Time for a Super Bowl of Dissent

Today, sports is the jumping off point to something more important, so please read through...

The Super Bowl is unlike any American football game of the season for more than it is the NFL’s championship game. Structurally, the biggest difference between the Bowl and the rest of the season, including the playoffs, is that would-be champs play on a neutral field, so there is no “homefield” or “home crowd” advantage. The way Super Bowl tickets are distributed and sold also shapes the make-up of the crowd.

There are three splits in the distribution of Super Bowl tickets. The first split is between the teams and the NFL. The teams get 75% of the tickets and the NFL front office get the remaining 25%. The second split is between the teams. The biggest share of the team tickets goes to the two franchises playing for the title. Combined they get 35% of the total tickets. The rest of the tickets go to the “coulda-beens.”

The team split seems to mean that 17.5% of the crowd will be super fans backing – this time around – either the Kansas City Chiefs or the Philadelphia Eagles. Not so. There’s the third split, which is how each team distributes the tickets they get. Typically, the team tickets go to team office personnel, sponsors, local businessmen and politicians, and a smallish segment of fans, usually season ticket holders, who get a chance to buy tickets via lottery. It’s the same with the top two teams, except players’ families and friends tend to get a slice.

So, thanks to ticket distribution, we’d assume that at least 17.5% of the Super Bowl crowd would be backing the Chiefs and 17.5% the Eagles. Throw each team a few supporters from the remaining 65% and the Super Bowl crowd breakdown looks like this: Team One 25%, Team Two 25%, Just Here For The Party 50%. Sunday was different. Sunday sounded like 25% Chiefs, 75% Eagles.

As soon as the Chiefs were introduced and ran onto the field, the booing started and grew to a point where it drowned out everything else. When Chief’s fan Taylor Swift was shown on the jumbotrons, the crowd erupted in boo’s and jeers. Throughout the game, the crowd hazed the Chiefs while cheering loudly for the Eagles. At no time was the crowd louder than when Chief’s quarterback Patrick Mahomes fucked up. Errant pass, fumble, interception, or sack, if it happened to Mahomes, the crowd exploded. Like the Eagles defense, the crowd buried the Chiefs.

Now if this happened in Philly, yeah, sure, no big deal. If it happened on any other team’s homefield in front of hometown fans and against the Chiefs, again, no duh. But this was the Super Bowl on a neutral field in front of what was supposed to be a neutral crowd. So why?

The most obvious reasons are these:

The Chiefs are a dynasty. They’ve won a bunch of championships and were looking to make Sunday’s contest three Super Bowl wins in a row, something no team had done before. Because they are a dynasty, plenty of people want to knock them down, and those plenty of people tend to be louder than those who want the dynasty to thrive.

The Eagles were the underdogs. You know the cliché: America loves an underdog. And as much as Americans bandwagon winners, they are suckers for “worthy challengers battling against the odds” and a blah blah blah.

Philly fan. No matter the sport, Philly fans are notoriously passionate about their teams and they show it through hostility towards their teams’ opponents. Philly fans’ rep is such that they’ve been referred to as “battery chuckers,” thanks to some fans’ propensity for throwing D-cell batteries at the rival team’s players’ heads. In what some call the darkest day of Philly fandom (others call it hilarious – guilty!), Philly fans not only boo’d a December appearance by Santa Claus. They pelted him with snowballs. Philly fans are loud, obnoxious, and intense. No matter the number, they will make themselves known.

Because Taylor Swift and her squeeze Travis Kelsy – a Chiefs’ player – backed Kamala Harris for president against Donald Trump and because football fans tend to be more conservative than not, you might assume that MAGA had something to do with the Chiefs reception. Nope. There are some pretty vocal MAGAs among the Chiefs’ players (and their family). That, and Donald Trump was rooting for the Chiefs, either because he always backs a front runner or just hates Philly because the city voted against him three times.

If there was another factor – and I think there was, otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing about the Super Bowl – it was the general attitude of the United States right now.

We are a very frustrated nation with a lot of disgruntlement and hate whirling inside us, fetid feelings fueled by fear and uncertainty. MAGA people are angry because they are always angry and because the destruction of the rest of us isn’t happening fast enough. Some of them are also pissed off because Donald Musk is not what they expected when they voted for Trump. Those who oppose Trump are angry because of Trump and all that comes with him, especially the unexpected cancer known as Elon Musk. The rest of the country is pissed because change isn’t happening immediately, what change is happening isn’t the change they want, prices are still high, their wages still suck, they don’t understand politics or how the system works so “Grrrrrr!”, and/or people around them are pissed off so might as well join in.

Remove the politics and personalities, and the root of the anger is fear of the unknown and the feeling that we must face the unknown alone, something that turns fear into terror. That fear and that terror need a release. And while the release can come in many forms, it often treads towards violence, which in its incipient phase, as far as sports goes, shows up in the kind of crowd behavior we saw on Sunday.

(Note: We don’t know how violent fans were on Sunday. We do not know how many fights between fans were broken up or how many times security were called in to calm things down. It is safe to assume that there were some fireworks, but, unless someone from the NFL or NFL security leaks, we will never know. The NFL works hard to suppress such information.)

I doubt that anyone reading this is unfamiliar with the soccer hooligan. Perhaps you’ve read Bill Buford’s classic book Among the Thugs (if you haven’t you should) or just read about hooligans in the news, either way, you know that soccer outside the United States has a reputation for fan violence, particularly in Europe, specifically in England. For those not in the know, soccer hooligans (or ultras as they are called in Europe) are fans whose loyalty and behavior is so extreme that they form gangs (in the guise of clubs) specifically to fight and terrorize opposing teams’ fans. Hooligans don’t stay put. They travel, sometimes to other countries, to face off with other hooligan or ultra gangs, something that has resulted in some teams’ fans being banned from attending any games not played on their team’s home pitch, prohibited from showing up in other cities, and teams playing matches to empty stadiums. Overkill? Bill Buford will bet you an eyeball that it’s not.

In England, soccer hooliganism started to take off in the 1960s, a period of unrest and uncertainty in England. There was an ebb and flow to the violence until the 1980s, especially after Margaret Thatcher’s policies started taking hold. Forty-some years before Elon Musk showed up in politics, Thatcher attacked the British state with similar intensity as Musk is showing (and the real authority to do so). She stripped England as close to the bone as was possible at the time, sending millions into unemployment and poverty, things that they had to face alone, as one of the first things Thatcher savaged was the social safety net.

Worse for the Brits is that Thatcher also oversaw an increase in the state’s policing powers and did many things to try to suppress citizen involvement and avenues for dissent. The combo of a shittier life, fear of a shittier life, unresponsive and hostile leaders, and state repression led to strikes, mass protests, and even a little bit of armed struggle (as well as a rise in hooliganism).

In 1989, Thatcher subjected Scotland to the Community Charge. The following year she gifted England and Wales the same. The Community Charge is commonly known as the Poll Tax. The tax was a mess. It was meant to replace a council tax, which taxed property and was not popular among conservatives (who tended to own property). The Poll Tax was a head tax, which was levied on adults, specifically adults registered to vote. It was not evenly applied and those with good lawyers and accountants could worm their way out of it. Thus, the working class and poor felt the Poll Tax more than most.

“Fuck that,” people said. While the Labour Party and traditional unions opposed the Poll Tax the fight was taken to the streets by anarchists, squatters, punk rockers, and a ragtag collection of socialists. They started with protests, which were extremely popular and soon drew more than just radicals. The cops responded to the protests with violence, which did nothing more than increase dissent to the point where protesters physically fought back. Eventually, the police violence turned into full scale riots, not in London suburbs or ghettos, but front and central in places like Trafalgar Square (March 31, 1990).

Brits engaged in other acts of refusal like voting but refusing to pay the tax, as well as withholding payment of other taxes. There were work slowdowns and strikes. Petty harassment of politicians who backed the tax and pressure on liberals who were slow to oppose it. There was a huge surge in cultural engagement. Punk, indie, and reggae bands released anti-Poll Tax records. Reggae artists Apache recorded “No Poll Tax.” Sore Throat spent all of 28 seconds declaring “Fuck the Poll Tax.” The Exploited, of all bands, put out the surprisingly smart “Don’t Pay the Poll Tax.” A bunch of punkers got together to do a few “We Are The World” type songs as Punk Aid on a 7” called Smash the Poll Tax. Chumbawamba, Dog Faced Hermans, Thatcher on Acid, and others contributed to a compilation called A Pox Upon The Poll Tax. And then there’s my favorite, The Cannibals’ gloriously snotty “Axe the Tax.” Artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performance artists, actors, and other creative types added to the scrum.

All this activity resulted in more activity. Musicians inspired more musicians to stand up. Artists joined artists and poets joined poets. And they all collaborated with each other as well as with organizers and protesters, which brought more people to the streets, inspired more people to get active, and gave more people the courage and purpose to speak up. (None of this happened instantly or without hard work and sacrifice.)

The sum of all this dissent was that the Conservative Party hit the skids. Soon after the tax was announced, Labour topped the Tories in the polls. Internally, all the blame went to the previously unassailable Margaret Thatcher. In November 1990, after two rounds of voting, Conservative members of Parliament ditched the Iron Lady for John Major. Less than two years later, the Poll Tax was abolished, replaced by a VAT, which was also unpopular, but not seen as a blatant attack on the working class or a way to suppress the vote.

Unfortunately, the Poll Tax protests and riots did not lead to major or systemic changes. Blame for that lies with the Labour Party, who were both incompetent and, like Clinton’s Democrats, fast tracking towards the center. Still people power smashed the tax, and the smashing was accomplished without compromise, moderation, or what centrists call “civility.” To reference my last Circus act, anti-Poll Taxers came to the knife fight with knives, and they won.

We win when we fight back. We win when we organize. But more important, we win when we ditch the screens, get some courage, and stand up for ourselves. As I’ve written before, to win, to have a chance of winning, we must do something, we must act, we must do the hard things. Kick back, put dissent off til it seems safe and comfortable, wait for someone else to save us or for our votes to be effective, and we are doing nothing. Do nothing and I guarantee that we will be buried faster than the Eagles’ defense was manhandled by the Kansas City Chiefs.