How a small football team draws a crowd: with its activism
In the back room of the worn-out offices of Irish football club Bohemians, the printer rattles, puffs and buzzes incessantly as it spits out a cascade of shipping labels. Some addresses bear the names of nearby streets in Dublin. Others come from further afield: from all over Ireland, from the Irish Sea, from across the Atlantic Ocean.
Each label is applied to a package containing a Bohemians sweater. And nowadays the club sells a lot of jerseys.
The appeal is not rooted in any of the traditional drivers of the football merchandise market: success, glamour, a beloved star player. Daniel Lambert, the club’s Chief Operating Officer, loves both Bohemians and the League of Ireland, the competition in which the club plays, but he is under no illusions about the reality of either. “We’re a small team in a bad league,” he said.
Instead, fans are drawn to Bohemians by the jerseys themselves; or better said: what the jerseys say, both about the team and about the customer.
Some recent editions draw on Dublin’s cultural iconography: the Poolbeg cooling towers; the pattern of the city’s bus seats; the face of Phil Lynott, former frontman of the band Thin Lizzy. Others send a more explicit message: One of this season’s efforts is designed the colors of the Palestinian flag. A few years ago another carried the slogan “Refugees welcome.”
In a scrupulously apolitical sport, where most teams avoid staking out positions except on the safest ground – and at a time when Ireland is trying to extinguish the sparks of a flickering culture war – that makes Bohemians an enthusiastic, unapologetic outlier: a rare example of a football club willing to wear its values on its sleeve, its torso and any other surface it can find.
In Dalymount Park, the dilapidated home of the Bohemians, the corner flags bear the rainbow colors of the Pride movement. Fans walk through the halls wearing scarves with both the club emblem and the Palestinian colors. Corrugated iron walls are decorated with images of Che Guevara and the Venezuelan flag.
Behind a section, home to the club’s most vocal supporters, a fist goes up against a red and black background. “Love football, hate racism,” it says.
It was placed there very deliberately. The Bohemians may lean unapologetically left, but the club is more than willing to deploy decidedly capitalist marketing strategies to expand its reach. “The politics are absolutely sincere,” says Dion Fanning, writer, author and co-host of the Free State podcast, said. “But the way they do it is very smart.”
Much of that can be attributed to Mr. Lambert’s background in music. He essentially and usually thinks like a promoter. “It is in that section that younger fans take selfies and upload them to Instagram,” Mr Lambert said. “This way they have that message there too.”
It’s hard to argue that the approach doesn’t work. Bohemians’ appeal now extends far beyond its traditional base in the north Dublin suburb of Phibsborough. It has captured the hearts and minds of a group of fans around the world, scattered by geography but united — in Mr. Lambert’s eyes — by common priorities.
Bohemians attracts fans, he said, who are “socially conscious, concerned about what happened to the game, and uncomfortable with state actors in charge of these precious things that belong to the working class.”
There are enough of them that Bohemians is now a remarkable commercial success story. Just over a decade ago, the club was on the brink of a first-ever relegation from Irish football’s top flight and the brink of financial oblivion. Now it is an image of health. In 2015 the club had only 530 members. That number now stands at 3,000. “With a waiting list,” Mr. Lambert noted.
There are ten teams in the League of Ireland, but Bohemians account for a quarter of the league’s commercial revenue. The club’s merchandise sales alone have increased by 2,000 percent in ten years. The orders for sweaters that come in every day do not only apply to the latest versions; old editions continue to sell well, something Mr Lambert attributes to the fact that they are not ephemeral fashion items. “They tell a story,” he said.
That story, and the rise of the club that accompanies it, has not always been universally popular. Mr Lambert admitted that some Bohemians fans may have been put off by the club’s activism – on issues as diverse as gay marriage, climate justice and the end of what he calls “inhuman” Ireland. treatment of asylum seekers – and he has noticed a low level of grumbling among supporters of rival teams for some time now.
After all, it’s fair to say that very few football teams have done that a resident poetor organizing rest raves, or employing four staff members to deal with the establishment a climate strategy. “We’ve heard it all: the hipster club, a lot of gimmicks,” Mr. Lambert said. “You hear people say, ‘Why can’t Bohs just be normal?’”
The answer to that, Mr. Lambert said, is simple. Bohemians does not view the positions it takes as inherently political. For the club, these are humanitarian issues, the natural values of a team owned not by a private investor, but by the fans. And expressing it, he and others said, is more urgent than ever as Ireland’s fledgling far-right grows in both strength and size.
“There is something at stake now,” said Mr. Fanning, the podcast host. “A few years ago, when the Bohemians started doing this, you would have said Ireland would never have a far right. Now it’s still several levels below a subculture, but it’s there and it’s going to get bigger.”
That, Mr. Lambert said, makes the decision to commit the club to its beliefs even more important. “The purpose of a club is to be a force for good,” he said. “I think people are often insensitive to a lot of these issues. You can use sport to bring them to people’s attention, to engage in conversation with them, to put pressure on governments to tackle them. Sports has a duty to do that.”
As much as the Bohemians’ activism is rooted in their beliefs, it has also been good for business. Audiences in the League of Ireland have grown in recent years – the exact cause of that phenomenon is hotly debated – but tickets for Bohemians matches are now extremely prized possessions.
Mary Nolan, who has been attending games with her father since childhood, said: “You see more women, more children, more families.”
“There are still a few old guys who complain that none of the newcomers know anything about football, but it’s generally a very welcoming space now,” she added. “Many more people are attracted to politics than are deterred.”
And even fans who may not be naturally inclined to see a football team as the right vehicle for social justice have little reason to complain. There is no wealthy private benefactor writing the checks. There is no generous television deal. Transfer fees for selling players to bigger leagues are unreliable and often meager.
The club’s message and its willingness to take a stand puts Bohemians in a “much stronger position”, as Mr Lambert put it. It helps fund all the work the club does off the field, and helps pay the team that plays on it.
“My father is very liberal by nature,” Ms. Nolan said. “He knows these causes matter. But at the very least he also understands that they help sell a lot of jerseys.”
As long as that remains the case, there seems to be no reason for anyone to object. “When I was a child and a young man, there was no contradiction between loving books and loving football,” Roddy Doyle, the novelist and lifelong Bohemians fan, wrote in an email. “It was all cultural choices we made, our IDs.”
He added: “Bohemians come close to delivering that mix that has always been my idea of culture: a stadium in an area buzzing with history and also a magnet for newness; a team wearing jerseys with Dublin musicians and ‘Refugees Welcome’ printed on their chest; fans singing a song composed by Brendan Behan just before kick-off. Supporting Bohemians is a stew. But football is of vital importance.”
Despite all the causes, activism, growth and commercial success, Mr. Doyle wrote, the best part of being a Bohemians fan for him is the same as always: “Being in the crowd when they score.”