Robin Jenkins’ 1954 novel The Thistle and the Grail raises potent questions about the power a local football (soccer) team has over its community. In the 1967 short story, Esse Est Percipi (trans: to be is to be perceived) Jorge Luis Borges employs an imagined match to skewer football, the media, and mass culture. Whether it be working-class realism (Peace 2006, 2013) or queer romance (Wilsner 2023), football fiction continues to push against dominant and entitled cultures and challenge entrenched notions around, for example, class, power, gender, and sexuality. Yet, the form’s capacity for the examination and enactment of resistance has undergone very little scrutiny.
The Irvine Welsh novel Dead Men’s Trousers (2018) depicts the immediate aftermath of a Cup Final, when predominantly Royalist and Unionist fans of the second iteration of Scottish establishment club, The Rangers, enter the field of play. The work highlights myriad ways the author leverages layers of political, religious, social, economic, and geographical conflict from the perspectives of a group of working-class football fans. These same characters feature in earlier Welsh novels (1993, 2002, 2012), which are themselves positioned in response to the work of those middle-class writers, such as Nick Hornby (1992) and Simon Kuper (1997-1998) (Redhead 2004, 2007; McGowan, 2019), who are credited with the late twentieth century cultural elevation of football and its writing (Hill, 2006). Within the context of football fiction, this paper examines the pitch invasion in Dead Men’s Trousers and its evocation of countercultural fan attitudes.