Celtic Football Club, Irish Ethnicity, and Scottish Society

John Hoberman observes in Sport and Ideology (1984) that "sport has no intrinsic value structure, but it is a ready and flexible vehicle through which ideological associations can be reinforced,"¹ and Eric Hobsbawm asserts that "the identity of a nation of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people."² Implicit in these comments is the belief that sport has the capacity to embody and express identity and community—in its national, cultural, ethnic, religious, social, political, and even economic dimensions—in a way that few other social manifestations can match. Celtic Football Club in Scotland, a professional soccer team based in Glasgow, offers a vivid case study of these observations and assertions, including aspects of the nature of community and supporter associations involved in Scottish football. For countless supporters, Celtic is far more than "merely" a football club.³

As an institution founded by and for the Irish Catholic immigrant diaspora in the West of Scotland, the role of the Celtic Football Club in the cultural and ethnic identity of this part of the Scottish population warrants attention for a number of reasons. As Thomas Devine notes, the Irish community in Scotland has not, until recent years, "been effectively integrated into the wider study of Scottish historical development."⁴ Nevertheless, what has been overlooked in academic research has received extensive attention in the domain of popular commentary, particularly within the Scottish sports media. Sport can echo and reproduce ethnic and national distinctiveness, as well as reflect social tensions and cleavages. While the dominant discourses present the idea of Scotland as "one" people on a range of cultural and identity indicators, the case of Celtic partly demonstrates how that dominance is manufactured as a social reality and norm by discounting, marginalizing, demeaning, or corrupting minority distinctiveness and difference: in effect, by disempowering a minority community.

Among second- and third-generation Irish populations for whom white skin, local accents, and assumed cultural similarities have traditionally been taken to reflect a community effortlessly assimilated to the "white" Scottish (British) majority,⁵ the resolute Irish identity of Celtic and its fans challenges those assumptions. The act of supporting Celtic is involved in the reproduction, maintenance, and expression of Irishness in Scottish society, and thus, important to understanding the processes of identity formation in a multi-ethnic Britain. This occurs within the context of ongoing debates concerning multiculturalism in Britain as a whole, as well as within animated, and occasionally acrimonious, deliberations regarding the contested subject of "sectarianism" in Scottish society.⁶

Much of the research reported on here arose from the Irish 2 Project conducted in the first years of the present decade, a sociological inquiry that looked at questions and issues of identity among people born in Britain of at least one Irish-born parent or grandparent. In addition, a web-based review of all mainstream Scottish newspapers over the period of research since 1990 shows that the discourses and narratives appearing in the print media problematize the Irishness of the Celtic Football Club and its supporters. Several hundred direct and indirect references and comments on Celtic—as well as hundreds in other media outlets—leave no doubt that a particular sort of commentary is dominant, all-encompassing, and recurrent, threading through editorials, letters pages, popular articles, news columns, and radio and television discussions.⁷ In other print media, the commentary on Irishness in Scottish society unambiguously demonstrates the links between sport and cultural and national identities. In a word, discourse that is deeply critical of the club's Irish identity is embedded in Scottish society.

The interview-based research centered on ideas of self, family, community, and nation among persons living in Britain for whom some, most, or all of their family originated in Ireland. Questions on sport and football formed a portion of the overall study, along with examinations of notions relating to history, religion, politics, health, work, family, and social life. Regardless of gender, age, and social class, all respondents in Scotland—with only one exception—reported that Celtic was their favored football club, and further, that this...