1. FOOTBALL POLITICS
On 16th August, Scottish champions Celtic FC and Israeli champions Hapoel Ber’er Sheva met for a UEFA
Champions Leaguequalifying match. The match ended with Celtic winning it 5-2. But that’snot what the
headlines in Scottish newspapers read the next day.
The headlines admonished a group of Celtic fans called ‘The Green Brigade’ for unfurling Palestinian flags
during the match. UEFA had already warned the club that if Palestinian flags were raised inside the
stadium, the club would be fined. Rumours that the police would arrest fans found carrying the flags
were also abound. Celtic fans decided to ignore both the threats and proudly unfurled the flags, out of
misplaced gumption. This was not the first time Celtic fans have used a football match to forward their
political aims, neither is Celtic the only club to boast of such a fan base.

2. Perhaps the most nefarious club when it comes to political activism is the Italian, A.S. Livorno Calcio. This
is a case of the city shaping the club. The notorious Italian Communist Party was founded in the port city
of Livorno. Influential Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci as its President, the Italian Communist Party was
at its peak the largest Communist Party in Western Europe. Livorno the club have till date carried the
legacy of the cities radical roots. A stumbling block for the club to increase its popularity, though, has
been its utter lack of success.

3. It has never won the Serie A, from 1948-2003, the club wasn’t even in the top flight of Italianfootball. But
that didn’t stop the club from having their heroes, shed in their own light. Striker, Cristiano Lucarelli
encapsulates Livorno better than anybody, taking a pay cut and joining down a division to join the club.
“Some players buy a yacht or Ferrari [with their wages]”, the striker explained shortly after joining. “I just
bought a Livorno shirt”. Hehas a Livorno badge tattooed on his right arm. Lucarelli though wasn’t just
steeped in left-wing politics like the club’s fans; he was also a good footballer. He scored 113 goals in 172
games in two stints for the club. Livorno supporters are some of the most rabidly enthusiastic ones,
before the start of every match they sing socialist anthem Bandiera Rossa. The translation of the song
reads thus:
“Forward people, towards redemption
Red Flag, Red Flag
Forward people, towards redemption
Red Flag will triumph.
Red Flag will be triumphant,
Red Flag will be triumphant,
Red Flag will be triumphant,
Long live communism and freedom.”
The club honours of Joseph Stalin’s birthday every year, and unfurled banners marking the death of Hugo
Chavez. Perhaps the farthest that the supporters went was when after 17 Italian soldiers died in Iraq.
While supporters of all other Italian clubs showed their respect with a minute of silence, the Livernissi

4. started singing in support of the Iraqi Army, with chants of “Give us ten, 100, 1,000 Nasiriyahs!”, the
Battleof Nasiriyah being where the Italian soldiers lost their lives.
To the south-west, across the Tyrrhenian Sea, Barcelona has almost since its inception been a political
club. In 1926, while Spain was under rule of the dictator Primo del Rivera, Barcelona fans jeered the Royal
March, the Spanish National Anthem, during a match. Several Barcelona and Bilbao players enlisted
themselves against the military uprising during the 1936 Spanish Civil War. In fact, Barcelona’s club
President at the time Josep Sunyol was a member of Accio Catalana and Republican Left of Catalonia,
both pro-independence and anti-Primo de Rivera parties. First blood was drawn when Josep Sunyol was
murdered by Falangists i.e. Fransico Franco, Spain’s next brutal fascist dictator’s army, and a Real Madrid
aficionado.

5. Marca, and football politics
The next chapter in Barcelona’s radical history comes in 1943. Barcelona and Real Madrid met in the
semi-finals of Copa del Generalisimo that year. The first leg was won by Barcelona 3-0. Fransico Franco
was the dictator of Spain at this time. Before the second leg, Franco’s director of statesecurity allegedly
visited Barcelona’s players in the changing room. He reminded them that they were only, of course,
playing due to the “generosity of the regime.” Real Madrid, courteously, beat Barcelona by a margin of
11–1 in the second leg.
Off the pitch, Franco Fransico further showed disdain for Catalunya by banning the use of any languages
other than Castellano, the official Spanish language. Barcelona’s stadium back then Les Cortes thus
became a place of protest, a place where Catalans asserted their culture and protested against Franco’s
idea of a centralised and ethnically, culturally and linguistically homogenised Spain.

6. In recent times, the club has been outspoken in its support of Catalonian independence. In fact, as a
symbolic gesture, Pep Guardiola was the last member on the list of candidates proposed by Together for
Yes, a pro-independence coalition of all the major pro-Catalan independence political parties, during the
2015 Catalan parliamentary election. Madrid, to this day, maintains a political stranglehold.

7. Tooting back across the English Channel, Celtic, the club has been almost similarly a force of political
struggle for Scottish Independence. Its rivalry with the Rangers is based almost entirely on that premise,
along with religious and sectarian undertones. Celtic has a historic association with Irish and Scots of Irish
descent, both predominantly Roman Catholics. This has resulted in Celtic fans being fervent supporters of
Irish Republicanism. Rangers fans on the other hand, constitute the other half comprising mostly of
Protestant and British Unionists.

8. Irish Republican songs have for long been heard on the terracesof Celtic Park. In 1952, the Scottish
Football Association (SFA) threatened to suspend the club unless it stopped flying the Irish tricolour
above the stadium. Celtic, fully acquainted with their own stature in Scottish football, resisted the order,
and the SFA naturally backed down. This support for Irish republicanism also in part explains the more
recent support for Palestine by Celtic fans. Sir Tom Devine, Scotland’s leading historian and author of
the Irish in Scotland explained recently in an interview to left-wing magazing Jacobin, “Part of their sense
of communal identity is that sense of grievance about what was done in the past. People who are Irish
nationalists will always tend to support independence movements that they believe to be based on
historical justice. The situation in Palestine is a classic example of land that is being taken from people
who lived there for generations. It chimes in with the course of Irish history.”

9. Such examples are not bounded by the boundaries of Europe. Once colonised by the Empire, India has
witnessed its share of football rivalries with religious and political undertones. Bengal in its heyday
boasted of three incredibly popular clubs: Mohun Bagan, the club of nativists and the upper-
class bhadralok supported by the Congress; East Bengal, the club of Hindu-Bangladeshi refugees backed
strongly by Communists; and Mohammaden Sporting, a representative of the Muslims in Bengal. The
Kolkata Derby between East Bengal and Mohun Baganis much more than a simple football gameto
decide the better team on the day. It is a clash of two incredibly hostile political groups. The refugees
identified themselves as Bangals, while the nativists where Ghotis. This Ghoti-Bangal subtext was forever
looming over every East Bengal-Mohun Baganmatch after partition of India in 1947 till as late as 1980s.
The resentment claimed too many lives.

10. Dolores Martinez and Projit B. Mukherji in their book Football: From England to the World recall a
particularly humbling account, “The matter came to a head in 1980 when, during a rather unimportant
League match between the two teams at Eden Gardens in Calcutta, clashes between supporter groups
led to wild-fire violence in the stadium resulting in a stampede that cost 16 fans their lives. The
immediate context that produced an ugly tackle by Dilip Palit, a tough East Bengal defender, upon Bidesh
Basu, a mercurial Mohun Baganforward, and the latter’sspontaneous retaliation by kicking the former,
ten minutes into the second half. The referee gave both their marching orders for their offences.
However, the supporters, enraged by the incident, became involved in a free-for-all while the police
remained mere spectators. Thirteen fans died, while several others were seriously injured. Three more
died at the hospital later on.”

11. Back in the land of the oppressors, England; Liverpool is considered one of the most red cities in the
country for its historical involvement in left-wing politics. This indelibly left a mark on Liverpool FC too.
Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of the club identified himself as a socialist all his life. The Labour
Party conference stood in a minute’s silence the year he passed away.

12. “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I
can assure you it is much, much more important than that”, is the most widely used quote in the game. A
lesser known quote from the man is, “The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal
and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’show I see life.” This was
undoubtedly one of the most pertinent reasons why Margaret Thatcher accompanied by the right-wing
media outlets like The Sun smeared Liverpool FC supporters in the aftermathof the Hillsborough disaster,
where 96 fans were murdered in a crush, caused by the collective negligence of stadium authority, the
English Football Association’s lax safety standards, and the police. It was an inhuman attackon not just
the club, not only the city, but surreptitiously on the left-wing as a whole. Branding working class
supporters of Liverpool as drunken, ticketless, hooligans and thugs went side by side with the
demonization of the Militant tendency in the Labour Party, a radical left-wing sub-group within the party.
In 1984, the Liverpool City Council led by Militant won an important victory over the Tory government of
Margaret Thatcher. They secured extra funding of £30 million for the council’s urban regeneration
programme, during a period where Thatcher was either privatising or dis-investing from state owned
entities and services. Another driving motivation for Thatcher to support the South Yorkshire Police’s
attempts of tainting evidence after Hillsborough, was their role in brutally suppressing the miners’ strike
of 1984-85, a major industrial action to shut down the British coal industry in an attempt to prevent
colliery closures, that at its height, involved 142,000 striking mineworkers. It took 27 years for the truth
to finally come out through an independent government sanctioned inquest.
Whether it be Celtic fans brandishing the Palestinian flag during a match with an Israeli team, or Livorno
fans chanting the name of Stalin, the important part is to realise the power that football holds over the
masses, where stadiums are like Coleridge’s and Kubla Khan’s opium haze castles. Whether you call them
fans or voters, they remain human. And humans are a product of multiple motives, influences,
circumstances, dreams, hopes and disillusionments. This informs their politics as well as club affiliation,
and ultimately, life. Bill Shankly was putting up a show of bravado, being the orator he was, when he said

13. that football was much more important than life and death, but for these clubs and their supporters,
football has been the cause and validation of their life and death and beyond.