“THERE could be a book in this.” I suggested to my mate, Vince Raison, on very cold night in Madrid in January 2019. We’d just been chatting to a bunch of Celta Vigo fans carrying the pan-Celtic flag at the Rayo Vallecano v Celta Vigo game that evening.

Celta have a left-leaning fan base as well as Rayo, these guys were off to some socialist conference in Derry a few days after the match. We were not long after our first visit to FC St Pauli, a place of pilgrimage for leftist football fans from across the globe.

“We’d enjoy writing it but would anyone want to read it?” replied Vince, with some justification. 

Fast forward to November 2022 — we’re doing a book launch in one of Glasgow’s coolest venues in front of 200 people, with Graham Spiers, Scotland’s top football journalist, and Paul and Chris from The Wakes, Scotland’s finest folk rock band, all supported by Unite, wondering ‘what did take us from that night in Madrid to St Luke’s in the Calton?”

The Morning Star formed part of the answer. In the 2020 lockdown, we published a series of well-received articles in the paper about left-wing clubs such as FC St Pauli, Rayo Vallecano, Cadiz, Palestino and others. This led to our pitching the book at a few publishers, Pitch Publishers gave us the commission in June 2021 and by May 2022, after a lot of travelling and heroic levels of alcohol consumption, all in the interests of our art, we’d submitted the manuscript to Pitch.

I can safely say that it’s a unique piece of work: not many volumes contain chapters that reference Gramsci and novelist William Gerhardie along with the 1970s hooligans, One-Armed Babs of Chelsea and Millwall’s Tiny. 

It covers some of the great names of world football: Boca Juniors, Celtic, and Liverpool. However, the sections dedicated to the lesser-known and the surprising, Detroit City, Velez Mostar of Bosnia, Happoel Tel Aviv and others, are equally engaging and just as important. These are stories that deserve to be told about clubs and communities that often go against the grain of expectation. 

The book covers a “First XI” and a “bench” containing 10 more clubs. More than once we had to ask “what does it actually mean to be ‘left wing’ and is this it?” but that led to some interesting discussions in the book as well as various bars. 

The book is not just for football fans, by no means: it can be read as an engaged travelogue through vibrant, edgy but welcoming parts of Europe and South America found well off the beaten tourist track and featuring, among other things; Andy Capp as cultural, leftist icon in Cadiz, a street in ‘liberal’ Hamburg from which women are banned, skinhead ska fans in Calabria singing The Wild Rover and the Millwall hymn “No-one Likes Us,” a Palestinian Communist mayor in Santiago de Chile with 65 per cent of the vote and green kangaroos in Prague …

Through extensive travels, formal interviews, and lengthy drinking sessions with the local fans, we talk about: how and why football matters, the importance of the leftist and anti-fascist supporters’ movement, how that importance can be harnessed and leveraged, not just by the left but in the interests of better relations among all our communities

Does football actually matter? And the existence of clubs with a left-wing following? Does any of it make a difference? This forms the theme of the book’s final chapter, a couple of extracts to give a flavour: “The power of the cult of ‘hardness’ to football fans is exemplified by the stories of One-Armed Babs of Chelsea and Tiny of Millwall, hooligan legends of the 1970s. I remember talking to some Chelsea fans in the 1970s about Babs, one of whom worked himself into a lachrymose quasi-religious ecstasy when telling of the exploits of Babs, ending with the amen of ‘Babs is just so hard.’ Millwall have never veered towards the almost religious but the fans will always talk about the legendary Tiny with true veneration. 

The extraordinary thing about them is that they were both black: black leaders of overwhelmingly white football firms in the very racist 1970s, the toughness afforded a respect and credibility that trumped race prejudice at a time when it mattered, a lot.

Maybe this strangely touching story also exhibits football’s capacity to bring people together, albeit in a less than wholly positive way ...

We can also wonder at how Chelsea and Millwall’s respective followings would have developed had some people in the 1970s and 1980s latched onto the fact that a couple of the top boys were black. In opposing the culture of violence, had narratives of inclusivity been actively propagated as they were in Germany — as opposed to the passive submission that characterised the British “response” to the growing racism that took over so many British football stadiums — then things could have been different here.

“And not just in football grounds, more people could have been prepared to argue at home and in their workplaces against racist and nativist narratives presented by some political parties and the majority of the printed media. Anti-racism and anti-fascism could have become something associated with prestigious football teams and supporter groups, not the ‘limp-wristed crank’ intellectual stereotypes pushed by the dominant culture and its media.”

We also summarily deal with one of the most common myths paraded about the game:

“The idea that football is just a circus designed to distract the masses can be dismissed by reference to reality. The areas of the greatest football fervour, the West of Scotland, the North-East, the North-West, have also been historically those of the greatest political and trade-union leftist militancy.”

The book is a celebration of football and its place in some working-class communities that will never adopt the bourgeois playbook. And an affirmation that it matters. As Professor Tony Collins’s foreword states, “by highlighting the importance of collective activity to social change, football does indeed offer lessons for life … at its best the game demonstrates the importance, and joy, of collective action, international friendship and human solidarity.”

It’s a complex and fascinatingly inter-connected planet, much of it is covered in The Roaring Red Front, you can get your copy here: www.theroaringredfront.com