Farage: ‘Keep Politics Out of Football’… But Not For Me!

Image - Abigail Keenan

On March 23, some of Reform UK’s politicians, including leader Nigel Farage, made a visit to Ipswich Football Club’s stadium, Portman Road. The event has become far more than a simple photo opportunity. The party and Farage shared photos via X of the Clacton MP holding aloft a personalised shirt with his name and the number 10 emblazoned upon it with the caption ‘I’ve been too bad on the right wing’. The backlash went beyond calls to separate politics from football, instead exposing the perceived hypocrisy surrounding who is permitted to project their ideology within the sport.

Farage claimed to reporters to have been invited by Ipswich ‘who knew I was in the area,’ a claim quickly disputed by the club. Ipswich released a statement a day later to express that ‘the club remains apolitical and does not support or endorse any individual or party’ and that they would ‘continue to engage with representatives from across the political spectrum’. The statement was symbolic in demonstrating that football clubs are not simple venues for events, but institutions engrained within local identity and cultural belonging. For many, Farage’s use of their ground felt at odds with such an identity.

Ipswich fans reacted angrily to the club’s involvement with such a divisive figure who many felt did not represent the club’s values or identity. The popular fan forum TWTD reported that the club had ‘no official involvement’ and that the shirts bearing Farage’s name were in fact purchased by the politician prior to the visit and were not gifts from the club. The website is open to fan comments, which were overwhelmingly critical of Farage being allowed to shoot political promotional content within the ground. Many voiced that they were ‘embarrassed’ to be fans whilst others said the apology from the club was simply ‘not good enough’. One fan commented ‘how has the club allowed itself to be involved in this? Statistically, it alienates 60% of its supporters’.

Some fans questioned ‘would there have been such an uproar had it been Starmer or another politician?’ Those comments which questioned the outrage were downvoted by other fans who voiced that the issue was not only the political nature of the visit, but the nature of the politician as one who ‘pedals division, hatred, and holds deeply offensive racist views’. The issue is perhaps not politics within football, but the nature of what that politics promotes.

Farage has a long standing opposition to players taking the knee in support of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and criticised Gareth Southgate in 2021 prior to the Euros labelling him ‘out of touch with England’s fans’ who ‘have the right to boo when players take the knee for Marxist BLM’. His defence for such was to ‘keep politics out of football’ and at the time, he urged people to focus on the game itself. His hypocrisy was again exposed just a day after his visit to Portman Road, as he reposted leader of the Scottish National Party John Swinney’s post on X in which he posed with members of the Scottish national team to ‘congratulate them on qualifying for the World Cup’. Farage captioned this ‘keep politics out of football,’ just hours after his photo shoot promoting his ‘right wing’ stance at Ipswich. It appears that Reform itself does not detest political messaging within football, but rather detests politics that it disagrees with being given a platform.

This selective framing is further underlined by Reform UK’s wider engagement with football culture. The party’s official website sells branded football shirts, the turquoise top adorned with the party’s logo and Union flag demonstrating their awareness of football's symbolic power and significance in both social and political matters. The sport offers a ready-made language of identity: nation emblems, anthems and slogans enveloped within its nature that can be mobilised for political gain. Such context frames Farage’s visit to Ipswich as less of a fun tour of the ground and more like a deliberate strategy to embed Reform’s political agenda within popular culture and yet another attempt to present Farage as a “man of the people”.

Reform have also been accused of attempting to insert ‘toxic politics’ into football as they appealed to the Football Association in England to scrap diversity and inclusion policies. The FA’s EDI wants 30% of the England men’s coaching staff to be from ethnically diverse backgrounds by 2028 in order to better represent the diverse squad and nation it represents. The letter to the FA came from Conservative defector Suella Braverman, who accused the ‘DEI strategy’ of ‘discrimination’, dividing rather than uniting. This mere comment provides an insight into the Americanised nature of the Reform party’s politics, as the term DEI is most commonly used in the United States, whilst British strategies tend to be referred to as ‘EDI’ policies.

The Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy criticised Reform’s stance, reaffirming that ‘sport belongs to everyone in our country’. But even this framing was not void of political charge as she commented that ‘it unites us and brings us together, which is exactly why Reform has such a problem with it’.

Farage and Reform appear to therefore be oscillating between arguments regarding where they stand on politics within football. One minute they are criticising the change to the England flag on the 2024 Euros kit, the next emblazoning a turquoise Union flag on their own jerseys; attending a Championship club and conducting a PR stunt and the next day criticising the First Minister of Scotland for appearing beside national team players. This episode ultimately demonstrates the slogan of ‘keep politics out of football’ is less a principled statement focused on the game itself, but a contested phrase that is used hypocritically by those shouting for it the loudest. The debate brings into question who controls the expression of politics within football and which voices and stances should either be promoted or dismissed.

From its early form as a working man’s sport played between neighbouring towns in the medieval period to the international multi-million pound industry that football has become today, political and social issues are embedded within its culture. To dismiss its political nature and meaning dismisses the historical struggles of race and gender, class identities, and collective expressions that have shaped the game.

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