Some years ago I foolishly told an Italian fashion editor I’d be unable to meet him one Friday morning because I was off to watch Manchester City play. He eyed me warily like I’d just announced that instead of work I was going self-employed to referee football-related martial arts combat. “You? Football?
But you will wear your nice clothes,” he replied. Less rhetorical question than death knell. I spent the next five minutes trying to explain that I would not be ditching my daywear for a Stone Island zip-up and a pair of Adidas Sambas and nor would I spend the 90 minutes booing the away team and launching myself into violent encounters with rival fans whilst shouting racist abuse.
Mostly the latter. He shook his head, still convinced I’d inevitably end up bloodied and clawing my way out of a terrace skirmish, my bespoke shirt caving in at the elbows.
I don’t blame him.
Ask anyone abroad to picture the British football fan and chances are you’ll be met with an image not too dissimilar to one spent in the 1980s – men in sports jackets and combat trousers fuelling themselves on cans of lager, searching for fights. Stereotypes are invariably rooted in at least some truth, but despite what the years of lazy British newspaper headlines have told you, today’s average match-going supporter has little in common with his bruiser forebear. Ask anyone under the age of 30 about football culture and they’ll likely struggle to place things like distinctly North-Eastern terrace chants, let alone know what a kop monkey is.
I should know. I’ve been a Manchester City season ticket holder for the better part of fifteen years (yep, pre money, hipsters) and football fashion has pretty much been my side-hobby ever since I started working in menswear. Watching it evolve has been nothing short of fascinating.
How we dress on a Saturday informs nearly every aspect of the matchday experience these days, from what music we listen to as we walk to the stadium to what food we buy at the ground. But what we wear also says plenty about how British football culture has changed as a whole. Who wears what at the football these days?
Let me take you through the North Stand of the Etihad Stadium on a random Saturday matchday and find out. The person sat next to me on my left is Raj, a 42 year old solicitor who’s made the short drive over from Didsbury. He’s wearing a cashmere overcoat layered over a City home shirt – not the current year’s (too trashy) but a vintage retro 93-95 away shirt that he found on eBay.
His jeans are Carrot Creek selvedge from some tiny Japanese brand I’ve never heard of that retails for approximately a week’s worth of groceries. His ten-year-old daughter is sat next to him wearing a tiny replica kit down to the shin pads (kids still do that, don’t they?). Behind me, Graham, in his late sixties who’s been supporting City since the 19sixties wears an exact replica of what he’d wear to the office – shirt, tie, trousers, and smart brogues – with only a vintage blue and white bar scarf (predating the era of shirt sponsors) to tip you off that he’s at a football match.
Across the gangway is a group of lads in their twenties who look like they’ve walked straight off the set of Armcunt and are most likely listening to house music on tourti launch themselves in breakdancing contests at some boozy student union event as soon as they leave the stadium. They’re wearing limited edition trainers, cropped trousers, oversized technical jackets from brands you’ll find stocked at END Clothing. Not one of them is wearing a replica shirt, which would be “cheap” in their world though they’ll probs have a vintage training jacket or a top from some streetwear brand’s latest football-themed collab.
The point is that football crowds these days truly span the spectrum of British society, and how they choose to dress reflects that. Of course certain aspects of the traditional “casual” style that came to define football culture back in the ‘80s and ‘90s persist to this day – the anonymous sports brand hoodie is still sports brand hoodie, golfing trousers somehow still signal something poignant to a certain generation of Manchester United fans – but for most fans these days it’s just one minor influencer in a much broader world of football fashion. For every dad wearing a Stone Island jacket there are two more dads wearing bespoke suits, North Face fleeces, skiing jackets – you name it.
Let’s rewind for a second and talk about how we got here. To really understand football fashion today you have to know its history. The casual movement as it became known emerged back in the late ’70s and early ’80s kickstarted by fans of Liverpool FC who would follow their team around Europe during the club’s golden era.
Unavailable in the UK, hard-to-get European sports labels like Adidas, Fila, and Sergio Tacchini became coveted uniform statements as fans dressed to impress whilst deliberately moving away from the overt clubwear that would mark you out as a target to the Thatcher government’s increasingly militarised police force during football’s most-violent era. By the mid 80s the casual look had its own uniform – Stone Island jackets, CP Company caps, Burberry-cheque shirts, Lacoste necklaces – and was deliberately insular, knowingly expensive, while remaining working class attire through and through. Fundamentally, though, it was fashion.
But fashion as tribal marker, clothing as coded language. By the time the Premier League era kicked off a few years later both the economics and demographics of football had begun to shift. Years of rising ticket prices, all-seater stadiums, and international broadcasting deals transformed football from a predominantly working-class, male pastime to something much wider.
Matches became filled with suited professionals who’d never dream of setting foot in a football ground in the kind of riotous atmosphere many yesteryear crowds faced. Clubs targeted families and women like never before, while foreign travel brought in fans from all over the world who you brought their own fashion attitudes with them. Casual culture hadn’t died.
But it was diluted into a far wider pool than ever before. Those kerning Under armour jackets may still turn up at your local pub team game these days but both the hypermasculine associations and explicit connections to football violence have been ironed out (sorry) over time and through casual culture’s assimilation into mainstream fashion culture. Any kid wearing a Stone Island zip-up at a match these days is more likely doing so because they follow Drake on Instagram than because he supports Arsenal and is in a football firm.
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This season alone I’ve spotted toddlers in Palace jersey sweatsuits and old men in floral-print leggings at matches. Contrast that with the crowds of yesteryear and you’ll struggle to spot any one identifiable look. The average Premier League crowd in 20twenty-five is comprised of ~25% women.
Their age ranges from babies in pushchairs to pensioners. Their socioeconomic background ranges from the working-class lad who’s supported his team for decades to newly-arrived Chinese tourists who just dropped £2,000 on “matchday tickets”. Does any of that paint a picture of a uniform style of football fan?
Of course it doesn’t. Hell, even by club some football teams have stronger fashion micro-cultures than others. Matches at Arsenal tend to be far more fashion-forward than most, which makes sense when you consider their location in North London and their international fanbase.
You’ll notice more designer clothing, more effort being put into outfits. United, being the world’s most supported club attract higher proportions of overseas fans buying full kit en masse than most, creating an interesting contrast between American sports fans and local casuals. Liverpool probably have the strongest casual dress-code affiliation these days but even then it’s being influenced as much by modern-day streetwear as vintage influences.
Likewise, London clubs generally feel more fashion-adjacent than their northern counterparts, who again tend to lean more heavily on traditional casual influences but interpreted through a modern streetwear lens. Scottish football too has developed its own unique style heavily influenced by classic casualwear. Brands themselves have also caught on.
For years Stone Island was, for better or worse, a byword for football fans in the UK. Now it bills itself proudly as a technical fashion brand who sell to people who may or may not follow football. Success of retailers like Casual Connoisseur demonstrates that, while diluted, there’s still an audience for clothes that reference football culture’s history.
Arguably the biggest football style sub-set these days are what I’ll loosely term “football streetwear”. That strange intersection between traditional football fashion and modern streetwear culture. Brands like Lack of Guidance, Mundial and Peaceful Hooligan freely reference football’s style history while divorcing themselves from the subculture’s more violent past.
Vintage-style tracksuits and sweatshirts worn with high-end trainers, classic football shirts, and obscure terrace anthems spun on vintage record players. As with casual culture itself, this emerging sub-set of football style reflects broader changes in British masculinity and social class. A willingness to engage with fashion and self-expression that flies in the face of the myopic stereotypes of yesteryear.
There’s far less overt aggression at football these days. Kids are still shit-bootied up and you’ll hear a homophobic chant or two but it’s rare to hear “FUCK OFF YOU ____ SCUM!” yelled fervently from sections of a stadium in the way you once would. Of course British men have also become more comfortable engaging with fashion, hobbies once considered coded “feminine” and thinking about how they present themselves to the world.
Football culture has broadened to reflect that. Which isn’t to say those old stereotypes don’t persist – they do, largely thanks to a media who’ll always cling onto them for dear life. When there is trouble – Thankfully, it’s a lot less frequent these days – you can bet the Daily Mail will proudly print pictures of “football hooligans” like we’re still in 1995.
The fact those headlines now involve a tiny, fractional percentage of football fans is ignored. It’s worse abroad, too. I cannot tell you how many Italian, French and American style friends I’ve had to patiently explain I really do love both fashion AND football.
The memories of Green Street massacres and The Football Factory linger far stronger in their memory than the reality does in mine.
Which is understandable, we live in England so by virtue of actually living here we’ve seen it change firsthand. Some elements of old-school football culture should probably be preserved.
Though problematic in many ways, football’s casual era was one of the few homegrown British fashion movements of the late 20th century. It was a proudly working-class subculture that showed how style-conscious and creatively inward-looking theNorth East could really be. Who’s to say that influence never trickled into the dressings of today’s football fanatics?
At it’s best modern terrace fashion still carries that ethos of independent subculture but without the thuggish baggage. So next time you’re watching football, pay attention to the crowd. Sure, you’ll still see the trad rocker wearing Comme des Garcons shirts with his man-bag and Stone Island-clad dads nodding along to Gary Glitter like it’s still 1989, but you’ll see far more variability in who watches football and how they choose to dress these days than ever before.
Football’s dress code is whatever you want it to be. When you visit a Premier League game abroad, don’t worry about dressing like some imagined notion of a “football fan” – wear whatever you’d usually wear on a day out. There’s no scene dress-code, no uniforms, and certainly no reason to show up mimicking some outdated IRA-loving stereotype of working-class Brits you picked out of a film about football hooligans.
Trust me, the only people who’ll look stupid today are the people trying desperately hard to dress like it’s 1989.
