Now I know there are a lot of people on here that love football in a properly considered and positive way, but i've always associated it with thuggery, machismo and and violence. I always just thought it was because, by nature, i'm a bit of a fey twerp, but tonight I realised it's because I grew up in Glasgow.
There was a rangers game on tonight and I had to take the underground, so got stuck in a carriage full to bursting with absolute football cunts, drinking tonic wine and singing despicable racist chants. Is this how it normally is? What's football like in England?
They weren't even playing celtic but were singing the usual stuff about king billy, thumping on the walls and generally intimidating the normal people just trying to go places (I was on my way to the theatre, daaaaarling. Already pretty LOL given the context).
So is it just because i'm useless at being a man that I don't like football or do you think that growing up with football being indistinguishable from sectarian violence would have affected you similarily?
I don't know what football's like in england, and obviously there's violence involved there to, but to this extent? Maybe I am just being too fey in being literally terrified whenever I approach someone wearing rangers/celtic uniform, but there's just something about associating racism and songs saying "surrender or die" with a sport.
I would probably really like sport. I'm a rugby champ, you know.
White rights
0()
according to my nan
footballers are all idiots who go around fighting with each other and are not respectable.
Rugby players on the other hand, she gives the title of "Real" men haha
Yeah we are.
Paisley RFC player's player of the year 2004 v
Oooh
she would approve! ;)
I read that as KFC
and to answer your above question. Yes. It's because you're an eyeliner wearing girly-man.
googling "rugby fans" gave me this in the first 5 results
HOOLIGANS
http://www.teara.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/8A804315-1608-4214-B48F-171C137C89DB/75412/p1985atl.jpg
They're clearly mocking a bunch of football players
who are acting all rowdy nearby
I sympathise to an extent...........
I never used to like football as the schools I went to didn't play it. Rugby was the sport you played and football was seen as an activity for wusses, chavs and chavvy wusses.
This was pre-prawn sandwich/corp ent/middle class season ticket holders, etc
I think Glasgow is pretty unique with the Old Firm and associated rivalries though, it just isn't as intense as that anywhere in England.
I guess that's why I have such a jaded view of football
about 80% of the people on the carriage looked horribly ghastly, drawn out, haunted and vicious people. English football hooligans seem positively jolly in comparison.
I think the English thugs are most likely just as disgusting......
but, the sectarianism adds an unpleasant dimension to Scottish football.
Is it an issue outside of Glasgow/West of Scotland or do teams in other regions of the country not have the same problems?
I think there's a bit of it in edinburgh
but not in the same way.
It just seems to me that english football has a spirit of competitiveness that there should be with any sport, but glasgow's seems to be fueled by nothing but BILE and hatred.
Interesting.
So do any other Scottish sides have a tendency to draw support near exclusively from the protestant or catholic populations then?
rrangers didn't sign a catholic player until 1989.
crazy.
I hate the Old Firm
but I honestly think that the sectarian side of things is exaggerated. The pricks that sing the songs probably have loads of Catholic/Protestant friends (delete as applicable), and are just singing the disgusting songs because that's the way they think a Rangers/Celtic fan is supposed to behave. Having lived in Glasgow all my life I've yet to come across someone who is genuinely sectarian, except for 90 minutes four times a season.
Teams outside Glasgow don't have the same problems. Hibs fans sometimes fly Irish tricolours, and Hearts fans sometimes have Union Jacks, but that means nothing really, it's just idiots trying to wind the opposition fans up.
This is a bit of a ramble. I fucking hate the Old Firm though.
I think the essential difference
is in England Hooligans generally just LIKE the fighting.
Some people obviously do get fucked up, and I assume sometimes 'innocent' people get hurt.
In Glasgow they seem to want to kill each other. I can remember reading about murders after the games.
yeah they love fighting too
even the choice of booze seems indicitive to me of the differences:
english football people stereotypically drink lager and stuff right? You have to drink a tonne of that stuff if you're gonna get boozed up enough to stab someone over a football game.
In glasgow it's buckfast and vodka or whatever. They get hyped up on it for fighting and are all drawn out and thin as opposed to my stereotype of english football hooligans of skinheads with beer bellies. it's frightening.
Again
I think the violence side of the Old Firm is exaggerated. Of course there has been murders but I think they were probably more down to pished-up neds acting as pished-up neds occasionally do, not because of any deep-rooted football related hatred.
There are some epicly sweeping
generalisations going on here. Not in a bitchy way but....
Scotland's historical problems with sectarianism is wrapped up in Rangers and Celtic tightly but has no real place elsewheres. Glasgow seeing the majority of the influx of Irish famine immigrants probly being the main reason. Football is not the cause its merely a forum where a group of men (mostly) can express historical hatred in a large format. Its mainly kept alive out of habbit and small mindedness. Any time spent in lower leagues or other SPL games sees generic "them and us" team loyalties but no political undercurrents.
English football doesn't have the ugliness that is sectarianism but is guilty of its own sins particularly the 'firm' phenomenom. The organisation and level of thuggery involved with some teams is Frightening. Lest we forget the travelling riot monkeys that are the more monobrowed English national support (note Scotland not exempt from that despite what you might hear)
The thing I dislike about football
is that it seems to be the sport where it's most common for "fans" to merely view it as some chest beating exercise. They don't care about the way the game's played, so long as their team win and they have something to rub their friend's noses in the next day. I know this isn't really true of DiS football fans, nor a good percentage of other football fans, but it's a high enough amount to annoy me.
I prefer cricket.
Most football = dull, corporate, violent, etc
Non-league football = INDIE AS FUCK.
Me and my friends might be starting a Sunday League team called 'Kicking Just For Practice'. I don't like sports, so I'm mostly just in it for the name.
I'd say this is just a small part of football.
There are loads of macho pricks, but then there are loads more who just enjoy the sport. You might even say the same thing about music audiences.