How Did Football Fan Culture Become So Toxic?

Fifteen minutes on Twitter, TikTok, or even YouTube is enough to cause you to lose hundreds upon hundreds of brain cells and on the footballing side of this platform that number is firmly in the thousands. Even worse you might find out someone abused a player based on his skin colour again or someone wore another 97 shirt to a Liverpool game.

It feels like the transition from a match-going experience and qualified journalists and pundits offering their analysis and opinions to a sort of online Lord of the Flies-type island has been completed over the past few years. A decade of the Lionel Messi versus Cristiano Ronaldo debate has embittered fans and has led to the creation of countless vile pages that title themselves as comedy accounts, despite their particular brand of humour consisting of hate thrown at opposing teams and players, veiled as somehow being funny.

The things we used to laugh at a few years ago are now the norm. Every debate between two footballers has become a mini Messi versus Ronaldo and you could even envision this happening at Sunday League level. The main shift in football fan culture has come with the advent of social media and has seen the experience of football become diluted and perverted.

Before the era of online highlights, the only way to get in touch with the beautiful game was either to go to a match, to watch it on TV or to watch the highlights after the game. These highlights were usually accompanied by a varying degree of pertinent commentary and were meant to give an account of what happened and not to follow or force any narrative. Nowadays, you can find compilations of the worst moments of a player’s game set up by rival fans or meme accounts that make them look hopeless, when in fact, analyzed as a whole the player in question had a pretty average game for his level.