collective effervescence

on chanting, fandom, and the opposite of half-time light shows

‘Football Fans’ by John Edwe (2018)

In the secularity of capitalism, football’s magic is withering. Sport has always been about divining the sacred from the profane, but let’s just say things haven’t been quite this profane before.

Right now, regulators are readying their spreadsheets to finally steam into the English football pyramid’s finances. Where those at the top are fat with cash and those at the bottom are often left gasping for air, now at least someone will (should lol) be held responsible. 

So, with that in mind, let’s dig into some reframing:

For years clubs have been chasing lucrative international broadcast rights at the expense of local fanbases. This much is obvious. When you see Pep Guardiola moaning about City fans not making noise in the stadium — usually as his team crushes the life out of their opponents with a patient, droning rhythm, the tactical equivalent of Tibetan bowl music — this is the reason. 

Communing in the support of — or defiance against — their team’s performance, sense of place, tradition, ritual, shared history should be sacrosanct. This is who we are, no matter what. That is different to a club anthem wrapped in cellophane and sold in the stadium shop or a half-time light show that requires you to download the official club app if you’d like to join in. Those are activations. They do not come with the experience of seeing faces of those around you, lost in the moment, and understanding what it means; who pay to experience the visual spectacle but do, on occasion, as I often have, close their eyes when chanting, for a brief moment, losing themselves, inclined to depart from this world — its congestion charges and patchy wifi — and into another greater, grander space, before re-centering, eyes opening, to see a team chosen — by them or for them — to represent them on the pitch. These clubs are grand narratives we tell ourselves to explain things we cannot always articulate.

Stories create bridges for connection, but the secularism of modern football runs counter to that. As less time and effort is focused on the authentic production of community and culture, collectivity suffers. Without collectivity, why are we here?

Anyone who stops to think about it for more than five minutes knows that fans do not need to have been born in the area to be a true fan. But fans — all fans; near and far; casual and die-hard — need to know why they’re there. That — beyond squeezing extra money out of pockets so they can sign a new left back — is the job of the club: To create a framework for collective effervescence to follow. 

I first came across the concept of collective effervescence listening to a podcast in the gym: a recent interview by author and broadcaster Brené Brown (the Carlo Ancelloti of discussing the chewy topic of shame and vulnerability, sitting back in a homespun-sorta way and laying it out plain) with Belgian-American psychologist Esther Perel (the Pep Guardiola of articulating the nuance and neuroses of human relationships, twisting complex concepts into patterns of behaviour that feel both simple and terrifying to try to replicate).

When Perel spoke of our culture’s propensity for ‘artificial intimacy’ and the inability of many to experience the fullness of life ‘without the mediator of technology’, I thought immediately of modern football.

The issue, for me, was two-fold: Clubs artificialising the scruffy magic of the match day experience into a package which can more easily be transported, consumed, and sold; and the way fans, looking for the promised atmosphere they’ve been longing for, that they'd paid good money for, would forever have their phone out, at the ready, recording, just in case, so they can prove it happened, even if only for a second, and that they were there.

This distance runs counter to the immediacy and presence of mind that collective effervescence requires.

According to sociologist Randall Collins, “The successful ritual, by bringing about mutual focus of attention and rhythmic [training], transmutes any shared emotions into a new emotion: the collective effervescence of solidarity. If we are all angry, or sad together, we nevertheless feel better and stronger.”

This collective effervescence is the feeling of synchronicity and harmony that comes from connection with a shared purpose. It is a highly spatial phenomena. It is the reason why brainstorms work better in person than over Zoom. It is why you snap into the rhythm of strangers on a dancefloor. And, in football, as in protest, it’s chanting. On a very human level, chanting as a crowd just fucking works. It always has. It has been tied to the sacred since the beginning of humanity. It moves us from individuals into something larger, stronger, more important than ourselves alone. Synching with those around you, hearing that noise build and build: it’s as close a feeling as I’ve ever felt to religious transcendence myself, being part of a whole stand singing and singing, the words barely registering, words near meaningless, just noises emanating through you, thoughtlessly, enormously, you feel ecstatic, tremendous, and unselfconscious, too, swept up in the safety of the group, this pure wave of emotion, jumping with thousands of fundamentally tuneless people singing so unashamedly in public, whooping and hitting high notes as they shout to the heavens, the grass and open roof of football stadia one of those crucial elements you never really think about, the way a match is as close to communing with nature as many of us ever come. 

Football chants “represent the one true surviving embodiment of an organic living folk tradition”. But in the hand-wringing over football’s supposed inability to connect to a younger (and therefore more lucrative) crowd, these folk traditions — passed on from one generation to the next — are often the first to go. 

Clubs still have “anthems” played just before kick-off, but have spent more creative energy on their eSports teams (one of those weird tricks of perspective I have constantly been told are important but have never seen anyone treat as important) as they have spent building a live experience to write home about. As people are systematically priced out of the game, marketing has done little to pick up the slack:

Tradition (active) is replaced by nostalgia (passive). It becomes a hashtag; it becomes this thing we do, the italics spoken aloud.

Having ‘a song’ is not enough to build identity. Shared cultural identities were once formed by local people with shared rituals and experiences. We go to this church. Work in this factory. Drink in this pub. The breadth and diversity of our society now means that people can come from anywhere, and do anything, and with that newness breeds fear. In football, the fear is that new fans ‘just don’t get it’. Many match day issues are often blamed on tourist fans — the slur of “plastics” — visiting grounds for their first games. But how are clubs motivating existing fans to share their traditions with new, willing audiences? It’s how we begin to rebuild the emotional intensity and sense of camaraderie that is shared by a crowd singing in union with people who’ve never experienced it before.

But clubs do little to capitalise on the groundswells of match day. By focussing almost all of its storytelling on players and not fans, it sets a clear precedent, a strict hierarchy: These are the people that make this club special, not you. But by flipping that, you’d start to see more of yourself in your club, quite literally. We form shared identities not by relating to transient professionals who may be gone next season, but by uniting with fans we know will be there or thereabouts every single game. 

When the chants rise up from the crowd, they might sing about the players on the pitch, but they’re singing with each other, for each other, for themselves, more than anything else. To bring unity and collective effervescence back to stadiums, clubs need to remember the story that they tell is not theirs, but ours.