Roaring Red Front

Stewart McGill, Vince Raison

Description

With the world turning rightwards and democracy looking at its most precarious since the 1930s, the emergence of a global network of left-wing, anti-fascist and anti-racist football fans has been one of the few shining lights in dark times. Some support clubs that are globally renowned, including the great St Pauli - more famous for the quality of its politics and its merchandise than its football. Others, no less committed, follow virtual minnows, like Red Star Paris and Bohemians Prague. But they still have proud histories, deep convictions and something to say. The left often fails to connect. How can these clubs inform and inspire? How can their example help collectivist, internationalist and inclusive principles defeat the seductive slogans and symbols of the growing nationalist and nativist movements across the planet? The Roaring Red Front explores theses questions while examining the history and current struggles of these special clubs - and why it all matters.

Sujets

• Ideology
• World

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801502962
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Stewart McGill and Vincent Raison, 2022
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Print ISBN 9781801501446
eBook ISBN 9781801502962
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Contents
Foreword by Professor Tony Collins
Introduction
C diz
Rayo Vallecano
St Pauli
Bohemians 1905
Liverpool
Detroit City
Dulwich Hamlet
Cosenza
Red Star
Palestino
Boca Juniors
The Bench
FK Velez Mostar , Celtic , Bahia , Olympique de Marseille , AEK Athens , Standard Liege , Polonia Warsaw , Adana Demirspor , People s Athletic Club Omonia 1948 , Hapoel Tel Aviv.
The Post-Match Verdict
Extra Time
Further Reading
Photos
Stewart: To my wife, still no clue why she puts up with me.
Vincent: To Richard Earle, the only teacher who didn t think I was an idiot.
About the Authors
Stewart McGill
Football fan, martial arts instructor, political activist, traveller, writer and podcaster, Stewart is the author of several football articles for the Morning Star and is a commentator on political economy issues. He has also produced several podcasts on the links between sport, politics and the working-class movement.
Vincent Raison
Co-author of Today South London, Tomorrow South London (Unbound, 2018) and Shirk, Rest and Play (Unbound, 2022), Vincent has been a freelance writer for 25 years, writing for The Guardian , The Independent , Huffington Post, Channel 4, Sky and ITV, among others. He also features monthly on the Deserter Pubcast on the merits of beer, crisps and the avoidance of work.
Foreword
by Professor Tony Collins
THIS IS a book about going to football matches, watching football, and talking to football fans. It takes us around the world, visits many different stadia, and introduces us to supporters from different clubs and cultures. It takes us deep into the nuances and complexities of why football means so much to so many men and women across the globe.
But The Roaring Red Front is also far more than this. It tells the story of football supporters and clubs who take a stand against oppression and exploitation, and have unashamedly aligned themselves with left-wing movements and campaigns. Through the observations of Stewart and Vincent, conversations with fans, and explorations of the history of each club, the book takes us into football s alternate world.
It s a world where the corporate culture of modern football is challenged, where the sport has a responsibility for its communities, and where the quest for equality for all is at the heart of the game. This is a story about the game you won t find in the mainstream media, and no one has told it with so much passion and insight as the authors of The Roaring Red Front .
It s no accident the book ends involving a team from Glasgow. Ever since it caught the imagination of Glasgow s shipyard and factory workers in the 1870s, football has been at the heart of the city s popular culture.
Glasgow was one of the world s industrial powerhouses. By World War I it was a centre of industrial militancy - nicknamed the Petrograd of Britain by some - and the world capital of football, boasting three stadia which could hold over 100,000 spectators. Tens of thousands of supporters gathered every Saturday afternoon to watch the city s professional teams, and thousands more played the game. By one estimate, there was a football club for every 160 young men in the region by 1900.
Nor was it just men. Thousands of women watched the game too. From 1917 many working-class women started playing the game in local factory teams, and Glasgow would remain a centre of the women s game for decades. The city embodied the link between football and radical opposition to the status quo.
One of its most prominent militant trade union leaders during the war was Willie Gallacher. In 1920 he played in goal for an international side in a hastily organised match against a Russian team in Moscow. The Russians dominated the match, so much so that according to some reports the game was abandoned at half-time.
Gallacher wasn t the only British player in the international side. Alongside him were Sheffield s J.T. Murphy, Hull s Dick Beech, Edinburgh s Dave Ramsey, and Essex-born Jack Tanner. None of them were renowned footballers. In fact, they were known across Britain for being revolutionary trade unionists - and they were in Moscow to take part in the Second Congress of the recently formed Communist International.
The International had been created by the Bolshevik Party in 1919 to build revolutionary parties around the world that would emulate the success of the October Revolution. Hundreds of delegates from all over the globe made their way to Moscow to discuss revolutionary strategy. Yet in their rare moments of relaxation, football was the automatic game of choice.
This was because the sport had emerged from the butchery of World War I as an international language of the working-class. Partly this was due to its popularity among soldiers of all sides but, more importantly, the game had become a symbol of international solidarity. During Christmas of 1914, troops on both sides of the fratricidal conflict had defied their officers, declared an informal truce, and played football between the trenches. This was, remarked Lenin at the time, an example of fraternisation that could lead to the end of the war and of capitalism itself.
Despite the fact its rules had been codified by the British upper classes, its famous clubs led by local businessmen, and its committees stuffed with venal bureaucrats, on Saturday afternoons the overwhelming majority of its players and spectators came from the industrial working-class. As Marx himself had noted, for the worker, life for him begins where [work] activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern seat, in bed . And from the late 1870s, hundreds of thousands of people who worked in textile mills, shipyards, and coal mines had added football to that list.
So, for working-class men and women, football was always more than a game. It was a communal gathering, a place to express local and class pride, and a 90-minute space in the week that was truly theirs, beyond the reach of the boss, the bureaucrat, and the moralist.
This was true wherever the game was played. Many of the clubs featured in Stewart and Vincent s wonderful book acquired their radical reputations following World War I. Others became anti-establishment clubs during further waves of radicalism towards the end of the 20th century. Regardless of who owned the club or the intentions of its officials, the character of these teams was primarily defined by their supporters.
And that perhaps is the point of The Roaring Red Front . Football is what you make of it. There was never a lost golden age when it was the people s game ; the sport was never owned by or belonged to ordinary people. It was only through struggles by supporters to create an identity for their teams that these clubs became seen as beacons of opposition to the establishment. In that way, by highlighting the importance of collective activity to social change, football does indeed offer lessons for life.
As this book makes clear, one of those lessons is intrinsic to the everyday experience of being a football supporter: at its best, the game demonstrates the importance, and joy, of collective action, international friendship and human solidarity. And in doing this, as Willie Gallacher and his comrades understood in Moscow in 1920, football also offers the promise of a better world.
Introduction
An astonishing void: official history ignores soccer. Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different. Tell me how you play and I ll tell you who you are.
Eduardo Galeano, Football in Sun and Shadow
A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
It is true that football is the most important of life s unimportant things.
Arrigo Sacchi
WE RE BOTH huge football fans and ardent lefties; though like most football fans, and certainly most lefties, we by no means agree on everything. As leftist football fans, we made the pilgrimage to Hamburg in December 2017 to see FC St Pauli, in many ways the guv nor of the left-wing clubs. We met our great friend Sonny there, had a fantastic time and came back a little smitten with the club, the St Pauli neighbourhood, and the idea of a book about the top leftist/anti-fascist football clubs across the planet. They say you should try to write the book that you want to read, and this is most definitely an example.
Life is very much a game of chance. We were in the St Pauli gift shop before the game against Duisberg in December 2017 when one of us, McGill, realised he had to leave. St Pauli have been mediocre in the second rank of German football for most of their history but they know how to market a Kult a