The shameful silencing of football fans

I was delighted to have my fourth piece published with Spiked over the weekend. It focuses on the case of Scottish Premiership football club Rangers, which has disowned some of its supporters after a banner was displayed at Ibrox, the club’s home stadium, during a recent Europa League match criticising “foreign woke ideologies”.

The Spiked version is stripped back, punchy, and focused primarily on the core facts of the case (you can access it here). With that in mind, I wanted to share the full, unedited version – in which I tease out a broader story about the policing of dissent in an increasingly globalised, über-commoditised sport that once gave voice to working-class communities. From UEFA’s political re-education-style punishments to lifetime bans for fans who say the ‘wrong’ thing online, football’s ruling institutions are attempting to compel ideological conformity and suppress legitimate political expression.

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Rangers FC has launched an investigation and begun issuing lifetime bans after a group of fans displayed a banner reading “Keep woke foreign ideologies out. Defend Europe” during a Europa League tie at Ibrox.

The banner appeared in the section of the Copland Road Stand where the Union Bears ultras – possibly the Scottish Premiership team’s most passionate supporters – tend to gather. They were there last Thursday for the second leg of the round-of-16 clash with Fenerbahçe, a match played under UEFA’s jurisdiction – which makes their message even more pointed. This wasn’t just a domestic fixture, but one taking place on an international stage and overseen by a governing body increasingly intolerant of ideological dissent.

In a statement, Rangers revealed that UEFA had launched disciplinary proceedings over the banner, describing it as “racist and/or discriminatory”. But the club also made clear its own righteous disapproval. In an extraordinary step, it publicly disowned the dissenting fans, telling them that “Rangers is not the club for you”. (This, on the apparently unironic grounds that such fans don’t realise “absolutely everyone is welcome to follow Rangers”.) Worse, it vowed to “identify those responsible and ensure they also face consequences”.

Consequences for what, exactly? Daring to dissent from divisive ideas imported from the (foreign) grievance studies departments of US academia; ideas that fracture the working class along identitarian lines, while serving as the handmaiden of an exploitative global capitalist system? And how does opposing an ideology amount to racism? The banner clearly targets ideas, not people.

UEFA has now fined Rangers €30,000 (£25,000), and imposed a suspended one-match closure of the Copland Road Stand if there’s any repeat of “racist and/or discriminatory behaviour” over the next two years. In response, the club has launched an internal investigation and says it is “in the process of issuing lifetime bans” to the fans responsible. The message from UEFA and Rangers alike is unmistakable: ideological dissent is no longer just controversial, it’s an unforgivable offence.

It is, of course, ironic that a radical Marxist like Herbert Marcuse was among the first to warn of the “closure of the universe of discourse” – the process by which dissenting views are systematically ruled out as impermissible in Western consumer-capitalist societies. That his supposedly progressive heirs at UEFA are now enforcing precisely that closure – treating opposition to the ideological underpinning of the corporate, branded, über-commoditised status quo as a form of wrongdoing – is proof, if any were needed, of the fundamentally conservative nature of woke politics.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of this story is that Rangers, a club long tied to both Scottish pride and Britishness (“Proudly Scottish, proudly British,” as the Unionist saying goes), is not only accepting UEFA’s censorial ruling but actively working to punish its own supporters on the organisation’s behalf.

Because this isn’t just about Rangers. Across Europe, elite football clubs and governing bodies are no longer content with simple compliance – they demand enthusiastic endorsement. Players and fans must affirm the right values, and when they don’t, the consequences are swift.

Consider the ritual of ‘taking the knee’ where players were expected to kneel before kick-off in a symbolic protest against racism – and fans were expected to applaud them. Though this was initially voluntary, those who demurred quickly found themselves under pressure.

When a crowd in Hungary consisting mainly of schoolchildren booed England for taking the knee at a UEFA Nations League match in 2022, the British media and footballing establishment framed it as a terrible moral failure. Like a particularly muscular colonial-era missionary, England manager Gareth Southgate justified his players continuing to kneel by insisting it was important to “educate people around the world”. One former player watching the game called the booing “horrible to hear”, while anti-discrimination group Fare declared it another sad example of “racism perpetrated in European games by children”.

The message sent across the airwaves, and into training grounds and dressing rooms across the country, was clear: refusing to conform was not an option.

The same dynamic has applied to rainbow campaigns for LGBTQ+ inclusion. Players who didn’t actively endorse them, like Monaco’s Mohamed Camara and PSG’s Idrissa Gueye, faced disciplinary action and political pressure. The German Football Association (DFB) fined Bayer Leverkusen €18,000 after supporters at a match in November held up a banner reading, “There are many genres of music, but only two genders”. The DFB ruled this “discriminatory unsportsmanlike behaviour” and decreed that a third of the fine must be spent on “preventive measures against discrimination”. In other words, ideological re-education.

The intolerance of ‘heresy’ from fans even extends beyond stadiums. Newcastle United supporter and Free Speech Union member Linzi Smith has been banned from attending home matches for the rest of this season and the next two – not for disrupting a match, but for expressing legally protected gender-critical views online.

Football, a historically working-class sport, has been hollowed out into a glossy corporate commodity, with clubs, governing bodies and even fan culture repurposed to serve the ideological interests of global capital. The game’s institutions claim to be progressive, yet they enforce a hyper-commodified monoculture, where only certain political and cultural narratives are permitted.

Which brings us back to Rangers. Because what we’re starting to see is something new: the ‘great unwashed’ are finally finding their voice. This isn’t just quiet noncompliance. This is fans in the stands articulating their opposition to football’s ideological monopoly in clear political terms.

No wonder the authorities are worried. What arguments might be next? Calling out woke politics as a distraction from the soaring ticket prices that are driving away working-class fans? A reckoning over why clubs that preach “equality” and flood social media with #BeKind hashtags allow star players to earn £180,000 a week while some contracted staff make £6.50 an hour?

Today, it’s banners at Ibrox. Tomorrow, it will be another stadium, another club, another group of fans whose political articulation is deemed unacceptable.

If you’re a Rangers fan under investigation – or know someone who is – email the Free Speech Union at help@freespeechunion.org.