Whether it’s helping bring down a manager, marching against their club owners or pushing back against plans to commercialize the sport, fans have a long history of using their passion for sports as a tool of nonviolent protest. During the Civil Rights Movement, Black fans turned their fandom into a formidable arm of the Movement by boycotting professional teams that segregated seating and pressing city leaders to integrate stadiums. They kept their message alive through the Black press, with writers like Jim Hall, Marcel Hopson and Marion Jackson keeping supporters up to date on the latest developments in their struggle.
Football thrives on noise: the thwack of a ball on goalpost, the swearing of an insistent keeper or the chants and songs of fans. But sometimes fans need to find more quiet ways of expressing themselves.
It seems that every football fan has a moment in which they become convinced that every referee in the land must have it in for them or else they’re completely incompetent. Fans of Serie A side Fiorentina ran with that feeling earlier this season when they staged a silent protest against poor officiating by escorting the team bus to their game with Lazio and then refusing to take their seats for the first 10 minutes of the match.
So when fans assemble in their thousands at a soccer stadium to demand change, it’s important that the news media not gloss over or dismiss their actions as unacceptable – or a sign of “ingrate” fandom. In the aftermath of the ejections of Manchester United fans at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, Graeme Souness suggested that their protest was “unseemly” and said they should “stop demonstrating.” He missed the point: fans should be able to protest as much as they want – even when it’s unseemly.