“Football without fans is nothing.” It has become an often repeated truism in soccer’s age of hypercapitalist excess. Originating with Celtic’s Jock Stein decades ago, the slogan was recently misattributed to Manchester United’s 1960s manager Matt Busby, then reappropriated by Keir Starmer in a typically unconvincing lunge for popular appeal.

How times have changed. Elites have whined about football crowds since the fourteenth century, when Edward II issued a proclamation banning the sport, lamenting that “there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise.” Given modern football’s global hegemony in the twenty-first century, it seems extraordinary that as recently as 1985 the Sunday Times published an editorial describing the game as “a slum sport played in slum stadiums, and increasingly watched by slum people.” It’s a verdict all the more jarring when you realize it was issued in the aftermath of the horrendous fire at Bradford City’s Valley Parade stadium, where fifty-six fans lost their lives.

Football fans, like all groups of people, are not uniformly good, moral, and wise. It is true that for a while in the 1970s and ’80s, racist abuse, an organized far-right presence, and casual violence became incredibly common at — or after — football matches (particularly, but not exclusively, in England). By 1983, things had become so bad that sports ministers from the Council of Europe met to discuss how to stop what one of them termed “soccer terrorism.” The crisis in football by this point had been brewing for a while, tied in with wider moral panics over juvenile delinquency and male youth violence. Stuart Hall warned in the late 1970s of an “amplification spiral” whereby exaggerated media reports exacerbated fears of trouble, which fed calls for police and judicial crackdowns, which fed greater confrontation with fans, and so on.

The hedonistic violence and machismo of a small minority gave Britain’s right-wing press the opportunity to use the vociferous, dehumanizing language that reflected its feelings about all forms of working-class youth culture: “RIOT! United’s Fans Are Animals” (Sunday People, 1975); “SAVAGES! ANIMALS!” (Daily Mirror, 1975); “Smash These Thugs” (the Sun, 1976). In a morbid foretaste of the tragedies that would soon follow — most notably Hillsborough in 1989, where severe police malpractice led to the deaths of ninety-seven fans, changing the game forever — the Daily Mirror made the following suggestion in 1977:

Another idea might be to put these people in “hooligan compounds” every Saturday afternoon. . . . They should be herded together preferably in a public place. That way they could be held up to ridicule and exposed for what they are — mindless morons with no respect for other people’s property or wellbeing. We should make sure we treat them like animals — for their behaviour proves that’s what they are.

Since Hillsborough and the reforms which followed, the crowd experience has been gentrified beyond all recognition. Defeatists lament that “the game’s gone,” but this pessimism isn’t reflected by the reality. There is much to lament about a sport run by petrostates and cartoonishly corrupt authorities like FIFA, but football has also opened up considerably to women, people of color, and LGBTQ fans; the far right has largely been cast out and forced into other avenues of recruitment; and the ludic banter, catharsis, and collective joy still remains, even if it comes — alas — at a higher price.

The truth of Jock Stein’s co-opted slogan has never been better illustrated than during the pandemic. When professional sports returned in June 2020 after a three-month hiatus, it did so without fans and behind closed doors. The Germans had a term for this unnerving sight: geisterspiele, or ghost stadiums. The normally raucous spectacle of a match played in front of 70,000 people bellowing their passions and fury in unison was reduced to a barren, near-silent TV ballet. It was all reminiscent of the experimental Lars von Trier film Dogville, where the setting of a small town is reduced to chalk outlines on a black floor like an especially spartan theater production.

Broadcasters plunged viewers even further into the uncanny valley by piping in fake crowd noises. You could turn off this artificial soundtrack, but then you were left with the emptiness of it all, occasional thwacks of the ball or distant shouts from the players echoing around the Premier League’s vast, glossy arenas. It was a surprise just how dreary it became, like you had tuned in to a training session in the local park by mistake. Most football fans I know could not bear the eerie silence and did not watch the games at all. It felt like a somewhat too on-the-nose satire of the state of things under late capitalism: atomized, stuck in our homes, technologically connected to the world outside and ever more alienated because of it.

It brought home the reason we go to games, indeed to any sporting events: not to see the action better (you get a far better view watching on a large flat-screen at home) but to experience the thrilling power and solidarity of the crowd. This frisson of nervous excitement can be a physical sensation in itself, a tingle of anxious adrenaline. You know the sensory overload will be almost overwhelming, and as you approach the stadium, you can feel its murmuring waves of collective energy emanating outward from the center even before you hear or see it, in ripples and then in waves.

Watching the Navarrese side Osasuna play in Spain’s top tier on a cold January evening, my host, Natxo, took me in with the club’s “ultras,” most of them dressed in all black, flags aloft like the anti-fascist protesters who had marched through Pamplona city center the day before. The Osasuna ground is known for having the best atmosphere in La Liga due to its “English-style” intensity and design, with vertiginously steep stands that make you feel as if you are almost on top of the pitch — and (rare in Spain) a new form of standing terrace, where each ticket holder is allocated a numbered seat but can choose to stand if they wish. This is referred to by the authorities as “safe standing.”

Pleasingly, the finer points of the authorities’ intentions had not reached the people of Navarre, and we stood three deep on each row with the density of a mosh pit. Natxo flipped down the plastic seat behind me and stood on it, leaning on my shoulder for balance, while others spilled out and filled the aisles. Everyone huddled together for warmth and solidarity.

I was taught chants and anthems in Spanish and in Basque, all sung at a deafening volume, and when the opposition team Rayo Vallecano scored the first goal, the song continued without even the slightest pause for complaint or remonstration — as if developments on the pitch were entirely unconnected to our presence. I was reminded of another chant, popular across the Spanish-speaking world: “Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol / Hemos venido a emborracharnos y el resultado nos da igual.” The first line should be fairly clear; the key second line translates as “We don’t care about the result; we just came to get drunk.”

I would suggest tweaking Jock Stein’s famous articulation of the correct priorities: football without fans is nothing — and the football doesn’t really matter anyway.