Gooooaaal!

Cheering for your home team evidently solidifies your national identity if you're Scottish, while English tend to see their fan-dom as an individual preference, finds scientist Jackie Abell at Lancaster University.

This sounds like a study my 12 year old nephew would come up with. From the paper..

Support for the England football team is
not necessarily an expression of collective social identity and pride.

Evidently, the English perceived their football fan-dom as an outcrop of the "progressive value of individualism" as opposed to the Scottish "regressive value of nationalism." The intellectuals versus the collectivist bruts..that's no new stereotype.

For the Scottish,

..support for the national football team is regarded as a legitimate expression of national identity for both [themselves] and English folk.

So, maybe this is like the difference between labeling yourself as English or Scottish (as if you were made that way) and actually thinking you are a member of a functional group (as the Scottish football fans seem to)?

The burning question in my mind is..How the hell can you know this stuff? Surely there must be hard science behind such brazen conclusions drawn without reservation.

I was surprised to find a wealth of past studies on football fans and inter-group relations. There is actually a ton of theory behind this stuff. From the 2010 paper..

In their study of Scottish and English people, Condor and Abell (2006) illustrate that whilst Scots typically assert their membership status and psychological attachment to a collective group, the English do not. [For the English], national identity can be understood as a sense of being rather than psychological attachment to a social group.

Is the 'sense of being' just--hey I live in England/Scotland, so of course I'm English/Scottish. And 'psychological attachment' would be a mobilizing, pride-driven sort-of attitude? The definitions are getting squishy at this point.

The 2010 study surveyed about a hundred Scottish and English subjects. Great care was taken to pick a random selection of urban/rural, diversified age/political/socio economic/gender groups. Subjects were asked to speak freely, sometimes for hours in response to general questions about national and local identity.

But, wait--is 200 people a large enough group to draw psychological conclusions? A ton of societal and circumstantial factors could contribute to a person's response. Did the Daily Mail feature an embarrassing hooligan incident the week before (negatively skewing English desire to claim national identity)? Did 60 out of 100 people just randomly happen to have a bad day or belong to an exclusive religious affiliation?

Scottish respondent--"even when you’re knocked out with the football you would rather support your worst enemy than cheer on England to win and I don’t know why."

English respondent--"Q:Do you feel any loyalty to your team?""A: For what?""Q: For your country""A: that’s just my way of life, it’s just my way of thinking. they’ve never done anything for me."

It seems like this study is not really about football, it's just using the subject as another example of extreme Scottish nationalism, which is not news to anyone. The study says..

We have considered how people invoke national football support as a boundary-drawing exercise to distinguish between the Scottish and the English.

Ok. Done. Now on to the next study--how consumption of haggus perseveres despite increasing awareness of its grossness.

Just kidding.

Jackie Abell (2010). ‘They seem to think “We're better than you”’: Framing football support as a matter of ‘national identity’ in Scotland and England British Journal of Social Psychology