Different Class: How Football Stickers Went Ironic

At a glance, the sticker above looks just like one of the football stickers I wrote about last week. The kind that declare loyalty without hesitation, the sort you would expect to find in the toilets of the local Wetherspoons. But look closer:

A LOAD OF WANNABEES, DRIPS AND DIVS… THEY’LL PROBABLY PUT THAT ON A STICKER.

It borrows the shape and swagger of the older language (right down to the St George’s cross), yet the whole thing collapses the instant you focus on it. Self-deprecation has always been football’s favourite form of defence: land the punchline first and maybe the punches never come.

They’re stuck to the same lampposts as last week’s stickers, yet impossible to pin down. Treat them as deadly serious and the joke collapses. Try to explain the humour and it collapses again. Some things can’t survive being examined too closely.

They compare sharply with some of last week’s stickers, in particular the Bradford City Loyal design: Red Hand of Ulster, crown, poppy, and the words No Surrender beneath. It draws on symbols that still carry real charge in actual rivalries and does so without hesitation or apology. Plain speech, the old, unflinching kind, is still possible for the people who stuck it up.

These newer stickers borrow the style but not the tone. The old certainty no longer fits their circumstances, so humour becomes the safest way to signal belonging without saying it outright.

Streatham Rovers was an early sign of the shift. Set up in 2015 as a fictional club, it started as an online joke and quickly spawned its own ultra-style stickers. A toddler with blacked-out eyes stood in for a youth firm. The pose signalled toughness, but the image made the whole thing impossible to take seriously. An imaginary club could still produce convincing ultra stickers, showing how easily the old visual language could be mimicked and how far it had drifted from the conditions that once gave it force.

Clapton CFC, a real club rather than a fictional one, lean into the same strategy but with a different tone. The image of a child smirking in front of a burning house should read as a threat. Instead it becomes something softer, almost playful. The tone never settles. It flickers between familiarity and refusal, using humour to dodge the fixed meanings that once anchored these designs. It looks like a warning but lands more like a wink.

Then there are stickers that make the class element explicit. Fulham supporters take the middle-class stereotype thrown at them and turn it into a badge of pride. The design lifts the old British Rail logo and swaps the destination for Waitrose. The humour acknowledges the gap between the look of working-class football identity and the reality of many who now stand on these terraces. It is not mockery and it is not pretending. It sits in the space between the two.

Other designs push the absurdity even further. Clapton’s Gravy Ultras sticker drops Jack and Vera Duckworth onto the Haçienda dancefloor and treats the mash-up as if it were entirely plausible. It throws two over-familiar northern stereotypes into a scene built on myth and nightlife nostalgia, and the result is knowingly ridiculous. It isn’t trying to look tough and it isn’t chasing authenticity. It mocks the idea that either is still possible.

The most revealing example is the West Didsbury pastiche of Pulp’s Different Class. That record is built on the politics of class tourism, most obviously in Common People; the fantasy of dipping into working-class culture without facing any of its consequences. Whether intentional or not, the image captures the mood of this newer football culture: supporters working out who they are through humour because sincerity feels too exposed.

The most recent example is a Shrewsbury Town sticker that went viral last month. It throws everything into one frame: the Kneecap mask, the progress flag, a ketamine joke, an antifa nod, and even Zack Polanski, who only became leader of the Greens in September. It may be designed to wind up right-wing football fans by stacking every possible trigger at once, and the overload is what makes it funny. But that irony hides something else. You can’t tell if any of the politics are sincere or just gestures. The humour wipes out any sense of conviction.

These stickers cannot carry the directness or certainty that the older ones managed. Everything needs distance, quotation marks, and irony. The references stack up because saying anything plainly has become the hardest move of all.

What they document is not a joke but a mood. A culture where conviction feels risky, sincerity feels exposed, and humour steps in to do the job that loyalty once did.

In that sense, the stickers matter less for what they say about football and more for what they reveal about the people around it. A sign of how many now choose distance over declaration.