Desmond Morris was 45 when he went to his first ever football match – a club game in Malta, where he lived at the time. He had no interest in football, but had been pestered into it by his young son. For the elder Morris, it was an awesome experience. Fighting between rival fans caused the match to be abandoned before half-time. Most people would have been put off for life, but Morris – the author of the bestselling books Manwatching and The Naked Ape – was captivated. What had caused people to behave so passionately over something as meaningless as a football game?
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On his return to England in 1977, Morris became a director of Oxford United FC so he could closely observe the culture of football – the players, directors and, above all, the fans. Four years later, he published his conclusions in The Soccer Tribe, which argued that football is essentially tribal. Each club is a tribe, with territory, elders, doctors, heroes, foot soldiers, modes of dress, allies and mortal enemies.
Morris saw this as a modern expression of a deep-rooted evolutionary instinct. For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in small nomadic bands of mostly related individuals in frequent conflict – and occasional alliance – with neighbours over scarce resources. Tribes made up of individuals prepared to fight for a common good had a competitive edge over those that weren’t, so tribalism was selected for by evolution. We are one species, but we instinctively and effortlessly identify with smaller groups.
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Tribalism and the hostility it engenders are frighteningly easy to induce. More than 60 years ago, Muzafer Sharif at the University of Oklahoma took 22 adolescent boys to Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. The trip had all the trappings of a traditional summer camp, but in truth . Sharif had divided the boys into two groups, each unaware of the other’s existence. They were given cooperative tasks to perform, and quickly bonded, developing hierarchies and cultural norms. Then, towards the end of the week, the experimenters engineered a fleeting encounter between the groups. Hostility flared, despite the boys having been chosen for their similarities. Soon the camp descended into a sort of tribal warfare, with derogatory insults, land grabs, nocturnal raids, flag burning and, eventually, a mass brawl. Hostilities only ended when the experimenters introduced a common enemy in the form of fictitious vandals.
Since then, numerous experiments have revealed how the flimsiest and most transient badges of cultural identity can trigger people to divide themselves into “us” and “them” – even the colour of randomly assigned T-shirts can do it.
Tribalism can be a useful motivating force in the modern world: rivalry between scientific teams working on the same problem, for example. It also underpins some deeply unedifying behaviours including racism, xenophobia and homophobia. But there’s hope that we can reduce these negative repercussions. Our saving grace is that the boundaries between “us” and “them” are fluid. Fans of rival football clubs can forge an alliance as supporters of the national team. If we can extend our definition of the tribe in football, why not in other, more meaningful, areas of life?
This article appeared in print under the headline “Tribalism”
