‘Toxic football culture has no place in our schools’

England fans have shown ‘pride’ at its ugliest – schools should never condone such aggression, says Lucy Rycroft-Smith
15th July 2018, 12:03pm

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‘Toxic football culture has no place in our schools’

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/toxic-football-culture-has-no-place-our-schools
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What a week it’s been. I think - I THINK - there’s been some sport on this week.

Whether it’s been Wimbled- oh, who am I kidding, this is about the football. Football has dominated this week. Has it also dominated your classroom? Have there been excited chants, chats and cheers echoing down the corridors of your school? Have you referenced the beautiful game in lessons, watched it in the staffroom, or tuned in for updates on playground duty? Then we need to talk. 

I was out in the streets late at night when the England-Croatia match ended. I was in a university town full of people I know and work with, in a place I have walked around at night many times before. And yet, I barely recognised it.

I didn’t need to ask how the match went. Drunk, noisy, dejected fans jostled me on street corners, loudly queued for kebabs, and eyed me up like doner meat. A pair of football-shirted guys, one actually covered in blood, tried to get me to engage with them. Terrifying and incomprehensible bellows went up like calls for revolution; beer cans were hurled; streams of hot urine lashed against buildings.

“But that’s not everyone!” I hear you cry. ”That’s not everywhere! Those are the exceptions!” Are you excusing this behaviour, or trying to decouple it from the sport itself? 

I am not here to place blame for the culture around football: I am here to tell you that it makes things unsafe, needlessly. If you want to argue that I simply feel unsafe, that people are just enjoying themselves, that it’s not all the time, and that I’m being too sensitive, then I want you to think - really think - about the last time you didn’t feel safe.  About how the reptilian part of your brain fired up and adrenalin surged through you and you had to stop what you were doing and be very, very careful what you said and did and maybe you needed to run fast.

You may not care if I don’t feel safe. If that’s the case, then #metoo and women whistleblowing on sexual harassment and the stated equal rights of women count for pretty much nothing. This behaviour is learned in the classroom - unless, of course, you’re doing something to stop it.

Football is heavily aligned with masculinity in our contemporary culture. Women play and watch it, but men almost always perform it, for themselves, for their dads and brother and uncles, for their friends and colleagues. You would be forgiven for seeing it, as many have, as a kind of religion that boys are indoctrinated into, with complicated hymns and scarf-waving rituals and the very highest value placed on blind loyalty. But it’s more than this: the way that they perform it is heavily prescribed. The advertising industry prescribes beer, pizza and crisps. The media prescribes intense flashes of emotion, often aggressive or loud, often sold as “bonding” - yelling, hugging, jumping, spilling, smashing, fist-pumping. The hospitality industry prescribes large crowds around a large screen, making a large stage for these large emotions to play out.  Add these three together - alcohol, expectations of displays of communal aggression and crowds - and you get one of the most unsafe places both a woman or a man can possibly be in.

‘The toxic masculinity in football’

If you are in any way replicating these expectations in an educational setting, shame on you.

Watching football is OK. You can like football, and so can your pupils. What you absolutely cannot do is contribute to the vile sludge of toxic masculinity that football pumps into our pubs and our living rooms and our streets. If you bring it into your classroom you are doing your pupils an enormous disservice.

So: how not to watch, or talk about, football, is pretty clear to me.

Don’t exclude women - that’s hopefully a given, even though it’s really hard to feel represented in a sport where things like “we haven’t made the semi-finals for 28 years” get said (the England women’s team finished third three years ago.)

Don’t allow staff or students to yell or jump around. If this seems unfair, imagine watching a film with students and how you might react if they did this. Why the double standard? Why do we allow space for “emotions” to be performed in this manner in this particular setting, but frown on them being so prominently displayed elsewhere? Surely a central focus of schooling is learning to control emotions and their effect on our behaviour because of, in turn, their effect on other people. That emotion that you read as “delight” or “pride” because the football culture has struck that convincing narrative can actually feel bewilderingly difficult to read, and very frightening - and that’s before we’ve even got on to the negative outbursts, the disgust and anger and hate.

Don’t allow students to vocally “hate” the other team. Did any of you have a Croatian student in your school this week? Do you think they had an enjoyable week? I have written before about nationalism and the national pride agenda in education, and how thoughtless and damaging it can be. Football seems to be the poultice that draws it out at its ugliest. I have seen people jeering, sneering, laughing at players getting injured, screaming at the referee, spewing race hate, wishing pain on others, all in the boisterous name of “ENG-ER-LAND”. If you’d rather a win, even if “your” side cheated; if you’d rather a trophy than a sense of fair achievement; if you’d rather see referees as biased against your team because that helps ease the disappointment of “us” losing a match; if you’re doing any of that - even in a small way  - what exactly are you showing to pupils? As far as I can see it, you don’t need the hate at all - you could just enjoy the gameplay without the need to pick a side quite so hard. Because otherwise, you don’t “love” football at all - you love the romantic and obviously nonsensical ideal of “your” glorious team being the best and vanquishing other less deserving teams full of nasty subhumans who lie and cheat and dive.  That way, as we know, lies some of humankind’s most particularly dark behaviour.

Which brings me to my final and most important point: how can we discuss and enjoy sport like this in schools? Critically.

We separate the sport from the culture; we consider the human sameness as well as the difference; we examine fairness and unfairness in all its grisly glory. If you really love football, surely you love it when people play well and fairly, right?  So you appreciate the astonishing goals and extraordinary set-ups and amazing teamwork, regardless of the team that they come from, and you teach your pupils that this is the healthiest way to enjoy the sport, too. You explore how unfair both life and footie can be and that being a good human means being ethical, even when it disadvantages your team-mates, and what an interesting and difficult choice this might present. You don’t portray footballers as “heroes”, despite the persuasions of the national press - you present them as flawed humans who sometimes make flawed choices, on and off the pitch.

And, as hard as it is amongst a cry for simple “enjoyment” of the game, you find the contradictions and complexities in the idea of one group of people having a lovely time causing another group of people to have a terrible time, and you think about how this problem can be solved.

Most importantly: you acknowledge the urgent priority of safety, most especially of women and girls, and intersecting with other minority groups. 

Lucy Rycroft Smith is a teacher and freelance writer, and the co-editor (with JL Dutaut) of Flip the System UK: a teachers’ manifesto. She tweets @honeypisquared

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