. Politicians in Ulster are careful people.

  Brewster, who was wearing a blue pullover, is tipped as a future MP. He is an Ulster Unionist, and so, naturally, is a Rangers fan. He was the first of many lucid Old Firm fans I met. “This,” he said, indicating a scar around his eye, “is, as a matter of fact, a souvenir of Glasgow. But in Glasgow, 99% of the time you can be as bigoted as you want and the worst you’ll get is punched. All the stuff that you’ve bottled
up for months in Ulster, you can let go there in 90 minutes. Things get very intense over there, but you won’t get shot.” In Ulster itself, he said, Old Firm fans kept quiet. Celtic and Rangers shirts were read as simple sectarian symbols. “Pat Rice, a Roman Catholic, was killed in about 1971. He was educationally subnormal, and he used to walk around in his neighborhood, one of the toughest areas of Belfast, wearing a Rangers scarf. He had been warned—he got on people’s nerves—and in the end he got murdered. So the Old Firm is not that tribal.”

  In other words, there was no street rivalry between Celtic and Rangers fans in Ulster? No teasing, no fistfights? “In Belfast, Catholics and Protestants who do work together avoid religious topics. The phrase is, ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’ If you ever ask the folk here anything, by way of an opinion poll for example, they’ll be very guarded about expressing an opinion. Yet they know the religious affiliation, or the perceived religious affiliation, of virtually every club in England and Scotland.” I went straight back to Derry, and caught a bus to Belfast, arriving there late on Thursday evening.

  Belfast used to have its own Old Firm games. Belfast Celtic, a clone of Glasgow Celtic, was founded in 1891, and their matches against Protestant clubs were always hairy affairs. There was gunfire at games against Linfield in the 1930s and 1940s, and finally, after fans invaded the pitch and broke a player’s leg in 1949, Belfast Celtic folded.

  Later, the tiny Belfast club Cliftonville began to attract Catholics, simply because their ground, Solitude, lies near a Catholic area. Matches between Cliftonville and Protestant teams can produce quite spectacular violence. Graham Walker, a Rangers fan and a Queen’s University lecturer in politics, has even seen Protestant fans throw a grenade: “It went off at the back of the Spion Kop, where the Cliftonville fans were. The back of the Spion Kop is where the Falls Road is, so the fans started cheering and singing, ‘We’ve Got Another One’—they thought the bomb was one of theirs.” But Cliftonville is a very small club. Belfast Catholics look to Glasgow for most of their soccer.

  I stayed at Queen’s University, which has a Celtic Supporters’ Club and a Rangers one. All the committee members of the Queen’s R.S.C. that year were also members of the Unionist Party. On Friday morning I found Lee Reynolds, the R.S.C. chairman, waking up under a Union Jack in his room. “You probably can’t go into a Protestant house in Ulster where there isn’t a Rangers scarf, or a mug, or something,” he told me. I mentioned that I also wanted to speak to the chairman of the Celtic Supporters’ Club. “Oh yes, D.J. We’ll go and find him.” We met Thomas “D.J.” McCormick, draped in Celtic scarf, outside the student union, and Lee introduced us. The two were overly polite to one another, like diplomats of warring states at a UN meeting. D.J. told me he would take me to the match the next day. He decided that instead of sitting in the pressbox I would stand on the terrace with the Celtic fans.

  Later that Friday I went to see Michael Fearon, another solicitor, but a Catholic who works on a lone Catholic street in the Protestant part of the city. Walking through Belfast you think of bombs. As you walk through Fearon’s door you are, to the casual eye, identifying yourself as a Catholic, and you hope that no one watching minds. Happily the street seemed deserted, but I decided not to get lost on the way back to Queen’s.

  I asked Fearon how popular Rangers and Celtic were in Ulster. “It’s Celtic and Rangers,” he corrected. “The most fanatical Celtic and Rangers fans come from here, from the six counties.” He was one of them: “I wrap a Tricolor around my shoulders, put on a scarf with a picture of the pope and sing, ‘Fuck the Queen.’ And there’s thousands like me.” Why? “I’m a downtrodden nationalist, and when you stand on the terraces at Parkhead and look across, you can see the people who keep us down here.” And yet going to Glasgow meant a holiday from Ulster: “Politics in this country, on both sides, is intransigent, and totally, totally predictable. There’s no such thing as that weird animal, the floating voter, here.” At an Old Firm game, I suggested, there is the possibility of beating the Protestants for a day? He agreed, and gave me an article on Maurice Johnston that he kept in his drawer. I asked him for his stereotype of the Rangers fan. “It would have to be the potbelly with the McEwans shirt over it. Every time at night before the TV goes off, he stands up for the British national anthem. The reality is, he’s just like me.”

  D.J. and I took the train to his parents’ house in Larne, the port for the Stranraer ferry, and the next day, rather early on a very cold morning, we walked to the boat. I was staying on in Glasgow after the match, but D.J. was making a 22-hour round trip that would cost him at least £70. Ulster Old Firm fans are almost quantifiably the most loyal supporters in Britain. The Glasgow academic Raymond Boyle surveyed Belfast fans of Celtic and found that:- LESS THAN 50 PERCENT OF THEM HAD FULL-TIME WORK.

  - 80 PERCENT MADE ALL 16 ORGANIZED TRIPS TO PARKHEAD EACH SEASON.

  - 49 PERCENT SPENT MORE THAN £500 A YEAR ON CELTIC. SOME TOLD BOYLE HE SHOULD HAVE ALLOWED A CATEGORY FOR OVER £1000.

  - 80 PERCENT OF THOSE WHO FILLED IN THE POLITICAL SECTION OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE VOTED SINN FEIN. HOWEVER, 40 PERCENT OF THE SAMPLE LEFT THE SECTION BLANK.

  Ours was an all-Celtic boat—Rangers and Celtic fans travel best separately—and on it was a rubber-faced man the others called “Reeva.” He was probably the one person in the world who could jump on a table in front of a ferryload of Celtic fans and shout, “Can You Hear the Rangers Sing?,” without getting a response. Reeva was the Larne village idiot, and he gave me a barrage that he insisted I quote verbatim in my book. He never made the match that day: he was arrested in Glasgow before kickoff for talking to a policeman’s horse. “In Northern Ireland you belong to one side or the other,” Paul Hamill, head of the Larne C.S.C., told me. “Either you are, or else you aren’t. If I miss the boat tonight, I’ll be given a bed, be given money. It’s happened before. Celtic is a big family: It’s essentially an Irish club, an Irish club playing in a foreign league.” Many Rangers fans agree, and think that Celtic players never try their best for Scotland because they feel Irish. “He’d rather be wearing a green shirt than a blue one,” is the terrace phrase.

  Our coach finally reached the East End of Glasgow and D.J. gave me a Celtic scarf, for safety’s sake. When we passed Rangers fans we looked away, and so did they.

  It was still cold, I was still sleepy, and I found it hard to feel partisan. No one else did: Parkhead was full, Follow, Follow had called for a flag day, and the Rangers end looked like a crowd at a Royal Wedding. Their Union Jacks are considered so provocative in Glasgow that the police regularly confiscate them, which, as Follow, Follow points out, is peculiar: “After all, it is the national flag.”

  The most devoted foreign fans admire British fan culture. People from all over Europe come to Glasgow for the Old Firm game, and there is even a Rangers fanzine published in Switzerland called Strangers on Rangers. Some of the foreigners try to imitate the British, which explains the Union Jacks on terraces all over Europe (especially Eastern Europe) and the songs borrowed from Britain. “Here We Go,” which Auberon Waugh called the national anthem of the working classes, is rapidly becoming the new Internationale. The British fan’s repertoire is limitless. Though there are soccer fans all over the world, I doubt that Dicks Out!, the recent collection of terrace songs, could have been published anywhere but in Britain. Perhaps in Argentina.

  British fans are unique. In Britain, soccer itself is almost incidental to fan culture. More than any other supporters in the world, British fans are aware of themselves as fans. They think a lot about their own numbers, their visibility, their group character. Man City fans say they were the first to wave inflatable bananas; Liverpool fans think they have a famous sense of humor; Leeds fans are racist. The British fan’s main virtue is devotion, which is why the Rangers fanzine Aye Ready writes that “Celtic fans are about as loyal to their team as Philby, Burgess and Maclean were to the British Empire.”

  Every British man (at least) has
his team. Nothing else in soccer matters nearly as much to him. A Rochdale fan wants to read about Gazza and David Platt, but most of all he wants to read about Rochdale. My friends in Holland and Germany liked some teams more than others, but these sympathies were slight and changeable. For years I thought I was a neutral myself, until I noticed a mild pang whenever Ajax lost. Coming to England, I met people who had not the slightest desire to kick a ball themselves but who were devoted to teams which they knew to play poor soccer and which they went to see play every week.

  Of course some foreign fans are devoted to one team, but even they are unlike British fans. In Holland, or in Italy or Cameroon, being a fan is a rather passive affair. Perhaps you love your team, and maybe you sing and shout in the stadium, and if you are particularly devoted you spend much of your spare time with other fans of your team, but you hardly ever think about being a fan. In other words, you want your team to win, but you do not care if the opposition’s fans outflag you. Follow, Follow did care. So did D.J., who muttered to me when he saw the flags, “When we go to Ibrox we fill the stand with Tricolors.”

  British fans are historians. When two British teams play each other, their histories play each other too. This is especially true in Glasgow. Every Celtic fan of any age can talk to you for days about the Lisbon Lions, and every Old Firm fan knows that in 1931 the Rangers forward Sam English accidentally kicked the Celtic goalkeeper John Thomson in the head, whereupon Thomson, the “Bonnie Lad from Fife” died. The Celtic anthem sums it up:It’s enough to make your heart go oh oh oh