You can’t keep politics out of football — but clubs can choose unity over division

Nigel Farage sits in the home dressing room at Ipswich Town, his ranine, amphibian grin fixed smugly in place as he is framed by shirts emblazoned with both his name and his political ambition - the number 10. The hypocrisy is not subtle from a man who has repeatedly insisted that politics should be kept out of football. For many Ipswich Town supporters it feels like a kick in the guts, delivered by their own club.

We know the feeling. In 2016, we felt the same revulsion when former AFC Bournemouth chairman Jeff Mostyn presented shirts to Boris Johnson, Conor Burns and Lord Eden, bearing the number 66 - not to commemorate England’s World Cup triumph, but to mark 50 years of a Conservative business club.

It may not be rational, or healthy, but supporters do not simply follow football clubs - we internalise them. Our self-image becomes bound up in theirs. We live in their identity, and it becomes part of our own. The shirt is not just fabric; it is a symbol. It is not just merchandise; it is meaning, history, identity. To see it used to promote political figures whose values stand in direct opposition to our own feels like a betrayal.

This is, of course, projection - but football cannot be apolitical. It never has been, and it never will be. rednblack.net has always been politically active and always will be. Clubs are woven into the fabric of their communities and will always intersect with politics in its broadest sense. Engagement with civic life is inevitable. They carry influence and, with it, social responsibility. They bring together people who would otherwise have little in common and give them something shared. In a society where so many communal spaces like working mens' clubs and pubs have declined, that matters more than ever - but is precisely why they cannot be used as vehicles for party politics. There is a clear line between civic engagement and party endorsement.

The moment a football club is seen to endorse a politician or a party, it stops being a focal point of unity and becomes a fault line of division. Supporters are no longer unified; they are sorted, implicitly, into sides. Once that line is crossed, the club no longer speaks for itself. It speaks - whether it intends to or not - for the politician it has chosen to platform, inheriting their words, their actions and their values.

Calls to “keep politics out of football” do not solve this. That approach does not remove politics; it removes resistance. When football clubs fail to manage their social and political roles, they create a vacuum - and that vacuum will not remain empty.

The term “far right” is often dismissed as a smear, criticised for being used to shut down debate - and sometimes it is. But it also describes a political tradition and ideology that is well understood: exclusionary nationalism, hostility to minorities, authoritarian instincts, the instrumentation of religion, and a preference for hierarchy over equality.

When a political movement consistently reflects those traits - in its rhetoric, its priorities and the alliances it forms - the term is not a smear, it is a description.

Reform UK sits in that space. This is not opinion; it is observable, empirical political fact.

The party’s supporters object to the label because it carries consequences and historic connotations. Their disagreement does not alter the definition or its applicability. Nor does it change the strategy that so often accompanies it: shift the boundaries of acceptable discourse by amplifying more extreme voices, so that what once sat on the edge begins to look like the centre. The emergence of figures such as Southampton’s Rupert Lowe and splinter groups like his Restore Britain is not a coincidence. It is part of that pattern, designed to make Reform look moderate. They are not.

Farage announced this week that he wants to speak to all clubs. Ostensibly this is about the proposed independent regulator that supporters’ organisations have campaigned for over many years - but it is also because he knows football has huge importance to the political future of the country. He wants a foothold in the sport. Football - with its reach, its emotional pull and its place at the heart of communities - is fertile ground. It is one of the last shared civic spaces left. It cuts across class, race, sex, gender and age, the very fault lines that he and politicians like him want to drive wedges between. It has the capacity to bring people together - or to divide and exclude them.

When clubs lean into their social responsibility, when they actively and visibly welcome people from across their communities, they build connections across these lines of difference that the far right seeks to exploit. They build a shared community identity that resists the forces that seek to fragment it.

When they retreat - when they pretend neutrality is possible, or worse, lend their platforms to political actors - they do the opposite. They fracture that shared space. They hand it over. They make it exclusive. They assist in the division of their communities.

At Ipswich, Mark Ashton issued an apology. He described it as unreserved, but it was more notable for what it avoided than what it addressed. There was no apology for Farage or Reform UK being implicitly endorsed by the football club - only for the upset caused. If he is not willing to apologise for endorsing the party, and if the values represented by Farage and those around him are ones he is comfortable aligning with, then the honest course is to say so. Supporters can then decide, with open eyes, whether they are willing to follow.

Farage aligns himself with Andrew Tate - if you are comfortable with your club being aligned with the manosphere, then be open about it. Explain it to your female supporters and your women’s team. Let your community decide whether they want to continue to support you. If you are happy to align yourself with Reform UK, and if Anne Widdecombe’s advocacy of conversion therapy is something you want to stand for, explain why to your LGBTQIA+ supporters. Stand up and be accountable for those values - but be prepared to resign if your community rejects them.

Football clubs are not just businesses. They are focal points of community, identity and belonging - with an emotional attachment that carries great weight. That gives them huge soft power, but also imposes limits.

They cannot be apolitical, but they must not be party‑political. They need to communicate their values clearly, live them consistently, and be held accountable to them. That responsibility falls on us as supporters as well.

If those who believe in inclusion, in community, in something shared by all of us - not just some of us - step back from that responsibility, others will not hesitate to step forward and reshape those spaces in their own image.