It’s unhelpful to pretend racists can’t be football fans

The ingredients that make up a proper football fan are the subject of persistent and perpetual debate, but one thing remains a certainty: whenever somebody who walks and talks and sings and shouts like a football fan is caught doing something racist, somebody else will be along shortly afterwards to make the point that they are not, in fact, a football fan. They are a “fan” in scare-quotes, or a “so-called fan,” or they have the cheek to “call themselves a fan,” a status that they patently do not deserve.

But while it’s understandable, it’s also disingenuous, and perhaps even dangerous. The disingenuity lies in the peculiar notion that being a football fan is somehow determined by moral qualities. As though it were impossible to be a football fan and a dickhead. As it goes, by many of the more popular standards of footballing fandom properness, those Chelsea fans in Paris were among the most proper fans it’s possible to be. They were, at least presumably, the away support, the hardcore, following Chelsea over land and sea.

And the danger? The danger is in the neatness and the patness of what looks like a solution, but isn’t. Saying “they’re not fans” might feel like the end of the matter -- a personal act of dismissal -- but it chimes uncomfortably against the fact they quite obviously are fans by any metric, and, even more importantly, they are fans who are happy to simultaneously be fans and be racist, and be both those things loudly and in public.

Which is troubling. It suggests that far from football fans being a group of people that excludes racists by definition, it is instead a group in which racists feel happy to express themselves as such. Doubtless the lip-loosening effects of alcohol and adrenaline bear some of the responsibility for the act, if not the mindset, but still. It’s not usually as stark -- or as well-recorded -- as last night’s incident, and it’s certainly not as widespread as the days when monkey noises regularly rolled down off the terraces and onto the pitch. But it’s still there, tucked away in the corners of the English matchgoing experience.

Ultimately, this act of well-intentioned recategorisation is an abrogation of responsibility. It presumes -- or perhaps hopes to pretend -- the battle is over and the malign elements have been defeated and can safely be quarantined within quote marks, over there, out of football. Which would be lovely if it were true, but it isn’t. It’s closer to being true than it was, but clearly not close enough.

The end goal is a game where anybody holding such views are made to feel unwelcome to the point that they declare themselves to no longer be football fans. Or at least, they keep their mouths shut. This means condemnation by clubs and other fans on an individual level, and while taking on an entire train carriage might not be a wise idea for an individual, it is encouraging that Chelsea have taken a proactive stance regarding this incident; the club are appealing for witnesses.

Indeed, over the last few years clubs have got quite good at addressing this sort of thing among their own fans, at least in high-profile instances, and it’s perhaps a positive sign that having a racist element among the support is considered terrible PR. Though, of course, it is certainly worth wondering when they might extend this same attitude to their players, or when the FA might do the same to its own employees. And the fact remains that everywhere but the pitch, English football is still -- to borrow a phrase from FA Chairman Greg Dyke’s time at the BBC -- hideously white.

Football in general, and football fans in particular, can’t persuade a racist not to be a racist. And a sport, and the people who follow that sport, cannot dismantle a system of discrimination and oppression that has existed for centuries and continues to exist, even though it’s no longer acceptable to stand on the terraces and lob darts at the nearest black head. What football and football fans can do, however, is work together to make the game as safe a space as possible for everybody, at the same time as wider society works towards the same ends.

This isn’t done by mentally dividing the world into proper football fans and bad people. It’s done by recognising that these people are still in football, and working tirelessly to push them out. There’s no point claiming somebody isn’t a football fan unless it’s actually true. Victory proclaimed isn’t the same as victory achieved.