Roaring Red Front

Historian Wim Bot is a prominent expert of the Dutch Cyclists’ Union (Fietsersbond). He is also known as the ‘football professor’ of Feyenoord, the big club of the port city of Rotterdam. In his book review he recounts the experiences of two British authors and their travels along a series of football fields, sometimes discovering clubs that withdraw from the hyper-commercial global football/soccer that is ruled by big money. A club like St Pauli in Hamburg (Germany) turns out to be an example of empowerment by local, place-based communities that forge alternative social, cultural and economic ties.

Real left-wing football clubs? A journey of discovery, from St Pauli and Liverpool to Boca Juniors
By Wim Bot (January 2025)

During my most recent football trip to England I had time to visit the left-wing bookshop Housemans in London, a shop where you feel like you are back in the late bookshops like the famous Rooie Rat (the ‘Red Rat’, Utrecht, Netherlands). There in London I noticed the book ‘The roaring red front. The world’s top left-wing football clubs’ by Stewart McGill and Vincent Raison. As a left-wing Feyenoord fan and football lover I obviously could not pass it up.

The authors are British football fans, outspokenly left-wing and critical of the often racist nature of British professional football. For them, being a supporter of a club is a collective experience, the stadium is one of the few places in society where people can still have such an experience. After a visit to St Pauli, the Hamburg club that is seen all over the world as the example of a left-wing club, they decided to visit more clubs with a progressive profile and write about them. The supporters of the eleven clubs to whom they devote a chapter in the book are quite different, but the greatest common denominator is an egalitarian, anti-racist and anti-fascist identity and opposition to the commercialisation of football.

St Pauli became popular as a reaction to the influence of the far right at HSV (the big old ‘Hamburger Sport-Verein’) and developed into the rallying point and symbol of the Hamburg alternative scene, playing in the Bundesliga for the second time this season (2024-2025). The club management has turned it into a progressive business model, without selling out its own identity.

Smaller clubs such as Red Star from Paris (or rather Saint-Ouen) and Dulwich Hamlet from London represent a similar kind of progressive alternative. Cadiz and Rayo Vallecano from Spain and Cosenza from Italy are less outspoken as clubs and mainly have a fanatical following from their own city or neighbourhood, with a strong collective identity.

As one of the biggest clubs in the world, Liverpool has a distinct character: that of the working class from a port city, with a strong Irish influence and its own dialect, pro-Labour and anti-Thatcher, anti-Tory and anti-tabloid The SUN. Legendary 1960s manager Bill Shankly explained how he saw socialism in society and in football: working together, helping each other and being rewarded for it, “that seems like a lot to ask, but that’s how I see football and life”.

Boca Juniors from Buenos Aires is a kind of Argentine counterpart to Liverpool, but with Peronism as a connecting element instead of Labour. A very special club in the book is Palestino from Chile, founded by the large Palestinian community in Chile – half a million people from Palestine settled in Chile from 1850 – and playing in Palestinian colours.

The authors are not blind to the dark sides of the ultra culture they describe. These groups are sometimes also violent and hostile towards outsiders. The clubs they describe all have their own history and identity and cannot be tarred with the same brush. They do show that in a world in which football culture is becoming increasingly commercial and uniform, there are places where fans are able to maintain and/or build their own collective and non-discriminatory culture.