https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sudfSPWfr8E
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/sport/2023/08/football-love-keir-starmer
“Yet something about the video doesn’t work. First and foremost, there is the dubious notion that a young Keir was too poor to attend Arsenal games. Starmer would have come of age in a time in which attending football was dangerous, violent and forbidding, certainly, but hardly expensive, with ticket prices only reaching £3 around 1980. That was the era of bunking turnstiles and invading opposition ends, which feels like a much greater barrier for a studious lad from Oxted to contend with.
Then there is the non-committal, non-specific language he uses: “adult”, “grass”, “London”, “smell”, “noise”. To the uninitiated, this probably all seems a fine way to describe the rituals of a game, but when true football fans talk about attending matches, they tend to use specifics: the station you arrive at, the road you walk down, the pub you go to before, the pub you go to after, and the stand (or end, if you really know the lingo) you sit in.”
(…)
“Since then, football has become a fascinating hurdle for politicians. Many of them are probably genuine fans of the game, yet it appears to be a concept you can’t embrace too much. It’s something that you must understand, but not pontificate on. You need to have a team, but you can’t be too tribal about it. Ironically, to win votes off football fans, you need to be the kind of safe, middle-class part-timer that the terraces claim to despise. You need to be, in the immortal words of Roy Keane, a “prawn sandwich”.
However, it’s important to note that the longest-serving prime minister in post-war British history, Margaret Thatcher, had nothing but disdain for the game and championed all manner of draconian anti-hooligan measures (while simultaneously lighting the touchpaper for aspirational away-day violence). Johnson’s attempts to connect with fans were half-hearted at best.
Maybe when you have enough tub-thumping, enough flag-waving in your politics, you don’t need football at all. Simply sing the national anthem, wish Harry Kane or the Lionesses good luck and stick to rugby otherwise. But for the technocrats, academics and Islingtonites in our political class, football is still the best way to tap into normality (as long as you don’t tap too hard).”