Last January, I met a man named Vinny McDonald at a pub in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, in the southern suburbs of Manchester, England. We sat outside over pints of Boddington’s. “The cream of Manchester,” Vinny called it, with a toothy grin.

Vinny, who is forty-nine years old, comes from a large, working-class Irish family. His mother supported seven children as a housecleaner and took him to church. Vinny found the communal prayer tedious. It’s difficult to scrounge up meaningful penitence when you’re seven.

When he was eight, one of his brothers took him to his first Manchester United game, at Old Trafford, the team’s vast fortress, nicknamed the Theatre of Dreams. Football in the eighties wasn’t broadcast on television every week. “It was just, ‘Go to the game, go to the game, go to the game,’ ” Vinny recalled. He would emerge into open-air stands, called terraces, with an infantry of fans, decked out, like all good soldiers, in uniform—Adidas, Fred Perry, Lacoste, Fila—to the warring smells of tobacco, beer, and beef pies.

Vinny’s brother kept telling him, “Wait till you hear the noise when they score.” The match finished without a goal. But, in the stadium’s west-side stands, the infamous Stretford End—described by the Observer as “a kind of academy of violence,” not dissimilar to a “cage, formidable and expensive, that is put up by a zoo to contain the animals it needs but slightly fears”—Vinny was left transfixed by the crowd. “It was all swaying,” he remembered.

Football became a measurement of time. Vinny remembers throwing up on the steps of Old Trafford before a match against Dundee, in 1984. He remembers selling unlicensed merchandise, in 1997, before United played Borussia Dortmund, in Germany. The German police would have preferred that he didn’t; they tangled.

Ninety-seven people died as a result of a mass crush, in 1989, on the terraces at Hillsborough Stadium, in the city of Sheffield. In the aftermath, the terraces of English football grounds were torn down and replaced with seats. At Old Trafford, the Stretford End became the seated, more expensive West Stand. United won its first league title in nearly three decades, in 1993, and then kept winning. Television money and commercial ambition turned the club into a premium global-entertainment product.

A leveraged take-over, in 2005, by an American family, the Glazers, raised prices and loaded the club with debt. When Ineos, a multinational conglomerate, took over operations, in 2024, prices rose again. Discounts for children, seniors, and other groups were reduced. Longtime season-ticket holders were relocated to make room for hospitality-ticket holders, who lounged in padded seats and were served treacle-cured duck breast with plum compote.

Vinny, a shutter installer, tried to overlook the price hikes. “There’s still that great community thing,” he said, “your group of friends who go there.” But his friends started to disappear. Not only was attending matches expensive—it was increasingly unpleasant. Barriers separated crowds into escort routes before and after games; supporters could be held in the stadium long after the final whistle, so that rival groups did not clash outside. “You get treated like a criminal before you’ve done anything. You wouldn’t take it in any other walk of life, would you?” Vinny said.

And, really, there’s nastiness and there’s nastiness. Vinny still relished the thought of sitting, just the right amount of scared, in a rival stadium, like Liverpool’s Anfield—“Love the thought of going to Anfield, knowing I could get me head kicked in,” he said. But, as Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, announced recently, “Football belongs to everyone,” and in some ways this is true. Across any fan base, there is an insistence that loyalty to the badge trumps all differences—a beautiful sentiment, until people open their mouths. At Old Trafford, Vinny usually sat in front of a man who launched into the same racist chant every two weeks. “No one was, like, ‘Dickhead,’ ” Vinny said. Eventually, one of Vinny’s friends punched the man. At halftime, the fan came over. “He was, like, ‘We’re all United fans, aren’t we?’ No, you’re just a dick,” Vinny said. “It’s not 1970 anymore. It’s not 1980, even.”

Vinny stopped religiously going to Manchester United games twelve years ago. “They don’t want me in there,” he said. “Fight for what you believe in or walk away. And I pretty much walked away from United.”

A year passed. On Sundays, Vinny would go to the Turn Moss public playing fields, just south of Manchester, where he would watch amateur leagues play. The River Mersey runs by the bottom of the playing fields. One day, Vinny walked along the river with his two-year-old son into Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and then along a tributary, the Chorlton Brook. Between the brook and the river, he arrived at a football pitch.

The ground belonged to a club called West Didsbury and Chorlton A.F.C. Its supporters call it West. The club played in the North West Counties Football League, in the ninth tier of English football. Any football that is played below the top four divisions of English football is considered non-league, and West fit the category handsomely. Not even a hundred people were at the first match that Vinny attended. His toddler crawled along the touchline. “You just sat there,” Vinny said. “You just feel comfortable. And you think, I like this.”

West, founded in 1908, spent much of its first century yo-yoing up and down the standings of amateur leagues on anonymous fields around south Manchester. When the team settled at Brookburn Road, in Chorlton, in 1996, it was one of thousands of non-league clubs playing for almost nobody. Obscenities, the referee’s whistle, and the thud of boots into balls—and sometimes shins—easily carry across these desolate fields.

In 2011, West installed floodlights, for late games. Around the same time, a small group of regulars began gathering in the stands. Admission was five pounds and the beer was decent, so friends brought friends. Some of them were put off by élite football’s deliberate lack of culture—staunch apoliticism is easy to sell to Sky Sports—and others had been priced out. They organized events, offered free tickets, drinks, and, as a selling point, choir recitals. Then the pandemic hit, and an outdoor pint became one of the last vestiges of social life. West’s attendance bloomed.

A fan named Steph Parker said that Brookburn Road was “the biggest beer garden in Chorlton.” The matches were entertaining, in a weird, raw kind of way—slapstick football. During one game, on a dark winter afternoon, a Border terrier ran onto the pitch. Five players and the referee tried to catch it, Steph recalled, while its owner sobbed on the sidelines. The dog was not caught. The game was abandoned.

For John Williams, a sociologist at Leicester University, non-league football has become “a refuge in England for people who are rejecting what’s happening at the top level—who want an intimate connection with the club and disagree with the politics of the Premier League.” Matthew Durrant, a Leeds supporter before he discovered West, was also disenchanted by the direction of the country as a whole. News headlines loudly declared crisis after crisis—in the N.H.S., in the Labour Party, in a Calais refugee camp. The Brexit referendum, in 2016, became a mainstay in public discourse. Supermarket beef included traces of horsemeat.

A team with no fan base, Matt told me, was a chance to “build the club we wanted to support.” West’s politics were never consolidated with a manifesto. “If you could bring a flag, what flag would you bring? That was it,” Steph said. After Britain voted to leave the European Union, Matt found himself on Alibaba, tinkering with E.U. symbols. “Before you know it, you’re getting a run of twenty flags made at your own expense,” Matt said. When he brought one of the homemade flags to an away game, an assistant manager asked what it was. The fans made stickers, which started to cover the walls at Brookburn Road: “Football Without Trans Is Nothing”; “No One Is Illegal”; “Boycott Israeli Apartheid.” These signals seemed to draw more families, more women, and more nonbinary people—people who might not otherwise have gone to a ninth-division football ground in south Manchester.

Steph understood the precarious nature of belonging at the football. She grew up in Glasgow, which is mostly divided between Protestant supporters of Rangers and Catholic supporters of Celtic. Her father was Protestant and her mother was Catholic. Games between the two Scottish giants, known as Old Firm derbies, regularly ended in violence. “We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood,” Rangers fans have been known to trill, along with a resounding “Fuck the Pope.” “Old Firm games meant you weren’t going to be in for a good time,” Steph recalled. “There’d be drama on the streets, drama inside your house.” Her dad and brother would sing Rangers songs around the kitchen at home, and Steph remembered thinking, Mum’s right there.

Support for a local club is not, in itself, reactionary, but Williams, the sociologist, noted an overlap between supporters and cultural-preservation movements across post-industrial Britain. It is “(mainly) men who react with a ‘profound sense of loss’ through their ritualistic and highly symbolic constructions of nostalgic discourses and images,” he wrote, in one study. The workingmen’s clubs have closed, and trade-union branches have declined. The pub is expensive. In many of these towns, the local football club is what’s left—it serves as “the strong invocation of place and identity in the face of wider social change,” Williams wrote. This reaction is often tinged with right-wing politics—in the past year, there has been an increase in anti-immigrant, homophobic, Islamophobic, and antisemitic chants. At West, the fans veered to the left.

One of West’s ardent supporters, Con Lunn, grew up in an old mining town outside of Sheffield as a Sheffield United fan. His match days at the team’s ground, Bramall Lane, follow a familiar pattern: pre-match pint, standard songs, ninety minutes of anger, and then a slow snake back to the train.

In 2014, Con moved to Manchester. He worked night shifts in security at a drugstore in the city center. He stopped sleeping. He lived in a basement flat that completely flooded one evening. On Friday nights, he clocked in; on Saturday mornings, he clocked out and took the train to Bramall Lane. By the middle of 2019, he was waiting for a sunny day to take his life.

“It’s Manchester,” he told me, and snorted. “There aren’t many of those.”

A roommate brought Con to West. When I first met him, during a dreary loss to Stockport in frigid winds, he was more preoccupied with a KitKat Chunky White chocolate than with the result. “I’m not going to start getting wound up because the center-back had the shits the night before and isn’t performing particularly well,” he said. “We’re playing someone on Wednesday—I’ll be there.”

“I need to feel like I belong somewhere,” he said.

West isn’t alone in providing this refuge. Just north of Manchester, the former mill town of Bury was hit hard by deindustrialization, then faced additional struggles under the austerity movement of the twenty-tens. Bury was left with an open-air market, famous for its black-pudding stalls, and a football team, Bury F.C. The team was part of the English Football League for a hundred and twenty-five years. In 2019, amid financial trouble, management was given a deadline to sell by the E.F.L. Four hundred supporters gathered at the stadium, Gigg Lane, with brooms, mops, and bin bags, to get the ground ready for their first game of the season. The deadline passed; Bury never played the game, and the team was expelled from the league. Supporters stood outside Gigg Lane as the floodlights were switched off. Bury’s mayor called the closure the final nail in the town’s coffin.

During the next few years, a group of fans formed a supporter-owned club called Bury A.F.C. Another group acquired the old club’s assets, including its name and, eventually, Gigg Lane. In 2023, the two groups voted to merge, allowing the fan-owned club to play, once again, as Bury F.C. at Gigg Lane. (That year, Bury’s market partly shut down.)

In September, 2023, West played Bury at Gigg Lane. It did not go well. A West supporter was slapped in the head while putting up a progressive sticker outside the stadium. A Bury fan mocked a West fan with a “limp wrist” hand gesture. Someone else was called a “Paki.” When the two teams met again, a handful of Bury supporters mocked fans using the disabled facilities.

Similar dynamics have emerged at other away grounds. Vinny judges a place by how many St. George’s Cross flags he sees on the lampposts. The red-on-white flag of England has become something of a symbol for right-wing, anti-immigration politics. The people who get angry at West’s stickers are the same ones scaling the lampposts to plant the flags, Vinny told me. They don’t even go all the way to the top, he lamented—“halfway down the lamppost.”

I first went to a West game on an improbably bright January afternoon. Brookburn Road is off a narrow dirt path in the woods. The pitch often floods after heavy rain; winter fixtures are often cancelled. If games are held, and if people manage to find the ground, they are greeted at the entrance by blue Portaloos.

A low wooden fence goes around the pitch itself, with a top rail just wide enough to support a can of Foster’s. I walked down the long side, then past a red brick clubhouse behind one of the goals, where I waved to Dave Cooper, a former player who became the club secretary, treasurer, and a member of the finance subcommittee; now, on match days, he turns on the heating and hot water, checks the generator fuel, and restocks the toilets. Next to the clubhouse, people were queuing at a purpose-built hut for tea, beer, and Bovril—“Beefy Drink.” I walked up the other long side of the field, until I arrived at the Shed End, behind the other goal.

The Shed End is cobbled together from sheets of cheap corrugated metal and cheap plastic, with a few steps for tiered standing. I stood in the top-right corner of the structure. On the lumpy pitch, players were warming up, the home team wearing black and white.

West was playing Nelson F.C., another ninth-division team, in the F.A. Vase, a cup competition that about six hundred teams participate in. Attendance below the upper tiers of English football has doubled in the past ten years. “It’s amazing,” the football writer and author of “The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer,” David Goldblatt told me. “Not much else is growing in Britain.” Still, most teams at this level draw an average of some two hundred people. At Brookburn Road, there were about eleven hundred attendees.

The Shed was covered in stickers. “It’s the weekend, baby; you know what that means,” one read. “It’s time to drink precisely one beer and call the ref a Tory.” It was joined by a collage of others: “Refugees Welcome,” a picture of Gisèle Pelicot with the words “Merci Beaucoup,” and “I Still Hate Thatcher.” The air smelled of beer and cigarettes.

By kickoff, around two hundred people had gathered in the Shed. They rubbed gloved hands together and unfurled flags. Others gripped plastic cups of golden beer and paper cups of Yorkshire tea. These were the fans known as the Krombacher Ultras, named for the German Pilsner served at the tea hut.

Then the whistle sounded. The Ultras bellowed rewritten lyrics to the Pogues’ “Dirty Old Town”—“Dirty Old Shed.” Fists battered the metal walls in time. A man called Hammo swung a large, tattered flag that bore a smoking skull in a flat cap.

At West, the fans aren’t separated, and there are no cordons. The crowd polices itself. Steph had brought her daughter, Rowan, to a match when she was eight weeks old. “Rowan’s not going to think football is anything but attainable,” Steph said. “It’s not going to seem scary to see a crowd at football games.”

The players feel it, Billy Matthews, a West forward who holds the club record for appearances, told me. “I wouldn’t really give a shit if I won the league with another team,” he said. “It’s like my people—like, the forty, fifty fans that have been there since I started playing there, who I still see every single game.”

The Shed’s songs are not traditional football chants. They had revised the lyrics to “Lord of the Dance,” which was now a song about hummus and celery, an answer to Chorlton-cum-Hardy’s upper-middle-class reputation. They belted out Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” (“You just can’t get me out of the Shed; North West Counties is all I think about.”) At one point, Con initiated a call-and-response: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie? Dead, dead, dead.”

Vinny arrived just after halftime. He had come from Old Trafford, where he had watched Manchester United beat Manchester City. (He may have walked away from Old Trafford, but he doesn’t miss a Manchester Derby.) He’d started at the pub around 8 A.M., then walked to the stadium. When he dropped his rucksack to the ground, it clinked with cans of Foster’s.

Weeks earlier, Vinny had told me to look out for what happens when West scores. In the seventy-second minute, West went 1–0 up, with a free kick. People in the Shed jumped up, or at one another. They flung their cups into the air, because this sort of celebration needed both hands and all ten fingers. Under a golden arch of frothing German Pilsner, men and women and children scrambled to find a balance that they had happily lost.

“Football to me is a religion, in the sense that it’s something you go and do,” Con told me. “You get up on a certain day, you put on the right garb, you go to the right place, you sing the right chants. You expel the right frustrations or adorations, surrounded by a group of people who believe the same thing as you, for a communal sense of belonging.”

But the crowd was growing. The previous year, eighteen hundred people had showed up for West’s Boxing Day match. “It’s getting closer to the stuff you got away from,” Vinny said. West had the potential for promotion to a better league. Matt was unsure if he wanted it. “It’s a dream and a nightmare,” he said. Con called West “an unshaken temple in just a mess. Everything’s a mess now, and West isn’t.”

The game ticked by. The Shed sang one of its favorite songs, to the tune of Pulp’s “Disco 2000”: “Let’s all meet up when the crowd’s two thousand; won’t it be strange when we’re all getting old?”

West won, 1–0. Vinny and I left the Shed. His rucksack was no longer clinking with cans, and we stumbled toward the clubhouse. He was grinning. “When you look back in time, you don’t really get that many where you go, ‘That was a good weekend,’ ” he said. “And that’s just football. That’s what football does. Football should be that.”

By the time Vinny went to meet up with other fans at the pub, it was pitch-black. “I could stand there when there’s no game, just with them people,” he had told me, “and look into an open space with no one playing football and just have a great time.” ♦