Opportunities for the Labour Party: Football, Class and Community Renewal

SUMMARY

• Football represents an underutilised opportunity for Labour to anchor a wider programme of civic renewal.
• In many working-class communities, the decline of trade unions, working men's clubs and other associational spaces has eroded collective life.
• As Labour faces challenges from Reform UK and the far right, football provides a civic space capable of countering their divisive narratives, where dignity, recognition and belonging are sustained.
• If Labour is serious about rebuilding trust and repairing the social fabric, it should place football at the heart of its strategy.

Football is not merely a game; it is one of the last enduring institutions through which some communities experience a tangible sense of belonging. The post-Thatcher era has been one of profound trauma for Britain’s, often working-class, communities as traditional sources of identity—workplaces, unions, political parties, pubs, clubs, and local sports teams—have withered over the past four decades. These institutions long served as focal points of solidarity, pride, and stability, embodying a shared culture and a sense of rootedness, where dignity was affirmed through everyday practices of mutual recognition.

In many areas, football clubs remain as just one of a handful of institutions where dignity, recognition, and belonging continue to be sustained. Indeed, ‘the club’ still contains the potential for dignity, solidarity, and collective belonging. While workplaces and unions no longer function as the centres of communal life they once were, football clubs remain popular repositories of community identity. Historically rooted in the same churches, factories, and neighbourhood associations that defined working-class life, clubs continue to offer mass participation, ritualised gathering, and mutual recognition—to the extent that 37 per cent of people say their local club is an important part of their identity. Football culture therefore continues to provide a distinctive means by which people experience solidarity and express belonging.

Hooliganism and belonging

Of course, the game has also provided a venue for conflict. The rise of hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s illustrates how football became an outlet for frustration among sections of the working class facing economic decline, deindustrialisation, and the erosion of stable community life. Clubs came to embody the areas they represented, and matches became contests of identity in which organised ‘firms’ offered young men a way of asserting masculinity and achieving recognition. For some, these groups operated as surrogate families, supplying belonging and loyalty amid the collapse of other institutions. Hooliganism was, in part, an attempt to reclaim agency through ritualised violence—fleeting, destructive, but meaningful in its own terms.

The ability of hooligan groups to mobilise alienated, often young, men prompted a government response focused almost entirely on regulation, with little attention to the social conditions that had made such mobilisation appealing in the first place. This failure further entrenched a subgroup of men who felt ‘left behind’. Today, such men are among the most insecure and vulnerable in society, and they are disproportionately targeted by the far-right. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon built his early networks through hooliganism, adopting the pseudonym Tommy Robinson from a well-known Luton Town hooligan. Early organising took place around matches before shifting to WhatsApp groups and social media. The transition from terraces to street protest was made possible by his credibility among working-class men already accustomed to collective identity, confrontation, and mobilisation. St George’s Day demonstrations by the far-right resemble football fan culture in their drinking, chants, and stark ‘us versus them’ identity. These rituals offer a familiar and emotionally resonant form of belonging, making such spaces easy for outsiders to join and helping reproduce the sense of purpose found on the terraces. The far-right has thus been effective in integrating elements of football culture into its activism, making its message both more accessible and more dangerous.

Football clubs and belonging

However, this challenge highlights the importance of maintaining a strong, local, and inclusive associational life—extending far beyond football, but where football remains particularly relevant. Clubs that maintain meaningful local connections provide spaces where people experience recognition and belonging in concrete ways, connecting citizens who might not otherwise interact. As part of this, clubs can mobilise powerful narratives of inclusion and social justice, with the capacity to extend such messages beyond already sympathetic audiences to those who are sceptical of diversity. Indeed, outreach and the visible togetherness and interactivity between fans that it engenders often enhances the impact of clubs’ messaging, especially when framed around the shared, almost, and often, sacred love of the club. Given the emotional resonance and trust clubs command, a message that places far-right politics, and the lived experience of fans, in direct opposition to the club can generate a genuine moral reflection. Indeed, for citizens who feel profoundly isolated—and thus more vulnerable to far-right mobilisation—questions raised by trusted institutions can embed inclusion in a positive and resonant way, where one is encouraged to see others, different from themselves, with that same love of club. As UCL’s Policy Lab notes, the more inclusive options available for community participation, the greater the likelihood that connections will be formed across the very lines of difference—race, religion, gender, sexuality—that are exploited by the far-right.

Why Labour should place football at the heart of its strategy

However, this positive impact of football is presently threatened by a commercialisation which increasingly disconnects fans from their clubs. Ticket prices are the highest in Europe, and clubs are now becoming a focus as the cornerstones of financial portfolios for owners with little prior connection to the club itself. The isolation of fans will undoubtedly diminish the positive impact that clubs can have in their local communities, where football could become a cornerstone of a wider renewal of civic life. We know clubs have real potential to strengthen belonging and repair the social fabric, but rampant commercialisation and alienation for fans, not to mention the continued underfunding of the women’s and grassroots game, will hamper its effectiveness.

If the positive potential of football clubs as local anchors is to be realised, it requires champions and coordination across the country to ensure fans, clubs, and communities have the resources and support they need. To this end, the Labour government has an opportunity to articulate a compelling narrative in which football is part of its promise to revive civic life. It cannot afford to squander one of Britain’s most powerful engines of meaning-making, nor concede to the far-right the very terrain on which part of our common life could yet be rebuilt.