Describing his love of Rangers, Dummy provides a cogent narrative of Scottish Protestantism: “In 1646 at Portadown. . . .” O¤ the top of his head, even in his sot-ted state, he spews dozens of important dates.
As Dummy points out, the story of Celtic and
Rangers traces back to the sixeenth century. The Protestant reformation sank its talons into Scotland with greater ferocity than anywhere else in Europe.
When John Knox’s disciples spread north from their bases in Glasgow and Edinburgh, they violently stamped out Catholic strongholds, resorting to ethnic cleansing in a few cases. Their theocracy executed Edinburgh students for casually doubting the existence of the Lord — and purged society of most hints of papistry. By the end of the eighteenth century, Glasgow possessed thirty-nine Catholics and forty-three anti-Catholic societies.
Three hundred years into the reformation, however, Catholics began to reappear in their midst in a major way. With potato blight making life across the Irish Sea untenable, thousands of immigrants escaped to Glasgow seeking relief. They’d been among the poorest, least educated émigrés—the ones who couldn’t a¤ord tickets to Boston and New York. Dazed by their new home and excluded from the rest of society, they had little choice but to stick mostly to themselves. A structure of virtual apartheid evolved. Glasgow’s Catholics attended separate schools. Shut out of Protestant professional firms, Catholics started their own. And in 1888, a Marist monk named Father Walfrid began the community’s own soccer club, Celtic.
Walfrid created Celtic out of fear. By the late nineteenth century, Catholics had good reasons to worry about the influence of Protestant missionaries, whose wealth and soup kitchens allowed them to evangelize in the Catholic strongholds. Leisure time of Catholic youth needed to be filled by Catholic institutions, or else Protestant ones would claim the void. A winning football club, Walfrid also hoped, could puncture the myth of Catholic inferiority. Indeed, Celtic succeeded wildly. Because it played with something to prove, Celtic soon captured four of six league championships.
Protestant Scotland didn’t passively accept Celtic’s success. The soccer press put out the call for a “Scottish” team to retake the championship. Rangers began with no particular religious or political aspirations. But when it racked up wins against Celtic, Protestant Scot-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
land imposed religious and political aspirations upon the club and gradually adopted Rangers as its own.
The Old Firm hadn’t started as an especially violent a¤air, but it quickly became one. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, ethnic hatred in Glasgow ratcheted up. The Harland and Wol¤ Shipbuilding Company, a Protestant firm, relocated from Belfast, bringing with it thousands of Protestant workers and their expertise in despising Catholics. The new yard, however, couldn’t compensate for the woes of Glasgow shipbuilding. In the 1920s, as German and American industry surged, Scotland felt the Great Depression ten years earlier than anyone else. With intense competition for limited jobs, the inevitable religious scapegoat-ing kicked in, and the Church of Scotland began grousing about the Irish menace. That’s when the Old Firm first turned poisonous. The Billy Boys gang of Rangers thugs, along with Celtic equivalents like McGrory Boys and McGlynn Push, fought one another with guns, knives, and no restraint.
The press likes to describe Celtic and Rangers as moral equals. And it’s true that Celtic has used its stadium for open-air celebration of mass; chunks of its management devotedly backed the Irish republican cause; and its directors consisted exclusively of Catholics up through the 1990s. There was, however, a substantial gulf between the practices of the two clubs. Celtic made an early calculation to field non-Catholics in their green and white jerseys; Rangers did no similar thing. Sometime in the vicinity of World War I, Rangers instituted a Protestants-only policy, extending from players to jani-tors. And it became even more stringent than that: The club denied promotions to executives who married Catholics. Rangers allowed itself to become a staging ground for strident Protestant politics. It sent teams to Belfast for benefit matches, with proceeds going to Northern Irish chapters of the Orange Order—the anti-Catholic fraternal organization that seems to exist for no other reason than ominously marching through
Catholic neighborhoods on July twelfth, the anniversary of King Billy’s 1690 triumph at the Battle of Boyne.
Ibrox Stadium became the citywide focal point for Glasgow’s own July twelfth celebrations. One of the club’s oªcial histories describes its ethos bluntly enough: “a Protestant club for Protestant people.”
Considering postwar history—decolonization, civil rights, a global push toward liberalization—Rangers stubbornly held back until late in the program. Perhaps it was appropriate that Rangers tore down its religious wall in 1989, the year of the Velvet Revolution. The club’s new president, David Murray, prodded by his manager Graeme Souness, signed an ex-Celtic Catholic named Maurice Johnston. (Actually, Johnston’s father was a Protestant Rangers fan and he never really practiced Catholicism himself.) Even then, Rangers weren’t pushed into their decision by do-gooders. It was purely a business decision. During the 1980s, enticed by rising television revenues, a new generation of capitalists entered the game to make some real money, a breed far more sophisticated than the amateur rogues and phil-anthropically minded bourgeoisie who’d ruled before.
David Murray, for one, had made his fortune as a steel magnate. Although he hardly preached progressive politics, he understood that sectarianism had become a HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
potential financial drag. The European soccer federation, he feared, would impose costly sanctions on Rangers if it didn’t alter its hiring. He also understood that relying exclusively on Protestants had deprived Rangers of the talent to compete at the highest European levels, where top clubs like Real Madrid and AC
Milan had imported Latin American stars as Catholic as they come.
Rather predictably, the Catholic acquisition
