Tragedy chanting is getting worse
Football does not exist in isolation but is a mirror of socio-politics
March 18, 2024 6:07 pm(Updated 8:42 pm)
This wasnât just the noisy work of a few, the kid who didnât know better or the idiot who has committed monastically to becoming an edgelord whose football club forms 98 per cent of their personality. It was hundreds, perhaps even thousands.
You know the ones by now: âAlways the victimsâ and âThe Sun was rightâ. âMurderersâ was chanted, en masse, at least five times during Sundayâs FA Cup tie at Old Trafford with the noise coming almost exclusively from the Stretford End. This was not a few bad eggs. This was hatred on a grander scale from those who go to watch Manchester United every other week.
The banter excuse doesnât exist anymore. It was always morally vacuous to prove your love for your own club not just through spending money, time, effort and angst on them, but by singing about the death of other humans. Now itâs legally official. In August 2023, the Crown Prosecution Service updated its guidance to reconfirm that tragedy-related abuse is a public order offence and thus prosecutable.
There are two distinct negative reactions when you talk, write or post about tragedy chanting. First, and far more commonly, come the cries of whataboutery. Where were you when this or that or the other happened? Where was your energy when it was the fans of the rivals of my team?
Which, Iâm sorry, just makes you part of the problem not the solution. All tragedy chanting is appalling; that should be obvious to anybody decent. Nobody is trying to unfairly besmirch you if you didnât chant or your club, only what is being chanted and those who did it. This is not some grim league table for you to cut out and keep on your bedroom wall and using the toddlerâs âBut they started itâ argument makes you look stupid.
If someone else does it, you donât have to. If your rivals do it, be better than them. If your own do it, push for them to stop and agree with the criticism just as much as when itâs your rivals doing it. Joining in because someone else did the same is a route only down a miserable downward slide to the bottom. Rivalry pulls us apart but it does not disconnect us. It has to get better than this.
The second reaction is that any attempt to police this behaviour is sanitising football, by which they mean ruining it. Thereâs no argument that football has indeed become plasticised â rising ticket prices, gentrification, increase in corporate hospitality and general rise in facilities. But you cannot fill a perceived absence of atmosphere with hate and call it a solution. And if you need to celebrate or protest or engage with other supporters by mocking death or accident or a poor kid with cancer, the game does not want you. A kid with cancer, for f**kâs sake.
These are already known knowns. Condemnation comes from all sides after every incident. Everyone who is prepared to listen on this issue has already heard the explanation and still they plough on. The Premier League, via its âStarsâ campaign, educated children in schools about unacceptable chanting, and that is valuable. But you arenât going to persuade a 55-year-old boiled ham joint in tight jeans and a jumper to stop acting out a human being crushed to death with lessons and notebooks.
Instead, the important point is that this seems to be getting worse. Itâs not just that you see it more with social media, because social media is a decade old. This season alone, weâve had chants or abuse at matches over the Leicester City helicopter crash, the Emiliano Sala plane crash and the death of Bradley Lowery. At Old Trafford on Sunday, those chants were louder than Iâve ever heard them before.
We must reflect upon this rise and ask where the assumed power to be so grotesque has come from. Perhaps itâs merely the inevitable endgame of rampant tribalism in a sport that seems to drive performative outrage and anger like never before. Maybe it reflects a rise in general angst and a determination to rail against authority by those who perceive that they are being ignored. Although if that is the case, backing the authority view on Hillsborough seems pretty dim.
Instead, how about this: football does not exist in isolation but is a mirror of socio-politics. Last week, the largest donor to the Conservative Party had remarks from 2019 about black Labour MP Diane Abbott reported. They included Frank Hester saying that âyou just want to hate all black womenâ and that Abbott should be shot.
Ever since, Government ministers have caveated or explained those quotes as referring not to gender, race or even Abbott herself (âit wasnât even really about Diane Abbottâ â Kemi Badenoch, Business Secretary). Hesterâs company TTP released a statement in which he accepted that he was ârudeâ.
We live in the age where offence is increasingly decided by the giver rather than the receiver. Where provoking a reaction is the height of victory. Where a Crowley-ian doctrine of do what thou wilt has taken hold. Iâm not suggesting that there is a direct link between Hester and Old Trafford, obviously. Simply that, in the post-truth and post-decency era, nobody appears to consider the consequences of their behaviour either on themselves or those who they attack.
