Andy Harrow
Teaching Associate in Journalism, Media and Communications at the University of Strathclyde. He is also a freelance sports journalist who has written for Scottish publications such as The Herald and The Scotsman, as well as regularly contributing to a popular Scottish football podcast.
Dr. Michael Higgins
Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Strathclyde. His past books include Media and Their Publics (Open University Press), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture (Cambridge University Press) and Belligerent Broadcasting (Routledge). His next book is Conflict Culture: Anger in a Mediated World and will be published next year by Routledge.
There is a common narrative progression that unites domestic media coverage of a team’s performance in the World Cup: the build-up and heightened expectation, early frustration at adequate but underwhelming performances at the group stages, overblown triumphalism and optimism following a knock-out victory and coming to form, a period of national outrage and recrimination at another disappointing exit. Scotland’s media has been guilty of stages one and four (most notably around the Argentina World Cup of 1978 and the collective madness around “Ally’s Tartan Army”), but the national football culture of Scotland has limited experience of group stage adequacy and remains excluded altogether from knock-out stage triumphalism.
After a 28-year gap in qualification for the Finals, Scotland’s media agenda takes a quite different role and divergent focus. Scotland rarely reaches the World Cup Finals and carries no expectation of overall victory. Rather, the target set is to qualify from the group stage and proceed to the knockout stage; something the nation has never achieved.
There were many conventional elements to the mediation of the World Cup in Scotland: squad updates, match reports and analyses, praise and recriminations depending upon results, but the focus we will take here is the presentation of the Scottish support. At the risk of pretentiousness, there is a mythology associated with Scotland’s support. Indeed, since Barthes’ first volume on Mythologies it has been clear that sport offers fertile ground for mythmaking.
The visual icon for the beginning of Scotland’s World Cup adventure was provided during the qualifying stage. The opening goal in the final qualifier against Denmark was an overhead kick by Scott McTominay, the aesthetic elegance and rounded symmetry of which inspired its use on fan merchandise and various retail items. The kick even featured on a gable-end mural on a tenement block near Scotland’s national stadium of Hampden, the tenements themselves an icon of urban Scottish identity. Temporarily, McTominay was Scotland’s answer to Vitruvian Man.
However, McTominay’s bicycle kick was to be supplanted as Scotland’s national football symbol by the orange and white traffic cone. The association between these cones and Scotland results from a long-standing tradition of keeping one on the head of the statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow’s Royal Exchange Square. This symbolises the people of the city’s irreverence and prompted artist Banksy to describe it as “his favourite work of art in the UK” (the statue is also situated in front of the Gallery of Modern Art). In the absence of newsworthy exploits on the pitch, attention fell on the coning of statues as a calling card of the Scottish fans, most notably in Boston. While Miami Police were less enamoured of the cones on their city’s statues, Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu signalled her approval by coning a statue of basketball player Bill Russell. The bond was sealed after Scotland’s exit, when a cone, emblazoned with national slogans and imagery, was flown to New England to its own welcoming ceremony.
The projection of good-spirited humour sustained in domestic news coverage, aided by social media videos posted by both gleeful Scots and bemused – but appreciative – Americans. For a week, it became commonplace to see videos of Scotland fans marching on baseball stadiums, whereupon they would bring a gregarious Scottish noise to the home of the Great American Pastime.
Even the traditionally taciturn tabloid newspapers couldn’t ignore the mood. The Scottish Sun’s front page detailed each stage of the Tartan Army’s journey, concentrating on the supporters, and after the team’s defeat and subsequent resignation of manager Steve Clarke, they adapted the line for the affectionate back page headline “No Scotland ..No Clarky”. This was a nod to ‘No Scotland, no party’; a musical trope that would permeate footage of the fans and assist in defining their attitude. The title was used by a self-penned song by Nick Morgan in 2024 but came to be sung by fans to the tune of Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes.
As a claim, this is of course arrant nonsense. More successful footballing nations such as Brazil are capable of letting their hair down without Scottish assistance. But to dispute the line is to miss the point – its preposterous confidence and enthusiasm feed the narrative of partying without a care. Its success is to assert and enact the goodwill and enthusiasm of the Scottish supporters, even though the activities represented as partying – exuberant public drinking – look less attractive if undertaken by less positively connoted supporters. Along with the punning of the headlines, the overall projection is of humour and conviviality as innate Scottish traits.
The Tartan Army’s international reputation stands in stark contrast to the domestic game. A notoriously divisive, ill-tempered rivalry between Glasgow teams Rangers and Celtic, which is prone to darker undercurrents of bigotry and violence, colours the impression of club fans and is bound up in class-based representations of football more broadly. On this basis, a positive fan image is something to take pleasure in and shouldn’t be taken for granted.
