So far in 2026, I’ve heard boos from away supporters towards their own team and manager. I’ve heard home fans chanting for their own manager to be sacked, booing at full time and jeering one of their own players for poor set-piece delivery.
I’ve heard the fanbase of the team top of their division drowning in angst, one bloke screaming repeatedly at a winger for not doing something right from a distance that made his individual words audible to their target. I’ve heard a team get booed off at half time. I’ve heard angry chants against broadcasters, owners and referees… always referees. I’ve heard furious claims that multiple governing bodies are corrupt.
I quite like booing. There’s something comical about using a pantomime gesture to translate rampant frustration and despair. But the rise in anger across all four divisions of English football is undeniable. It raises a question: why does it feel like vast swathes of people don’t like the game or the club that they love?
The wider context is inescapable. Football is the most significant cornerstone of British culture. Nowhere else in everyday life do more people congregate in larger groups than at football matches.
Anger is a rising epidemic across the general population. A recent study recorded that almost a quarter of people surveyed say they felt anger on a daily basis, up significantly in a decade. Research into the treatment of customer service workers revealed that 60 per cent had experienced serious verbal hostility over the past 12 months.
Negative news cycles, perceived social injustice, a feeling of being ignored by those in power, social media as a highly addictive tool of amplification and reinforcement of things specifically curated to annoy you; these are the causes. And at football, we gather together like nowhere else.
On that last point, football is probably the best example after politics. You surround yourself with those who agree and you all get angry together towards those who don’t. Tribalism has fragmented over the last decade, from “us vs you” to “us vs you, but also us vs each other”. Factions exist over debate and extremism runs wild.
Football matters more now to those who go to watch it, a sweeping statement but a correct one. The notion of simply going along to watch the game and seeing what happens, football as soap opera, is now archaic.
There is always another week and another season but the second football epidemic, desperation culture, provokes a heightened sense of need for success to happen immediately. I think we used to see football as one entire mass. Now it is more of a food chain fight with its economics reinforcing that hierarchy in concrete.
If we have become more emotionally entwined with on-pitch performance then, crucially we also have more insight into club life and access to more performance data and analysis than ever before. It’s one thing to watch a team play badly, but if you have read four theories of how they could be better and articles about how injuries could be better avoided or how the sporting director is failing, you’re more likely to express frustration in person.
But the angry football fan is a creation of the sport itself. The rise in ticket prices, merchandising and concessions, far above inflation (and decency) irrevocably increased expectations of the product being sold, which in football’s case is either success, entertainment or both. Previously, supporter loyalty would extend to the “thick and thin” principle. Increasingly that loyalty is exhausted simply through the financial effort of being at the game. They made us like this.
If you believe that the club cares about you less (and that is the overwhelming sentiment of matchgoing supporters in 2026), the club loses its own leeway. This is a two-way street. Treat supporters as customers for long enough and they begin to believe it. If your washing powder stains your clothes, you complain or switch brands. If your team loses badly at home, you can’t switch so you complain doubly loud.
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To which we then add the myriad other (entirely valid) complaints by the same people, from kick-off times at the behest of broadcasters and the sanitisation of the match experience to the limitations of Profitability and Sustainability Rules and the emotional blackmail of clubs who pretend matchgoing supporters matter when it suits.
That presents rising anger not only as a product of football’s market economy, but a marker of its success. You see everybody is still here. Despite everything, crowds continue to rise. Fourth-tier crowds averaged over 6,000 in 2024 and 2025 for the first time in 60 years. Rank all second-tier crowds in England over the last 70 years and the last two sit first and second.
The more they gouge, the less it seems to make a difference to football’s in-person popularity. If everybody who was angry left, they would probably be replaced by happier, clappier attendees. But we don’t. We simply stay, getting less for more, changed and warped but still stuck in the cycle of hope and despair and thoroughly addicted to the whole thing. Booooo!
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