The lazy stereotype of the drunken Scotland fan is doing harm in a country with a massive drinking problem already.
It’s a bank holiday in Scotland today because football. Cue the inevitable “they’ll need a day to recover from their hangovers”.
Football attendances in Scotland are the highest number in Europe per capita; it is integrated into the whole country’s life. It is a language most people speak. If England won the World Cup perhaps there’d be a bank holiday, but never one just for being there.
The prevalence of football here never ceases to amaze. Take Fife for example. It’s a relatively small area at just 512 square miles. It’s where St. Andrews is at the furthest point. Yet this region has 45 to 50 amateur clubs competing in various local and national competitions and cups along with four league sides.
There is football at every turn. Where I now live in Angus there are four league clubs within 15 miles or so: Montrose, Arbroath, Forfar Athletic and Brechin City. These are not big towns, the total population across all four is only about 55,000. So you can see how important and omnipresent football remains in Scotland.
So football does dominate local culture. But what is less known, contrary to the stereotype that Scots themselves sometimes feed, is that not everyone was sh*tfaced on Sunday morning.
The Tartan Army has a history of embracing and owning stereotypes with the Jimmy wigs, bonnets and kilts. So much so that ironically that’s become a stereotype in itself.
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Football and drink are obviously frequent partners but it’s far from the only story about Scotland. Not that you’d know it from those in the media that only feed on the pished Scots cliche. It’s true that binge drinking is more prevalent in Scotland at around 37% of drinkers, compared to 26% in England. But it’s far from everyone.
Broadcasters just want to fill airtime with the lowest common denominator. Similarly, you’d think everyone supports Scotland here but they don’t for a variety of reasons; just ask my Polish neighbours. The same goes for England, I guess. Sometimes it’s presented as if everyone who likes football is a beer-hoovering, Sun-reading thick-necked bloke called Dave from Essex who hates foreigners, thinks Farage’s lies and dishonesty are the truth and also loves a bit of racism, but don’t worry, he doesn’t mean you. So many stories are pushed through this lens.
It’s not that it’s unfair to illustrate the booze culture, because it exists, so much as presenting it as a positive, almost natural default as if nothing else exists, especially through inane vox pops (the most fatuous thing TV ever invented) with cheerful people in bars and pubs singing ‘no Scotland, no party’. Worse still, those pointing out the problems and inaccuracies of this tend to be portrayed as starchy judgemental killjoys who ‘don’t get it’.
Furthermore it’s damaging to those trying to live up to the stereotype trapped in a toxic cultural loop. The risk of a drink-specific death in Scotland is roughly 50% higher than in England. So ploughing this cliched furrow is not without consequences and it really isn’t fun.
I know all about this because I was a previously legendary drinker who loved nothing better than a double shot of vodka in my wine (try it with caution). I’m assured that this wasn’t the reason behind my stroke but I find that hard to believe really. It f***ing crippled me. The cliched cultural stereotype as the Scottish-based booze-hound was both a celebration and an excuse. It kept me recklessly necking the drink every bloody day for over 20 years, a habit first acquired as a refuge from the bleak north-east in the late 1970s.
But far from everyone shared such a habit and not everyone would be distressed to be only offered one glass of wine at someone’s house or didn’t attend Fringe Festival shows with two pints of gin and tonic to better stay less than sober. It creeps up on you and the story the drink tells you is that ‘hey, this is Scotland, home of the drinker; it’s just normal’ but you’re sweating on a hot August night, running to find an off-licence for a bottle of vodka before the next show because an hour without drink is too awful to contemplate. That’s the pernicious way stereotypes work on vulnerable psyches.
It might seem like a fun, harmless short local news item of fans in a pub at 4am having watched the football, especially since Scotland won, but that feeds the demon in the drinker brain and is stored for future use as a defence mechanism.
A bit of nuance is needed. ITV Sport has done a good job on this front so far, so it’s not impossible to present anything other than the usual ‘drink the bar dry’ cliche. It’s come to define the nation but there are plenty of other realities and much else to celebrate, as omnipresent as football undoubtedly is.
Future generations seem to be less enamored of this inheritance, if only because it’s expensive. It does Scotland no favours on reputational, psychological or health grounds. We shouldn’t be enabled by a lazy media playing up to stereotypes who simply damn the consequences until the next news story about drink-related deaths.
