Dr. Richard Haynes
Professor of Media Sport in the School of Communication at University of Stirling. His research focuses on the interplay of sport, the media and popular culture.
Email: r.b.haynes@stir.ac.uk
The Tartan Army, the moniker given to the travelling fan base of Scotland men’s national team since the 1970s, have long been recognised as the gregarious symbolic expression of Scottishness within international football. The informal display of Scotland’s cultural heritage through the wearing of kilts and Glengarry marching hats, are invariably combined with contemporary replica Scotland shirts and are the most visible marker that Scotland fans are in town.
As previous academic research by Richard Giulianotti has explained, the Scottish symbolism of the Tartan Army was forged in contradistinction to the destructive and chauvinistic media profile of English national supporters of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Where English fans had historically been associated with rampaging forms of hooliganism, the Tartan Army incorporated a constructed self-styled sense of Scottish bonhomie with their hosts. Carrying a visibly cheerful disposition which displayed collective warmth and friendliness to whoever crossed their path, the Tartan Army also became synonymous with loud and often eccentric public drunkenness which rarely fuelled violent behaviour. After half a century the Tartan Army is now an incredibly well connected and intergenerational network of supporters from across Scotland and the Scottish diaspora and welcomed wherever they travel.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 was the first time Scotland men’s national team had made the finals in 28 years. Little wonder then that many Scots chose to travel to the USA to both attend Scotland’s group games but also join the camaraderie and carnivalesque identity of the Tartan Army.
Scotland’s first two group games against Haiti on June 13th and Morrocco on June 19th were held at the Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Massachusetts, known as Boston Stadium for the World Cup. With the majority of Scotland fans being located in the city of Boston the Tartan Army had a coherence and visibility for over a week, occupying the hotels, bars and public spaces. STV News labelled it “The friendly takeover of Boston”.
According to a BBC report an estimated 50,000 Scots visited Boston during Scotland’s first two games. This mass influx of tartan-wearing, flag-waving Scots attracted worldwide media attention. The stories in mainstream news outlets in Scotland were framed by historical references to Scotland’s glorious failure at previous World Cups. In five attempts Scotland had failed to qualify for the knock-out phase of the competition.
But the wider stories about the Tartan Army were not directly about the football at all. Themes of travel, visa’s, tickets prices, singing and beer drinking dominated much of both the broadcast news coverage and social media platforms.
Just a small selection of the most prominent news stories provides a sense of how the Tartan Army’s presence in Boston created a vortextual force which took over much of the headlines around the first week of the World Cup.
For example, concerns about the cost of travelling to stadia in the US led to an ingenious thinking by two Tartan Army fans to side-step the profiteering around the World Cup host cities. Davie Hood and Gregor Cowan hired a fleet of 21 American school buses to transport 1,000 Scotland fans from the small town of Providence to the Boston stadium for the games against Haiti and Morrocco. The yellow buses featured prominently across all news outlets and had a special feature on Gary Lineker’s Netflix podcast series The Rest Is Football.
Another lead story came from Scotland fan Craig Ferguson who trekked 3000 miles from Los Angeles to Boston to arrive for the opening game, raising £1m for Scottish Action for Mental Health. This was one of many stories of fans navigating their way to Boston, including those who had initially been denied visa’s to enter the US and discovered alternative routes to Boston.
The city of Boston, especially their publicans, fell in love with the Scots who reputably drank the famous Sam Adam’s brewery taproom out of their Boston Lager. Other reports showcased acts of kindness and kinship between Scots and their hosts, which have left lasting bonds between the city and Scotland. One symbol of this Tartan Army ambassadorial behaviour was the furnishing of various statues in Boston with a traffic cone. A long-standing whimsy in the centre of Glasgow where a cone adorns the head of the Duke of Wellington statue the transgressive act has become an iconic popular cultural tourist attraction. The city of Boston subsequently assimilated traffic cone symbol as their own with an annual Traffic Cone holiday. The Tartan Army also flew over a cone covered in messages to Boston including the reworked chant “No Boston, No Party” to help raise funds for mental health charities in the city.
On the pitch Scotland’s tournament didn’t last long, but the shining light of its Tartan Army ambassadors shone incredibly bright, creating lifelong memories and international bonds. This is surely what the World Cup is about.
