Performance of ‘Millwallism’

NO ONE LIKES US, NO ONE LIKES US, NO ONE LIKES US,
WE DON’T CARE
WE ARE MILLWALL, SUPER MILLWALL
WE ARE MILLWALL FROM THE DEN

Millwall FC is a football club in Bermondsey in London Borough of Southwark. The club is known for their large amount of hooligans and incidents with Millwall-supporters are widely covered by the media. Garry Robson, himself a Millwall-supporter, has done ethnographic research on Millwall-hooligans wherein he tries to understand the myth and reality of Millwall fandom in terms of working-class masculinity, violent ‘neo-fascism’ and subculture (Robson 2002).

The Myth of Millwall
Mainstream media have mostly focused on riots, destructions and inappropriate behaviour of Millwall-supporters. Media, according to Paul Rock (1973), derives its characteristics mainly from the sources, contents and contexts of its own productions which he defines as ‘eternal recurrence’. If we apply this principle on Millwall-supporters, the media represents them as boorish, violent thugs and because of eternal recurrence, ‘Millwall had become synonymous with everything that was bad in football and society’ (Robson 2000: 33). This created a myth of Millwall (archetype), what defines the Millwall-supporter as ‘a darkling urban iconography in which danger lurks around every corner; and the association of a legendary toughness and capacity for violence with particular occupational and cultural groupings such as dockers and gangsters‘ (Robson 2002: 23).

Millwall-supporters, therefore, carry a heavy mythological and symbolic burden (Robson 2002: 33). Even though the club and its supporters try to reconstruct the archetype of Millwall in their fanzine ‘The Lion Roars’, Millwall-supporters remain representatives of counter-bourgeois subjectivity and experiences defined as invalid and transgressive of the metropolitan, normative and liberal-individualist British public sphere.

The Millwall- archetype creates feelings of frustration and resistance among Millwall-supporters. This is reflected in the anthem ‘No one likes us’. The archetype of the Millwall-supporter is ‘a complex interplay of culture and representation […] and his reputation always precedes him, and an awareness of this special, iconic status’ (Robson 2002: 35). The public discourse is therefore a central aspect in constructing and performing notions of ‘the self’ and ‘the collective’. Labelling Millwall-supporters as hooligans, without regarding those processes, is a shallow analysis and thus inaccurate.

Millwall embodied
In line with Robson, I understand ‘extreme’ Millwall-supporters as groups of working-class (mostly) men whose expressions, characteristics and practices are performances of specific patterns of culture and feeling. We have to understand those patterns in terms of locality (south-east London), and masculine, working-class backgrounds.

Millwall FC is founded in south-east London which is continuously associated with disreputability and criminality (Robson 2002: 43). Working-class boys grow up with the assumption that they have to represent themselves as tougher, stronger and more masculine than others because they cannot distinguish themselves regarding materiality. The habitus of boys and men, ‘the product of dispositions of both structural conditions in which people find themselves, and their agency, that is manifested in bodily action’ (Besnier 2018: 97-98), involves violence, hate towards the police and bourgeoisie, and crime (Robson 2002: 47). Those ‘masculine’ practices and sentiments structure the social sphere wherein Millwall-supporters both perform (Robson 2002: 59). This makes ‘Millwallism’ a form of class affiliation and also a specific and embodied form of cultural capital. Therefore, I understand the performance of ‘Millwallism’, based on Bettie’s (2014) thoughts, as a dynamic process of intentional practices and repeated practices constructed in social structures.

Furthermore, it is important to recognize the role of the body in the performance of Millwallism. Robson (2002: 70) argues:
‘The body is a primary site of social memory and cultural reproduction. […] First, the dynamics of urban-masculine personality formation and sociality; second, the significant characteristics of their environment/cultural context related to the idea of “community”; and third, the fusion of these into class-specific forms of bodily culture and social consciousness’.
Those elements ‘inscribe social consciousness, meaning and identity in the body itself’ (Robson 2002: 72). These dynamics become part of the performance of ‘Millwallism’ in the public sphere. We can notice this in the way the supporters walk, dress, participate in riots or sing the anthems. The body is thus an important aspect in performing the ‘Millwall identity’.

In conclusion, Millwallism is about the ‘the celebration, maintenance and protection of local culture and character’ (Robson 2002: 157). The performance of Millwallism is based on mutual characteristics regarding south-east London, working-class backgrounds, masculinity and anti-bourgeois segment. This makes Millwall FC a repository of subcultural values and traditions, but also a site of cultural conflict.

References:
– Besnier, N., S. Brownell & T.F. Carter (2018) The Anthropology of Sport- Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics Oakland, University of California Press
– Bettie, J. (2014) Women without Class- Girls, Race, Identity Oakland, University of California Press.
– Robson, G. (2002) No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care- The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom New-York, Berg.