Dear fellow Nottingham Forest fans, there's no excuse for poverty chanting
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Nick Miller
The other team aren't the enemy - and supporters should think about that before weaponising poverty in the name of 'banter'
Just seven minutes had elapsed when the songs started, but if you’re familiar with the dynamic, the only surprise was that it took that long.
“Feed the Scousers…” came the song from the Nottingham Forest fans during their game against Everton at the start of December.
At games between Forest and clubs from Merseyside, and to a slightly lesser extent Yorkshire, there is a distinct background tension from the start — the sense that this sort of chant will probably come at some point. It doesn’t necessarily happen in every single game, but you can feel it in the air.
This song, to the tune of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, is particular to this time of year, a festive variation on a bleak theme. In the other 11 months of the year, you might hear “In your Liverpool slums”, or perhaps more frequently “Sign on…”, a riff on the Liverpool anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone, making reference to large numbers of people being unemployed.
You get the idea. It’s a suite of chants designed to mock poverty, using the perception that Merseyside and some areas of Yorkshire are poor, economically deprived, whatever term you want to use, and that this is an acceptable target for ridicule.
It’s been happening for a long time. The rivalry between Forest and Liverpool is rooted in the period during the late 1970s, and to a lesser extent the 1980s, when an upstart Forest team under Brian Clough challenged and sometimes beat the dominant Liverpool, most prominently in the 1977-78 title race, and the first round of the 1978-79 European Cup.
It was fuelled by Clough repeating lies told about the Hillsborough disaster, when 97 Liverpool fans died at the FA Cup semi-final between the two clubs in 1989. And not just in the fog of uncertainty immediately after the tragedy: he wrote as such in a 1994 autobiography and said it again on a TV talk show. He recanted before his death in 2004 but Clough’s reputation on Merseyside remains tainted, and the rivalry between the two sets of fans has an added edge.
Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest and Bob Paisley’s Liverpool before the 1978 League Cup final at Wembley (Allsport/Getty Images)
With Yorkshire clubs, it is driven slightly more by local proximity, but also by other factors. The animus between Forest and Leeds United again stems from the 1970s, and perceptions of Clough: at one club, the man who won the league and the European Cup twice; at the other, the man who stayed for 44 days and was despised by their great manager, Don Revie.
Sheffield United is a bit more recent, a rivalry with its roots in some extremely spicy games in the early 2000s, continued by two clubs of a similar size who have fought for much of the same space over the last 25 years. Speak to most Forest fans, and they will tell you that while Derby County are the main rivals, Sheffield United are not far behind.
And yet, there’s no excuse for this. These rivalries too often manifest themselves in this reductive and damaging way, Forest fans reaching for poverty chanting to express their feelings towards a group of clubs.
It should go without saying that chants from football fans are not always meant literally. For example, most fans presumably do not truly believe, deep in their hearts, that theirs is the greatest team the world has ever seen.
But when a chant puts over a message as toxic as this, whether those who sing it are being literal hardly matters.
It’s important to clarify a few things here.
The first is that this is almost always a minority of fans. Most do not join in, but the minority is usually plenty loud enough to be heard.
The second is that Forest fans are a long way from being the only ones to resort to poverty chanting. When Arsenal visited Everton recently, the “Feed the Scousers…” song made its unwelcome appearance, to which Everton responded by putting an advert for Fans Supporting Foodbanks on the big screen at Hill Dickinson Stadium. Just as it had been at Goodison Park when similar chants from Chelsea fans were heard last season. In the past, they’ve come from fans of many other teams, too.
The third is that it’s not one-sided, and is frequently part of a dispiriting back-and-forth. The sequence usually goes like this: Forest fans sing something related to poverty and the opposition come back with “SCABS! SCABS! SCABS!” Then, depending on how committed the Forest fans are to the first bit, the retort to the retort might be “Arthur Scargill, what a w***er”.
This response is often used as the ‘gotcha’ to anyone who complains about the initial poverty chant — ‘Oh, and I suppose calling us scabs is OK, is it?’. So while it is, at best, a stretch to think of the two things as equivalent, it’s still something worth unpacking.
‘Scabs’ is the insult applied to anyone who crosses the picket line during a strike, or is perceived to break the spirit of the strike in any way. It is specifically weaponised in this case because, during the British miners’ strikes of the 1980s, coal workers from Nottingham carried out their duties in opposition to the National Union of Miners and its leader Scargill, and indeed broke off to form their own organisation, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers.
This break-off was significant for various reasons. Way back in 1926, during a general strike called by the Trades Union Congress, Nottinghamshire miners returned to work against the wishes of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, a forerunner of the NUM. Thus, workers from Nottingham were often treated with a degree of suspicion, that this was a sort of union equivalent of an original sin.
“For older miners, Nottinghamshire’s behaviour was simply the logical extension of an area that gave birth to the strikebreaking company union of 1926,” wrote Harry Paterson in his book Look Back In Anger: The Miners’ Strike in Nottinghamshire.
Forest fans have, in recent years, started to ‘own’ the ‘scabs’ insult: when they beat Sheffield United a couple of seasons ago to take a big step towards avoiding relegation from the Premier League, some sang, “The scabs are staying up.”
Is it likely, though, that those who reach for that insult know about the history and complexities of the British union movement? No, almost certainly not: this is a group of mainly young men, who probably weren’t alive at the time, using a reductive interpretation of historical events as an insult against a group of mainly young men who probably weren’t alive at the time.
Equally, those who weaponise poverty in the name of ‘banter’ probably aren’t across the latest socio-economic numbers. They’re just reaching for the nearest thing available to use as an insult, without any thought about reality, or what impact that insult might have.
There is a school of thought that says pretty much everything should be fair game on the terraces. It’s not an entirely unreasonable argument: we’ve all said, shouted or sung things at a stadium that we wouldn’t in the course of normal life, and those things are protected by the context and atmosphere. Animosity between two sets of fans is one of the biggest contributing elements to a good atmosphere inside a stadium.
But everyone will surely accept there is a limit somewhere; that there are some things that you should not say. You can draw where your own line is, but there is a line. So from that point it becomes a test of what you care about, and whether you think this stuff actually has an impact.
“The thing with poverty is there’s a huge amount of stigma around it,” says Katie Schmuecker, principal policy adviser at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a group that works to “help create a future free from poverty”.
“Whenever we speak to people who have experience of poverty, they talk about the way in which the stigma adds a whole other level to the negative experience. It’s often the first thing that people will talk about: the way in which the stigmatisation adds a sense of shame, harms their sense of self worth and that’s often as bad, sometimes worse, than the actual material experience of not being able to afford life’s essentials.
“The stigma also acts as a sort of glue that holds poverty in place, because it makes it more socially and politically acceptable not to act. Being able to blame an individual for it makes it easier to dismiss, and the stigma plays a big role in that.”
According to figures provided by the JRF, 14.2million people are currently in poverty in the UK. Of those, 4.5million are children. “There’s no part of the country that is free of poverty,” says Schmuecker. “Even in wealthier parts of the country, there are pockets or individual homes that suffer.”
Which brings us to one of the basic ironies of Forest fans weaponising this as an insult. If you take a walk around Nottingham city centre at the moment, you’ll notice that it’s not an area that is exactly thriving. And that sense is borne out by statistics: in April, a report by the Department for Work and Pensions suggested that nearly 57,000 children were living in poverty across Nottinghamshire, and in Hyson Green — a traditionally working-class area just to the north-west of the city centre — almost two-thirds of children there were living in poverty.
The most recent statistics available from the End Child Poverty Coalition say that, in Nottingham as a whole, 38.3 per cent of children were in poverty. That’s only a little below Liverpool, which was at 39.3 per cent.
There’s more: in 2023, Nottingham City Council was effectively declared bankrupt when it could not issue a balanced budget. Things have improved recently, but the basic fact is that the area is not awash with money, and poverty remains a significant issue.
Nadia Whittome is the Labour MP for Nottingham East but, perhaps more importantly for these purposes, a Forest season ticket holder.
“Winding up the opposing team’s fans is a big — and often fun — part of football culture,” she tells The Athletic, “but there are some chants that cross the line into prejudice.
“I find it deeply depressing when I hear poverty chanting at Forest. Has our fanbase forgotten that Nottingham too has high levels of poverty? And that our city has long been looked down on by outsiders because of this fact? We shouldn’t be perpetuating classist jibes, which hurt our community too.”
The other irony is the amount of work Forest do as a club with charities related to poverty. For the last two years they have run a ‘Home For Christmas’ campaign which, among other things, saw several first-team players appear at Himmah’s Salaam Shalom Kitchen, a charity that provides meals for those in need, where they served food and donated warm clothing.
They held a series of events at the City Ground with the aim of helping those in need in the local area, including hosting several families at recent games. And before most of their home games in December, they hosted a food and multibank collection point at the stadium: in 2024, this resulted in 4,259kg of items being donated. You wonder if there are any people who donate to this collection and have also joined in with these chants, and whether they think about that at all.
A club spokesperson told The Athletic that they “strongly condemn” all forms of poverty chanting, and will be reminding supporters of this before the Everton game. There is a lot that Forest can be criticised for but, through actions and words, they could not be much clearer on this.
For the most part, it’s a football club’s fans that can claim the moral high ground. In this instance, it’s the club itself.
The City Ground ahead of the visit of Manchester City over the weekend (Andrew Kearns – CameraSport via Getty Images)
Maybe it’s naive to think that the working-class roots of English football can remain. Maybe it’s also naive to think that there should be some sort of solidarity between opposing sets of fans.
There’s a line from The West Wing, in which a junior Democrat demands to face down the Republicans, saying, “I want to meet the enemy.” A senior colleague responds: “The Republicans aren’t the enemy. They’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.”
It feels like there should be a parallel there for football fans. You can wish sporting misfortune on your rivals, make fun of their rituals, cruelly revel in their failure, mock their players, hate the things they love… but ultimately recognise that, broadly speaking, we’re all in this together.
The other team aren’t the enemy: they’re the opposition. The enemies are the ones that make the life of being a football fan a struggle, who solemnly insist that ticket prices must be high because of market forces or ask “how else will we afford those new players you like watching?”; who take advantage of our fandom and harness it for malevolent means, who ensure that games are broadcast on several different subscription services.
Poverty chanting breaks that basic agreement. Even if, for some reason, you don’t care about how damaging those chants can be to broader society, maybe you’ll care about that.
