Football Fans Are Organising Against the Far Right

In mid July, Paul Chadwick and Dave Kelly spent an evening at Liverpool’s Abdullah Quilliam mosque, which had opened its doors to the city’s football fans for the Euros 2024 final.

One month later, and the two men are back under different circumstances. Far-right violence has broken out across the UK, and word has gotten around that the mosque is under threat. Chadwick and Kelly are among 200 antifascists who have mobilised in response.

They aren’t alone. In Merseyside, football fans with Fans Supporting Foodbanks (FSF) – a group of volunteers who collect food before matches to distribute to those in need – are now acting as a counterpoint to the racist attacks.

“Football isn’t the first thing you’d think could bring different communities together,” says Chadwick, speaking to Novara Media. “But it opens a lot of doors.”

An untapped resource.

The idea for FSF came in 2015. Having seen how fans could come together to celebrate wins, gripe against unpopular managers or orchestrate a campaign against ticket price hikes, Kelly, Robbie Daniels and Ian Byrne (who later became the MP for Liverpool West Derby) looked at food banks struggling to meet growing demand and wondered: what if people’s bonds to their club could be harnessed for the good of the community?

Daniels – who suspected fans might be an “untapped resource” in the fight against food poverty – was proven right. What began as a handful of people collecting food in wheelie bins outside Everton’s Goodison Park has grown into a programme that feeds 2,500 people a week in Merseyside. Indeed, FSF has been so successful that it’s been replicated in Leeds, Southampton, Newcastle and London, and Scotland alone has 20 food pantries.

Football fans haven’t always had a reputation as community leaders. In the 70s and 80s, they were more closely associated with the far right, with the National Front recruiting from their ranks. More recently, self-styled groups like the Democratic Football Lads Alliance has tried to infiltrate the game, holding a series of marches against what they term “Islamic extremists.”

“It’s important that we’re on the other side of it,” Daniels said. “We are football fans trying to help in our communities, […] to show fans in a better light.” 

While Daniels, Chadwick and Kelly are dyed-in-the-wool Evertonians, Byrne is a Liverpool fan. Yet the programme is neither red nor blue, running instead under the slogan “Hunger Doesn’t Wear Club Colours”.

FSF has a close relationship with the Abdullah Quilliam mosque. While most of the food is collected by volunteers at games, the mosque donates to the programme regularly. Mumin Khan, the CEO of the mosque, said: “We tell the congregation to bring something, and then we’ll send off a van. We care for our neighbours.”

Earning trust.

Five days later, on 7 August, hundreds of people gather outside Asylum Link Merseyside, a charity over Overbury Street in the east of Liverpool that supports asylum seekers, after it was included on a list of potential far-right targets. Pat, aged 71, holds a sign reading “Nans Against Nazis”, a local restaurant serves up free meals, and a large green RMT flag floats in the evening breeze.

The RMT isn’t the only trade union represented in the Overbury Street crowd. In the days leading up to 7 August, the Communication Workers Union, the Fire Brigades Union and the RMT all asked branches to offer support to mosques, refugee centres and solidarity groups.

Both Kelly and Chadwick have trade union backgrounds: Kelly was a Unite organiser for 32 years; Chadwick, a postal worker for over four decades, is a branch secretary for the CWU in Warrington. But both argue that when it comes to community mobilisation, football has allowed for more cut-through.

“We wouldn’t get where we can get now as trade unionists,” says Kelly, speaking on FSF’s headway. Instead of simply waiting for workplaces to “go back to what they were in the 60s and 70s”, union members should focus on “getting out in communities”, he explains.

“There are people who donate [to FSF] who normally wouldn’t come and speak to us over anything else,” says Chadwick. “That is the way forward.”

As the night progresses, it becomes clear the asylum centre isn’t going to face violence this evening. The mood shifts into one of relief.

Kelly and Chadwick, who are both in attendance, are quick to praise the city’s response to the far right. But they also share fears that the moment will be another missed opportunity for building trust.

“One of the things that makes me laugh on protests is when the left chant: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ Yet they’re in someone’s community that they’ve never been in before,” says Kelly.

“You’re alien to that community just as much as the rightwingers. We’ve got to earn the trust and respect of the community before we can move on. You can’t turn up to anti-fascist demonstrations, then just walk away.”

Connecting struggles.

The morning after the successful counter-protest, and the city is calm but tense. At FSF’s weekly market-style food pantry on Lodge Lane, things are quieter than usual. 

Volunteers know that low footfall doesn’t reflect a drop in need: the pantry sits in Liverpool Riverside, the most deprived constituency in England. But volunteers worry that the threat of the far right has put locals on edge.

“People are sitting at home, hungry,” Daniels suggests. “But they’re too afraid to come out.”

Late to arrive is a pregnant mother and her two children, aged around five and 12. Living in a hotel with only a kettle, the tins of chopped tomatoes and bags of pasta on offer are of no use to them. Quickly, volunteers disappear down Lodge Lane. Before long, the family is fixed up with a microwave, electric stove, pots and pans, and a portion of chips from the chippy.

For close to a decade, this is how FSF has built a sense of community. With spaces that might once have brought different working-class people under the same roof having been shuttered – libraries, Sure Start centres, pubs – the pantry brings them back together and connects their struggles. And when it does, it chips away at the space in which the far right can organise and its rhetoric can take hold.

“We are the community, feeding the community,” says Daniels.