this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Football is fun and cool, and I don’t think football fans are especially bigoted, not any more than Warhammer or D&D fans
Football fans are so queerphobic and misogynist that local trans discords have set up early warning systems for days when there's a game in town, but things may look different if you're in the US.
Hello trans historian here who has written about sports and currently lives in Europe but is from America
The reason why American sports and European sports have such wildly different cultures is the history of how the leagues were formed.
European professional sports come from the British. The Brits pro sports leagues were just the amateur leagues which eventually allowed professionalism. This meant that since the beginning the crowds have always been super hardcore into it and less family oriented and mostly adult working class men. It was the same people on the teams who was watching it.
In America professional sports originated with the creation of professional leagues separated the wildly popular amateur college sports system. These leagues like the NFL and MLB were able to have more dictation over security and over what kinda people they wanted at games.
So all these baseball and football teams in America very very very early on did promotions for families and for people to bring their wife and kids. Make it a family friendly event. That's because before the 70s basically all the money was tied up in seat sales at games and they wanted more money. Instead of the working class did, you got two more tickets with his kid and wife.
Europeans were unable to follow this because teams were financially hostage to their fans and couldn't risk changes that would make them leave. So instead they did the opposite where they did everything for the fans which created a culture that only allowed straight cis men. (This also led to clubs excusing hooliganism and white nationalist elements in their fanbases)
You see now since Americans and Arab gulf countries have bought all these teams, they're trying to make the teams more 'family friendly " to sell more tickets and there's been some backlash
It's crazy that American sports are so much more welcoming to women and queer people because they know they can more money that way
Great comment. Football teams formed as workers’ rec teams in many Western Eruopean countries, and simply became a reflection of the surrounding cultural milieu and material conditions.
Also America has the same rec sport history with college football which was amateur for over a hundred years and took until only a few years ago to officially go pro.
For over decades the second largest sport in america was the amateur college football conferences which are now professional
Similar working class sports leagues used to exist in America but they all died probably like, 80 or so years ago.
The MLB and NFL were truly revolutionary in their tactics and ability to demolish the competition and monopolize a country the size of a continent.
There used to be dozens of baseball leagues for instance, separated by prestige, class, region, and race
They're all gone now
This is true but a minor counterargument is that lots of women love football and women’s football also tends to be very queer friendly.
This is a trans topic so I’m digressing but my point of contention is that the op mentioned minorities in their comment. Warhammer and DND might be more welcoming spaces for certain trans folk but can be extremely classist and unhealthy environments for lots of other minorities
True, although unfortunately men's football really overshadows women's football in most places outside the US.
Sadly correct as well. I'm also a bit torn on the trans inclusivity of Warhammer and D&D - post gamergate a lot of traditional "nerdy" spaces have gathered a small, but extremely vocal and organized minority of reactionary weirdos that will do everything in their power to make these hobbies as hostile to marginalized people as possible. It has gotten to the point that some TTRPG communities i know have sparked private, secluded offshoots intended as safer spaces for women, racialized and queer people.
Also, i've found it pretty easy to look for new groups mostly in trans communities. I think that can make the supposed trans relatedness of certain hobbies a self fulfilling prophecy, when you're feshly outed and looking for trans friends the easiest way to do that is to pick up TTRPGs, TCGs or WH40k.
While there are many cool football fans, I do not believe there is a fandom that has been involved in more hate crimes than football.
There are literally billions of football fans so that might just be the law of averages
I don't accept that. There are likely hundreds of thousands of knitters and they have yet to organise into doing even a minor ethnic cleansing.
Knitting isn’t a collectivist hobby, it’s kind of an apples and oranges comparison.
I don’t think ‘genocider’ is an appropriate label for the vast majority of football fans
Knitting circles can get kinda nasty sometimes but in a "Mean Girls" way not a nazi way.
Get in loser, we're stitching scarves
Knitting is a hobby most people either do in private or in very small groups.
If knitting circles had 1000s of people and gathered in giant public stadiums you'd maybe have some Nazi knitting circle gangs.
There are white nationalist soccer hooligan groups that teams refuse to get rid of
That may be true, but it is the most popular and publicized sport/hobby on the planet.
Other hobbies don't even make it into the rankings to get involved in a per capita question. Knitting has, to my knowledge, never been involved in even a singular crime against humanity.
Edit: The only hobby that does is probably gaming.
Need
but for premier league watchers
in eastern europe they throw bananas at Black players and make monkey noises
They do this in Western Europe as well but that doesn’t change the fact this could happen in the other hobby groups discussed if they had the same ubiquity.
Also, those footballers still train and compete with each other. I’ve seen videos of black dnd players chronicling their experiences at DND tables and it’s not pleasant.
The sport itself is fun to play but football watchers suck and you cant move me on that being i have to interact with them all the time
I don’t necessarily disagree with this but other hobbies listed here have extremely problematic fanbases but might perhaps be more transcoded and not have the popularity or collectivist/proletarian appeal to make them potentially dangerous.
You seem to really buy into this idea that football is specifically collectivist which is fascinating. Have fun defending football vehemently then i guess
You can convince me when all the football wankers for my entire life didn’t ostracise and belittle me over a mid sport, exclude all queers and women and be the center beacon for chud hyper masculine bullshit. But you’d need to rewrite reality for that
I don’t think it’s specifically collectivist. I just don’t agree that it’s inherently fascist or anti-minority, and by extension, neither are its fans.
Not trying to minimize your experiences here.
I guess in the same way that you’ve never felt welcome in football, I’ve felt ostracized and belittled in Warhammer or DND spaces despite actually really being interested in the latter.
Are we talking American football or association football?
I was talking about ass foot
I was thinking this too. I think american football has a stronger case of being cis coded, pure american brain.