Home Turf: Fans, Foodbanks and Photography
Part of our exhibition L— A City Through Its People at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, we held an online event connecting football, art and social impact.
Emma Case, alongside panellists Jacqui McAssey and Dave Kelly, discussed the importance of archiving fan cultures and the influence these communities can have in shaping a city. The panelists explored who is represented in footie fandom and what football fan activism can look like…
Home Turf: Fans, Foodbanks and Photography
GUESTS
Jacqui McAssey, creator of GIRLFANS
GIRLFANS started in 2013. I had gone to Anfield with my friend Alex Hurst, a brilliant photographer from Liverpool, and stood outside the ground. We noticed that there were a lot of women and girls going into the game, and I did some digging and found some Premier League statistics which said one in four match goers were women. If you were going into the game and you saw women at the match, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But talking to people who’d never gone to football, I think they still thought of going to the match as a male pursuit.
The idea was ambitious: I’ll just come back for the whole season and photograph the women going into the game. It felt important to be able to document who was going to the football, but actually document that from a female perspective. We made a fanzine, which I suppose really is a photo book. But we made it feel like a fanzine in that it was made from newsprint, it was something that you could roll up and put in your pocket. It referenced football in other ways as well; we put the scores in there, there was the table with the final positions on the very back page, and it was done in pink paper to reference The Football Pink.
It was published in 2015 and found its own community being in print. One of my colleagues very kindly took it off to Offprint Tate Modern, and it was picked up by the V&A art library, and travelled all over the world. When I sent the first zines out I sent them out with Don’t Buy The Sun stickers and Hillsborough Justice campaign stickers from the shop at Anfield. As somebody who’s grown up in Liverpool and then gone to work outside the city, I always felt like I had a stigma, and that I was stereotyped. Part of this project was me trying to remedy that by sending out these images of very friendly, smiling, warm women who were all match goers.
One particular piece I submitted was published in Fanpages, a style publication by Kira Jolliffe and Bay Garnett. I was always trying to get across these ideas of justice and activism, but on a quite subtle level. So that was a very important piece, to get the message out into a different domain, moving into style as well. In 2014/15, Alex and I started to document the women of Everton, and one of the great things about documenting fans of football is you talk about the game: the manager, the tactics, where they are, and it crosses over into what they’re wearing. Sometimes, you get quite angry women talking about the apparel that’s available in the club store.
After the first two publications, rather than think of it as one whole female fan community, I started to think about how each set of fans has their own history and their own narrative. They have their favourite places. They have their favourite kits. And so with each zine I try to uncover that. Meeting three women from Celtic, McKayla, Erin and Orlaith, really gave me a really renewed sense and purpose to what I was doing. They petitioned Celtic to provide free sanitary products in grounds. They did it in around six weeks, got a meeting with Celtic, and that campaign then extended to over a hundred football clubs now. I think it was really important for me that solidarity extended to Liverpool, and the clubs in Liverpool picked it up really quickly. If you ever go to a football match now and you go into the female toilets and there are sanitary products it’s because of those three young women.
Dave Kelly, co-founder of Fans Supporting Foodbanks
My fan activism probably goes back a long way. I’ve got a number of notable things on my CV that I’m immensely proud of. I was the chairman of Keep Everton In Our City campaign group, that stopped Everton going to Kirby. I’ve always had a belief that your average football fan reflects the average society and the establishment have got quite a lot of disdain for the average fan. The great Jock Stein said football without fans is nothing, and I think that’s been really well illustrated over the last eight months during the pandemic.
Fans Supporting Foodbanks started because me and Ian were working together, attending a meeting in a community centre in Anfield where were going to speak. We thought there’s a good turn out here, we must be popular, because there was a queue out the door. Little did we realise, the queue is for the food bank. I was shocked. At the time, five years ago, I knew very little or nothing about food banks. I think terms like food banks, zero hour contracts, the gig economy, they’re all words we’ve become familiar with over the last couple of years, but we don’t tend to actually think what they mean and the impact that has on our communities.
You’ve got these two mega big businesses with a billion pound turnover right in the heart of working class Northern Liverpool, and none of the money ripples down into the ommunity. One of the unique things about all of that was the Walton constituency in Liverpool, six of the eight wards are among the most socially and economically deprived in the country. So after seeing that queue outside the food bank, the chairman of the community association took us into the stock room because the food bank was about to run out of food. When we went into their stock room all they had left was a bag of pasta and 10 small tins of tuna, which they were starting to split up to make sure that everyone had something to eat, that no one was going to go away empty handed.
That was on the Friday. The following morning, Everton were playing Man United at half 11, so we grasped the nettle and decided that we would do a food bank collection outside Goodison in a wheelie bin, because that was the only thing we could get hold of at such short notice. We rolled over and we got a tonking off United, but I went home that night quite contented that that was a worthwhile exercise that because there might be one kid goes to bed tonight who isn’t hungry, who went to bed last night hungry.
So we replicated that the following week at Anfield. We were trying to instil into match going families that their routine is hat, scarf, badge, banner, season ticket, tin of beans. Get it in your routine. That’s what happens in this city during times adversity, and there’s a problem, the people of this city stick together and they get stuck in and they have a go. I don’t care whether you’re a Red or a Blue, or you’re a non-believer and you’ve got not which team. This city is full of good, decent people, and football gives a vehicle to spread that message.