How a Small-Time Soccer Team Draws a Crowd: With Its ActivismThe Dublin club Bohemians has made support for social causes a crucial part of its identity. Critics say the hipsters have taken over, but the approach has attracted fans around the world.Soccer fans cheer and pump their fists in front of a mural reading “Love Football, Hate Racism.”Rory Smith
By Rory Smith
Reporting from Dublin
March 2, 2024
In the back room of the threadbare offices of the Irish soccer team Bohemians, the printer clunks and chugs and whirs incessantly, spitting out a cascade of shipping labels. Some of the addresses bear the names of nearby Dublin streets. Others are from farther afield: across Ireland, across the Irish Sea, across the Atlantic.
Each label will be affixed to a package containing a Bohemians jersey. And these days, the club sells a lot of jerseys.
The appeal is not rooted in any of the traditional drivers of soccer’s merchandise market: success, glamour, a beloved star player. Daniel Lambert, the club’s chief operating officer, loves both Bohemians and the League of Ireland, the competition in which it plays, but he is under no illusions about the reality of either. “We’re a small team in a poor league,” he said.
Instead, fans are drawn to Bohemians by the jerseys themselves; or, rather, what the jerseys say, both about the team and the customer.
Some recent editions have drawn on the cultural iconography of Dublin: the Poolbeg cooling towers; the pattern from the city’s bus seats; the face of Phil Lynott, former frontman of the band Thin Lizzy. Others send a more explicit message: One of this season’s efforts has been designed in the colors of the Palestinian flag. A couple of years ago, another bore the slogan “Refugees Welcome.”
In a studiously apolitical sport, where most teams avoid staking out positions except on the safest of ground — and at a time when Ireland is trying to douse the sparks of a flickering culture war — that makes Bohemians an enthusiastic, unabashed outlier: a rare example of a soccer club willing to wear its values on its sleeve, its torso and any other surface it can find.
A woman stands next to a wall mural wearing a white soccer jersey with the message "Refugees Welcome" across the front. A painting of the Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott decorates the brick wall of a pub in Dublin. At Dalymount Park, Bohemians’ tumbledown home, the corner flags bear the rainbow colors of the Pride movement. Fans walk the concourses in scarves bearing both the club crest and the Palestinian colors. Corrugated iron walls are decorated with images of Che Guevara and the Venezuelan flag.
Behind one section, home to the most boisterous of the club’s supporters, a fist rises against a red-and-black background. “Love football, hate racism,” it reads.
It has been placed there quite deliberately. Bohemians might lean, unapologetically, to the left, but the club has been more than willing to harness distinctly capitalist marketing strategies to amplify its reach. “The politics are absolutely sincere,” Dion Fanning, a writer, author and co-host of the podcast Free State, said. “But the way they do it is very clever.”
Much of that can be attributed to Mr. Lambert’s background in music. He thinks, essentially and habitually, like a promoter. “It’s in that section that younger fans are taking selfies and uploading them to Instagram,” Mr. Lambert said. “This way they have that message in there, too.”
It is hard to argue that the approach is not working. Bohemians’ appeal now stretches far beyond its traditional base in the north Dublin suburb of Phibsborough. It has captured the hearts and minds of a congregation of fans across the world, diffused by geography but united — in Mr. Lambert’s eyes — by common priorities.
Bohemians attracts fans, he said, who are “socially conscious, concerned about what has happened to the game, uncomfortable with state actors being in charge of these precious things that belong to the working class.”
There are enough of them that Bohemians now stands as a remarkable commercial success story. A little more than a decade ago, the club stood on the verge of a first-ever relegation from the top tier of Irish soccer and the brink of financial oblivion. Now, it is a picture of health. In 2015, the club had only 530 members. That figure now stands at 3,000. “With a waiting list,” Mr. Lambert noted.
There are 10 teams in the League of Ireland, yet Bohemians accounts for a quarter of the league’s commercial revenue. The club’s merchandise sales alone have soared by 2,000 percent in a decade. The orders for jerseys that pour in every day are not just for the newest versions, either; old editions continue to sell well, something Mr. Lambert attributes to the fact that they are not ephemeral fashion items. “They tell a story,” he said.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/world/europe/ireland-bohemians-soccer-dublin.html
