Improper Support - A look into the current problems surrounding fans in football

You’ve been looking forward to going to your first football game, everything is packed, and you have made travel plans, you make it into the stadium and sit down in your seat with a bunch of other supporters of your club. Then as the match goes on and your team is 3-0 down you watch everyone in a four-seat radius start leaving with 15 minutes still left to play, and you start wondering what the point of them even turning up is and whether having fans in the stadium are even necessary.

We are in the information age, where phones, and subsequently social media, has become a daily part of people’s lives now. There is still one question left to be answered however, as the FSA’s head of communications Michael Brunskill said, “Has social media made society better or worse?”

You’ve seen it on social media before, after a fan’s team put out a strange lineup, or have a bad result, no matter how bad their run has been beforehand, you will get a handful of accounts who are or at least seem to be fans of the said club going into a complete meltdown. Some criticism is fine; however, some of them just want to complain for the sake of complaining. Scapegoating a player for not having lightning quick reaction times, complaining about something that would have only been apparent in hindsight are only two of the many examples of forced complaining.

It does feel as though the problem around social media extends to everything, and that it is not just a football centric problem. “Whether it’s football or whether it’s any other aspect of society, music, politics, film, anything,” Brunskill said, “social media has the tendency to divide people and really encourage extreme opinions for clicks in one reason or another, so I don’t think it is a football specific issue.”

Transfer windows in the summer and in January, is another section that social media has affected, with fans able voice their opinions on certain players, especially in the fast-paced transfer deadline day. Every fan on social media wants all of the new highly touted players, regardless of how they would fit in the team, so will sometimes believe stories from unreliable and sometimes unknown sources instead of journalists like Fabrizio Romano and David Ornstein, solely because the unknown sources give them positive (and often fabricated) updates. Fans can also switch their opinion on a player in a heartbeat, depending on whether they join their club or not; a “great player” can become a “flop” in a fan group within seconds.

In many circumstances it does feel like it is all an act, a form of forcing anger from their rivals and potentially get into the player’s head before they have even kicked a ball for their new team. However, on some occasions these fans will take this motive and send it out of proportion.

Brunskill, who is a Sunderland fan himself, alluded to the fact that a normal fan would not likely do this as their first course of action, saying “I’m not in a hurry [as a Sunderland fan] to get on to Twitter(X) and tell everyone what I think about Sunderland’s formation or result, or my favourite or most hated players, speaking of which I don’t hate any of the players because we’re doing really well.”

Social media, particularly on Reddit, have been noticing an increase in the number of ‘delusional fans’ of the so-called Big Six clubs. A user in the subreddit r/TheOther14, which covers Premier League issues whilst disregarding these big six clubs, made a post saying, “It actually baffles me how deluded big six fans are.”

This is accompanied by a screenshot of a post on X which has a Manchester United supporter account stating their fanbase must be the strongest out there due to the ‘trauma we have to go through on a daily basis.’ Unsurprisingly these Premier League supporters, as well as fans from former Premier League regulars like Blackburn where baffled, but also relatively amused by the statement. A highly upvoted comment from a now deleted user summed up the situation by saying “They should try watching their team in League 1.”

Along with social media in general, football podcasts have become one of the more popular ways to project your footballing opinions to an audience to debate and discuss. However, most of these podcasts have hardly any proper experts in football, with podcasts like Pitch Side and The Club usually consisting of very expressive content creators who talk about viral issues and always getting into intense arguments for viewership purposes only.

In contrast you have the Stick to Football Podcast, hosted by the current roster of Sky Sports pundits, including Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Roy Keane and Jill Scott, as well as The Rest is Football, hosted by Gary Lineker, Micah Richards and Alan Shearer, and the realistic outlook would be to watch and trust these podcasts more as the people on them would have first-hand experience of some of the issues surrounding the game, as opposed to content creators who are just looking for that viral clip.

Higher up or around the same level on the trust ladder as former footballers’ podcasts would be podcasts like The Guardian’s Football Weekly and The TIFO Football Podcast. These podcasts combine football analysis with, as presenter Max Rushden said regarding Football Weekly, ‘complete nonsense,’ to ensure the viewer still has an enjoyable experience whilst also feeling as though they are being educated, informed, and represented regarding relevant issues.

Gillingham are a Kent based club currently in League 2, level 4 of the current football league system, and they have a podcast run by Kris Delo calls The View from the Medway, which goes through the news that week and gets other Gillingham fans on to discuss these topics.

“We started the podcast in April of last year,” said Delo, “there are a few other podcasts about Gillingham. Having watched them I just found a void there, where other fans could get involved because a few of them had the same speakers, so for me it was a case of let’s do a Monday show to review the weekends game, or a Wednesday show to review the Tuesday game, and just get different fans on every week that haven’t necessarily  been on camera before, that haven’t necessarily had that opportunity to have an opinion on something like a podcast.”

Delo also had his say on the big six podcasts saying, “I am not saying they do it for financial gain, but I am sure a few get a financial gain from it with the numbers they hit each week. They are a little more showy the higher up you go. There is one that is not, his name Scarfey (Harry Scarfe), who is a 15-year-old lad who does a podcast, he is autistic, and it is absolutely brilliant.”

These groups of fans who are a part of these big six podcasts likely fall under the same group who do not speak to other fans in or around the stadium's vicinity, with some instead already having their phones on X ready to moan about the performance after 15 minutes and try and find that player to scapegoat, before then in some cases rushing to their defence when they get harassed by fans afterwards. Sometimes it is reactionary, sometimes it is just to fuel rage, but most of the time it feels like one big act.

There have been plenty of examples of select fans ruining a club’s image off social media too, both in and out of the stadium, before, during and after games. One of these occurred during the 2022 championship play-off semi-final involving Sheffield United and Nottingham Forest, in which Sheffield United’s captain at the time Billy Sharp was attacked by Forest season ticket holder Robert Biggs, in which Sharp had to have 4 stitches in his lip.

The Championship, League One and League Two has had its fair share of idiotic fans, including but not limited to: Sunderland’s Luke O’Nien being attacked by a Portsmouth fan after the player fell over the advertisement boards, Sheffield Wednesday’s Chris Kirkland being shoved in the face by a Leeds fan during the Yorkshire Derby, and Jack Grealish getting punched in the back of the head by a Birmingham City fan during the Second City Derby, a game in which Grealish would get his revenge and scored the winner later on in the game.

There is a noticeable theme with all these incidents, which is that they all occur in an important game or in a local derby. For example, in the case involving Sharp, the prize was a place in the championship play-off final, dubbed “the richest game in football,” in which winning this final would net the winning team skywards of £265 Million pounds. Also, the Second City derby and the Yorkshire Derby are just two of many derbies which has a long history, so the hatred for the other team is seen as normal now.

The big six clubs (which consists of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur) have more TV appearances in England in comparison to other English clubs, and with that adds a new way for fans to act up, with a prime example being the Chelsea supporter who made a racist gesture towards Tottenham Hotspur star Son Heung-Min in August 2022. Social media would become aware of the incident when a user pointed out the gesture on the Sky broadcast whilst Son was arguing a decision with a linesman just in front of Chelsea fan Thomas Burchell. Burchell would receive a football banning order for three years following this incident, barring him from being in the vicinity of any stadium for that period.

Being a ‘big club’ per se also means competing in the highest competitions, like the Champions League, although the excitement might cause fans to do regrettable actions, as was apparent with a select group of Chelsea fans travelling on the Paris Metro to the Parc de Princes for the Blues’ round of 16 first leg against French giants Paris Saint Germain. A day after their draw on the 17th of February, social media and eventually the tabloids caught wind of a video circulating of these travelling Chelsea fans not letting Paris resident Souleymane Sylla board the train whilst chanting “We’re racist and that’s how we like it.”

Two years after the incident, four of the fans seen in said video were given suspended one-year sentences, that being Joshua Parsons, James Fairbairn, who denied their actions were racist, as well as Richard Barklie and William Simpson, who were both tried in absentia (they were not present).

Racism is quite a prominent problem in football, with the 2021 European Championship Final being a notable example. The fans, who had already been criticised after 2,000 ticketless fans tried to break into Wembley Stadium, aimed racist abuse at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after the trio all missed spot kicks in the shootout. 52-year-old fan Johnathon Best, who livestreamed his racist remarks on Facebook, was jailed following the incident.

Another issue which has been affecting football is homophobia, and players coming out. In a survey by the BBC, 8% of sports fans in general would stop watching their team altogether if they signed an openly gay player and, whilst it is unclear whether this has gone up or down since, 8% is still a staggeringly high figure. This means that it should come as no surprise that the Premier League support the No Room for Racism and Rainbow Laces campaigns, as they have realised that the problem with offensive behaviour not being punished is the people who have an unwillingness to solve the problem or just pretend it’s not an issue to begin with.

Sometimes, this controversial and often illegal behaviour is caused by what is known as Ultras. They are usually known and remembered for extravagant demonstrations to celebrate someone or promote a message, take for example Egyptian side Al Ahly’s Ultras Ahlawy holding up tifos and banners commemorating former CAF General-Secretary and Ultras founder Amr Fahmy, who had died a month prior.

Whilst some sets of ultras are just seen as part of the stadium atmosphere, other ultras partake in constant riots, criminal acts like assault and battery, and offensive actions for some clubs. One example is Beitar Jerusalem’s La Familia Ultras, whose actions have given the club the title of “most racist club in the world,” in addition to their homophobic and Islamophobic comments. Albeit a slightly extreme example, it is one of the many reasons people hate ultra groups.

There is also an ongoing problem with football fans being overly judgemental on new signings and managers and seemingly having the inability to give them time to settle in or implement their tactics. If a club’s owners are constantly hiring and firing managers in quick succession, clubs will end up with a strange amalgamation of players which is the product of a variety of different playing styles. Say you have a defensive coach and an attacking coach one after the other, if you then hire another defensive minded manager, there is a high possibility that a great attacking prospect may need to be sold for development, which in turn could affect the overall progression of the long term ambitions of the club.

Just because a manager has an established track record in management, it doesn’t mean that immediate success will occur when a club hires them, however when it comes to the club’s fanbase, a large majority of them will opt for the more flashier name other than a coach that would work better.

Similarly, if a managerial option is a former player of the club, sometimes even a club legend, there is sometimes a tendency to opt for them instead of a manager who has experience but no relation to the club. Take for example before the 24/25 season got underway, multiple articles were already tipping the then head coach of Manchester United Erik ten Hag to be shown the door and to be replaced by current Ipswich manager and former Red Devil Kieran McKenna, even though Mauricio Pochettino, who had just been sacked by Chelsea, being a more experienced option.

This could in turn make a manager’s job even worse than it should be, for both the experienced and upcoming managers, albeit in completely different ways. For experienced managers, they will enter a club with fans already having high expectations on the club’s success, based on their success at a different club in a different league, meaning that having a season of no silverware may cause fans to lead a revolt against the manager and getting them fired, despite having a decent first season and having not done anything disastrously wrong.

In contrast, a previously unknown and/or up and coming coach coming into a well-established club with fans eager for instant success, who may not be best pleased with a manager without a vast trophy cabinet and have already cast an element of doubt on the coach's ability. Consequently, if they haven’t got clear backing from the fans, and their start isn’t good, it could force the fans to put immediate and undeserving pressure on the coach, instead of giving them time, which would take a toll on the coach’s wellbeing.

Where you have football fans who can’t buy tickets and go to games on a regular basis, you have the fans who do buy tickets and then leave before the game is done, instead of staying and supporting their clubs even when the team is not playing well. There are some fair reasons for fans to leave early however, for example a London club having away support travel up to Newcastle’s St. James’ Park and having to catch the early bus home.

During Chelsea's 3-0 loss against Brighton and Hove at the start of 2025, the camera panned over to the away end where the Chelsea fans were situated, and what they saw was almost empty after 60 minutes from supposed diehard fans. In contrast to a trip to Newcastle, driving into Brighton from London would take at most 2 hours by car and 1 hour by train, so the worry about getting home would not be a pertinent issue here. A good example to compare this to is when Panama played England in the 2018 World Cup, in which the Panamanian supporters were still in the ground even though they were 6-0 down and celebrated wildly still when Felipe Baloy scored for them. When you consider the same scenario with English supporters, a consolation goal would have been met by overly sarcastic cheering, or worse complete silence, as many of the fans would have already left.

Something that has come from the trend is there being countless often hilarious examples of these fans living to regret leaving so early, with one example being the England fans during the Euros in 2024 who left believing that they'd been eliminated by Slovenia, before Jude Bellingham's overhead kick in added time set them on the way to progression. Sky Sports came up to one fan, who was ironically wearing a Bellingham shirt, who after ranting about England’s mediocre performance, asked whether they had just scored, to which the reporter replied “Yes.”

With these fans you can make the case that they do not want to watch because they think the result is already decided, but there is also a set group of fans who will leave for more pointless reasons, like only wanting to see one player. After Lionel Messi’s move to Inter Miami, the fans flocked in numbers to see one of the greats play. However, Messi had to be substituted after 37 minutes due to muscle fatigue, and what followed was a mass exodus of fans, who only turned up to see him play, leave the ground early. Many fans were in awe of these fans, who to them felt like they had booked tickets for the complete wrong reason, and that these tickets could have been better given to the actual fans.

On the topic of England, many people were divided over the treatment of Gareth Southgate, who had just got his team to a second European Championship final in a row but was getting pelted with abuse on social media calling him useless and boring.

When Southgate was then on the honours list that year, you would have thought he had done something bad from the reaction on social media. He received it for guiding his team to another final, but people chose to focus on the fact we had lost as why he did not deserve it.

These lot have already set their sights on new boss Thomas Tuchel, by criticising him immediately for picking Jordan Henderson and Kyle Walker over Djed Spence and James Maddison, despite the games only being against Albania and Latvia, both of which England got through without any troubles. It is anybody's guess about what the angry reaction will be if the Three Lions lose a game.

There is also a bunch of fans, including pundits and former footballers Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville, who had already done an analysis of why the successor to Southgate should be English, were immediately on the back of Tuchel, with Neville stating there were good candidates that were English mere hours after the former Chelsea and Bayern boss was announced in an interview. However, Fabio Capello and the late Sven-Göran Eriksson also came in with many sceptics, but eventually won people over, so this could be a problem which will soon be forgotten if Tuchel keeps the team playing well.

Many people, upon hearing what Neville said, were quick to point out that all the good English England manager options had a high number of problems and doubts anyway. Some managers were already in jobs, and were relatively happy with it too, take Newcastle manager Eddie Howe for example, and the rest were solely fuelled by English bias. Lampard and Gerrard were being tipped for the job, despite the former off the back of a less than successful caretaker role at a Chelsea side which finished 13th, and the latter winless in the league with Al-Ettifaq in Saudi Arabia, after an underwhelming spell as Aston Villa boss.

Additionally, on the Soccer Saturday following England’s 2-0 win over Albania, the panel which included Paul Merson, Michael Dawson, Tim Sherwood, and Clinton Morrison all echoed the same expectation that "If England don't win the World Cup, we've failed." It’s no wonder that England supporters are always criticised and hated by other international fans for how obnoxious they are when the Three Lions win, and how it can immediately turn into criticising everything imaginable the moment they lose.

When it comes to showing anger, there is an ongoing issue with missiles and foreign objects being chucked on the pitch, usually with the intention to hit someone. Dimitri Payet, who now applies his trade in Brazil for Corinthians, was hit twice in the same season by a water bottle during his second spell at Olympique de Marseille, with both resulting in the matches being abandoned.

Another example was during West Ham’s run in the UEFA Conference League final, where their final win was slightly ruined by a suspected Hammers fan hitting Fiorentina captain Cristiano Biraghi, leaving him bloodied and needed to be bandaged. Jarrod Bowen would go over to these fans and beg them to stop throwing projectiles.

Normally, chanting is seen as fine, but there are some boundaries you do not cross, and one of those is tragedy chanting, which has only recently come to light as a genuine issue. One of the most well-known incidents which these chants go on about is the Hillsborough disaster, where 97 football fans tragically lost their lives after one of the Hillsborough Stadium crash barriers gave way after around 10,000 fans were squeezed into the stadium.

The controversies that occurred from this alone were vast. Away from chanting, when an alleged Manchester United fan got a football shirt printed which said “Not Enough 97” on it, to which wearer and offender James White pleaded guilty to and was banned from any stadium for four years.

The Hillsborough disaster is one of many tragedies that gets mentioned in abhorrent chants thought up by ignorant “fans” who either want a reaction or claim to not realise the severity of their songs.

The many issues regarding fans poses the same question, how do you sort it, where the answers are not as straightforward as some believe.

One factor which may affect fan behaviour is the lack of relationship they seemingly have with their club, and vice versa. A good example of a way to solve it comes from the German Bundesliga, and their 50+1 rule, which protects members rights and voting privileges. The league are so adamant on it that they collectively shared their hatred at RB  Leipzig, formerly SSV Markranstädt, after they found a workaround to the rule which allowed Red Bull to own the club, whilst still abiding by the rule, and then again when during a Hamburg-Hannover game, the fans put bike locks on the goals, to protest the Deutsche Fussball Liga giving future broadcasting to outside investors, to which “Die Losung ist 50+1” (The answer is 50+1, or 5001 on the locks).

Joe Short, who is one of the directors at Lewes FC, said that the incorporation of this in English football “would not work financially for a lot of the big men's football clubs.”

However, Short also suggested an alternative, saying “Fan representation is like the stepping stone towards fan ownership that most clubs could actually do.”

One solution some people have said regarding fan behaviour, especially on social media, is to name, shame and ban football fans whenever they do it. This however comes with plenty of sticking points.

“We are very hot on abuse,” said Joe Short, “we ran a campaign called Call Him Out, trying to eradicate sexism, of course there is still sexism here and in football, but we feel like we are doing better than most at preventing it from rearing it’s head.”

Joe however feels there is a limit when it comes to banning individuals, as well as running the risk of a disassociation with the fans and owners. “From an ethos point of view, if there’s just general dissent, you don’t want to just start banning your fans,” said Short, “they are the lifeblood of the club and they’ll still be around when you as a board member or decision maker disappear.”

You will see people asking to ban a small group of fans who may be protesting something that the club is doing and asking for answers, and they don’t want to be met with silence, or have the club do something like being banned from the stadium, which will inadvertently give them their answer.

“Say if there was a protest next week” said Short, “there was a big banner saying, “Sack the Board” which fans will do elsewhere we could not then ban them from going into the stadium.”

Governing bodies of football have dished out temporary punishments for any set of fans who do decide to act out of line. Unlike footballers who act out of line, to which both the club and the player will be punished (unless it’s the entire team then only the club itself gets a higher punishment), the misbehaviour of fans will usually result in the league’s governing body, for example the Football Association, to make a club’s next game be behind closed doors. This is only for the most exceptional cases however, and usually the club will just get fined, or they will just have partial stadium closure in the section where the incident occurred.

Temporary fixes do punish the offenders, but it does not eradicate the problem altogether. However, finding a permanent fix is almost impossible, because you’d have to metaphorically alter a good percentage of people’s mindsets. Fans will always complain, because complaining is a normal human reaction, and the punishments and media attention will only fuel the fire.

So, it seems that the only way to sort the problem is to not publicly call them out and they will stop when they don’t get attention, but then they might conceive it as they’re allowed to get away with it. Fan trouble seems like a problem that is impossible to solve, and that the sensible watchers may have to ride this storm out on this issue and just hope for a parting in the clouds sooner rather than later. 

The sort of question you hear people say on occasions where someone mentions anything which will or may involve some sort of fan interaction is “Do they even care enough about us.” This question is quite a fair one to ask, because one look at any news story involving the rich and famous does sometimes cast doubts on their interest in the public. Many fans are in the mindset that owners would rather get commercial success and don’t care about fan attendance. There has been a very recent example that showed club’s true care for fans, and that was during the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic had a monumental effect on football in the 2019/20 season, with the season being suspended, being reopened with no fans in the stadiums, and being given stadium audio to mimic the stadium atmosphere. Now that football fans have been back in the stadiums for a couple of seasons now, some look back on that period fondly, appreciating the determination of all these clubs to entertain the fans through the pandemic. This is in addition to the broadcasters going out their way to broadcast almost every game, with rearranged schedules for matches and even the scrapping of the 3pm blackout, which was especially noticeable at the end of the 2019/20 season.

When I asked Paul Dorsey, who is one of the founders of Stateside Seagulls, and who is from the US himself, about how the pandemic, which forced all supporters to watch the games at home, affected him watching the football, he replied, “That’s all I know, being an international fan, watching on a TV from an ocean away is my general state of being, so nothing really changed on my end,” and also said that, “it was really interesting to have that experience and obviously the atmosphere on TV was non-existent, it wasn’t the same, and I can only imagine how it was actually being there, not being able to go to games, not being able to have that feel when you are a match going supporter.”

For fans abroad wanting to watch the games like Paul Dorsey, the feeling of being welcomed is paramount to having continued and increased support throughout the season and in the future of the club’s popularity.

Something else some clubs around the world did in this period was doing cardboard cutouts in the stadium, and fellow member of Stateside Seagulls Sonia Membreno thought this showed a level of care about fans from football clubs.

“I feel that shows a level of care,” said Membreno, “they are looking for someone who they can put on a piece of cardboard and be there, that speaks volumes as they still want to have a bond with the fans.”

The way in which the pandemic was handled footballing-wise was a good way for these clubs to prove once and for all that they really do care about the fans, especially as around the same time you had the big six clubs reeling from the backlash around the European Super League, where many fans saw this as the club caring more about commercial success. Fans are the life and soul of a club, so it would be stupid to leave them behind, and if the fans reciprocate, then football stadiums may finally be a safe and enjoyable place to go to again.