Introduction

Racism, racialization and antiracism within football have been extensively studied (for example, Back et al, 2001; Garland and Rowe, 2001, 2014; Burdsey, 2006, 2011, 2014, 2020; Cleland, 2014; Cleland and Cashmore, 2014, 2016; Bradbury et al, 2018; Hylton, 2018; Lawrence and Davis, 2019; Penfold and Cleland, 2022). The focus of that research has tended to be on footballers, coaches and supporters of colour. Antisemitism in football has received comparatively less scholarly attention, with some emerging exceptions (Poulton, 2016, 2020, forthcoming; Poulton and Durell, 2016; Brunssen and Schüler-Springorum, 2021; Seijbel, Sterkenburg and Oonk, 2022; Seijbel, van Sterkenburg and Spaaij, 2022). Among the reasons for this scholarly neglect might be the relatively low number of Jewish professional footballers – in England, about a dozen have played in the Premier League since its creation in 1992 – but also debates pertaining to a hierarchy of racisms and whether antisemitic hate crime should be treated as a distinct form of racism (Kushner, 2013; Feldman, 2016; Hirsh, 2018; Rich, 2018; Gidley et al, 2020; Gould, 2020; Baddiel, 2021a).

Yet antisemitism, as this chapter evidences, is common throughout football, with some high-profile examples in England (Poulton, 2020) – and elsewhere (Brunssen and Schüler-Springorum, 2021; Poulton, forthcoming) – both on and off the pitch in recent years. This has included several antisemitic incidents at the top institutional and occupational levels of English men’s professional football – involving officials, club owners, coaches and players (see Poulton, 2016) – and most frequently within football fan culture, which is the main focus of this chapter. There are also regular incidents in grassroots football, with reports of seven-year-old Jewish footballers being hissed at by opponents aiming to replicate the noise of the Nazi gas chambers (Jewish News Reporter, 2022).

This chapter provides an overview of antisemitism within the context of English football. It first discusses problems related to contested definitions of the phenomenon and then covers the scale of ‘religious’ hate crime in England and Wales. Next, the nature of antisemitism in England is outlined before examining its prevalence and presence within English football fan culture. Finally, the chapter turns its focus to a Premier League club, Tottenham Hotspur (nicknamed Spurs), whose supporters are the target of the majority of antisemitism within English football. This includes a discussion of the different uses and meanings of the controversial term ‘Yid’.