Related articles:
It’s the last game of Clapton Community Football Club’s season and the sun shines on the Old Spotted Dog in Forest Gate, a ground recently improved with a new toilet block and a memorial commemorating the fallen members of the Newham international brigade.
CCFC is the UK’s most popular, explicitly anti-fascist football team. Londoners may also be familiar with Dulwich Hamlet, but they have a squishier, Green-party adjacent reputation. Clapton are proper east London radical left (there’s a shelf of Marxist books in the clubhouse bar).
Clapton’s opponents in this play-off final are Rayleigh Town. Like most clubs in the Eastern Counties Division One South, Rayleigh Town are used to 40-50 spectators, mostly family. There are more than 2,000 fans here, along with a profound sense of kismet that only football can provide. Clapton are community owned and financed. They make their money from the gate (a fiver for adults) and through merch. The team’s “¡No pasarán!” away shirt, launched as a fundraiser, ended up raising more than £400,000 for the club.
Clapton has had a football team for more than a century. The ground dates back to 1888 – the oldest in London – and during the 1898-99 season Clapton pulled a crowd of 12,000 for a tie with Spurs.
In 2012, a group of disaffected football fans calling themselves the “Clapton Ultras” adopted their local team. They came from the punk scene and brought that ethos with them along with left-wing politics, flares and songs. Amid the groundswell of leftism during the Corbyn years, their numbers grew. An international brigade of fans even began coming from Italy and Spain, where the football ultra tradition is strong.
Inevitably perhaps, the fanbase fell out with Clapton’s owner, organised a boycott of the ground, and launched a new fan-owned club. They bought the freehold to the Old Spotted Dog outright in 2020.
On this landmark day, people line all four sides of the pitch drinking Palestinian lager and sucking on rollies. On a scaffold on the far side of the ground, the ultras unveil a large banner depicting the Newham rapper Kano, and start bouncing. They sing continuously, led by a drum, segueing from No Pasarán to Clapton Pond to match-day favourite, the Depeche Mode classic, Just Can’t Get Enough.
In the clubhouse, I bump into Sukhdev Johal, a long-term supporter who tells me he used to know most of the fans by name but there’s been a lot of “tourism” recently. “It’s not a bad thing,” he says, “but I hope that the values go back with them. It’s not what you do on matchday; it’s what you do afterwards.”
For Eva, a civil servant who used to coach the under-16s girls’ team, CCFC is all about inclusion. “If you’re a woman, you can expect not to be harassed, not to hear racist things… someone’s not going to come up to you and ask you to name five players because you’re wearing a home shirt.”
When the game starts, Clapton quickly go 2-0 up. After that, Rayleigh Town claw their way back, first with a penalty, then a low, driven shot at the edge of the box. Half-time. On the way to the bar I chat with a Liverpool season ticket holder who comes here as an antidote to the Premier League. “As soon as I walked in,” he says, “I saw the Catalan flags, the Basque flags… the Palestine flags. You go, right, I’m welcome here. It’s a tonic to modern football.”
The Rayleigh game goes to extra time during which Clapton score twice. Then it’s over and CCFC’s first-ever pitch invasion begins. Johal tearfully embraces one of his comrades. “We’re back where we belong,” he cries.
More In Real Life:
