Jonathan Liew: The cultural division of football fans only serves those who wish to exploit it

Leaving early is a bit of a red flag. Booing your own players, obviously. Wearing a half-and-half scarf, purchasing a half-and-half scarf, expressing any opinion of a half-and-half scarf short of pathological hatred: forget it. Fake merch. Supporting a club from a place where you do not live. Supporting more than one club. Getting fewer than 10 out of 15 on a multiple-choice clickbait quiz.

Yes, these days there are multiple ways of outing yourself as that most abhorred of footballing species: “not a true fan”. Who gets to call themselves a football fan? Ostensibly this is a church open to all who want to believe, and yet somehow the very idea of fandom is constantly being challenged and contested, revoked and downgraded. English football has more words to describe ersatz fans than real ones: “plastics” and “casuals”, “fakes” and “frauds”, “tourists” and “day-trippers”, “trolls” and “haters”, “fair-weather fans” and “glory-hunters”.

It was the first of these terms that raised the ire of Ange Postecoglou last week, the Tottenham head coach cutting short a question on ticket prices to object to the characterisation of foreign fans as “plastics”. “That’s really harsh,” he said. “This club has supporters all over the world. It doesn’t make them any less passionate. I think it’s really disrespectful to fans who are willing to go to the expense of coming halfway around the world.” 

The really interesting aspect of this exchange was the way it encapsulated an increasing cultural divide at the elite end of English football. For most of the Premier League era the foreign fan has been regarded as the bottom-feeder of the ecosystem: exiled by distance, alienated by culture and history, maligned for the recency of their conversion