Prof. Raymond Boyle
Director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow and Co-Director, of the MSc Media Management programme. He has published widely on sport and the media and authored several books including (with Richard Haynes) Streaming the Formula 1 Rivalry: Sport and the Media in the Platform Age (2024: Peter Lang)
Email: Raymond.Boyle@glasgow.ac.uk
Football has always been the most popular sport in Scotland. Relative to the size of its population, Scotland has one of the highest attendances at football matches anywhere in Europe. For Scotland, a small nation with a rich footballing heritage, football, and the international media profile it can offer is important. International sport offers an arena in which to present a version of yourself to the world. In short, through media representations and discourse it becomes a marker of wider collective and national identities. In international sport, it does not get bigger or more international than the men’s FIFA World Cup.
The fact that the men’s Scottish national football team had failed to qualify for any World Cup since 1998 had become a narrative of national failure and footballing decline. Hence the 2026 World Cup was always going to generate extensive national interest in a football mad country. What emerged from the tournament and Scotland’s fleeting participation in the event was an interesting inversion of the usual academic interpretation of the role of a team sport and its reproduction of national identity.
Received wisdom often notes that teams become conduits for expressions of various forms of national identity formation. A football team represents the imagined community of a nation, resplendent with national and cultural characteristics, be that the unrepentant and petulant nature of the defeated Argentinian team in the final, signifying the Latin myth that emotion is everything (and the more aggressively expressed the better), and that apologizing shows nothing but weakness.
However, the case of Scotland turned this notion on its head. The Scottish football team on the park became the antithesis of the representations of Scottishness that were evident in the stands and in the cities flooded with thousands of Scotland supporters. Here, the self-styled Tartan Army that took over large parts of Boston and Miami displayed a performative Scottishness that was loud, confident, musical, creative, friendly, and inventive in finding ways to make new friends in both cities. They were the opposite of a team on the pitch that was insipid, frail, lacking in creativity, endeavor, or any sort of confidence (except for the last 30 minutes against Morocco!).
If the football team on the pitch represented aspects of Scottishness and national characteristics associated with the country, then this does not bode well for the future of the country. The other Scotland, evident through the fans with their color, kilts and bagpipe-inspired marches to the games and acts of charity and kindness towards their hosts, showed a different Scottishness, one both self-aware and self-referencing aspects of identity markers of a particular version of Scotland.
It was social media that allowed this version of the fans to be widely disseminated (often by mainstream media mobilizing social media clips) and highlighted the friendly fan takeover by 5,000 Scots of the baseball at the Red Sox Fenway Park stadium. Or the generous donations organized by fans for Boston-based charities. Indeed, such was the welcome and the enjoyment of the energy, music, color, humor and capacity to drink that the Scots fans brought to Boston that the mayor of the city quickly arranged to have the city twinned with Glasgow, while the Boston Globe posted a letter of thanks to the fans for the energy they brought to the city during their brief sojourn there.
Football journalist Rory Smith, writing in the UK newspaper the Observer, noted this impact the Scottish fans had on the hearts of the Boston population with their colorful and ubiquitous presence. He reflected on the differing aspects of fan culture in sports and across countries, noting that the World Cup brings something distinctive in this context even within the sport of football. He describes a carnival element to the tournament: while some fans travel hoping to see their team lift the trophy, most come for the more realistic pleasure of having a good time and, as he puts it, “performing their national identity for the world to see.”
As Scotland exited, again having failed to reach the knockout stage of a World Cup, the football team had produced yet another way of losing at a tournament. On the pitch the Scottish media narrative was one of underperformance, and of a team looking out of place at this gathering of the world’s footballing elite. Off the pitch, the fans represented another Scotland, even receiving celebrity endorsement for their time in Boston and highlighting that fan culture, at least as much as sporting performance, is an important marker of ongoing national and collective identity formation.
