The Business of Violence: Fashioning Hooligan Calling Cards

In the 18th century, the calling card was a symbol of class and access. Copperplate-engraved and elegantly typeset, it served as a small performance of civility, proof that you belonged to a world where reputation was currency. Working-class men did not need such things, and no means to produce them even if they did. Print was expensive, and etiquette was not their language.

Two hundred years later, the photocopier changed that. A machine built for bureaucracy and business became the great equaliser. By the 1980s, they were everywhere — from offices to schools to local newsagents. Anyone could now produce their own mark of identity. Football firms seized this new accessibility and inverted its purpose. Their calling cards weren’t gestures of civility; they were receipts of violence.

Leaving Your Card

The polite exchange of calling cards once signalled refinement. To leave one behind was to mark an introduction, not a confrontation. Sir John Dick’s 1778 engraved card, held in the British Museum, exemplifies this world of privilege, a copperplate composition combining the Pyramid of Cestius and the Sibyl’s Temple, classical ruins chosen to advertise culture and taste. The image was as much about ownership as identity: a gentleman’s education, reproduced in miniature.

This was communication as privilege; deliberate, expensive, and reserved for the few. While the calling card seemingly died out in the early twentieth century, the idea of announcing oneself through print never disappeared. It just waited for cheaper technology to enable a different class to take it up.

Dress to Impress

By the 1980s, the football terrace had become that stage. The T.Y.F. card reads like a warped echo of 18th-century etiquette:

INVITES YOU TO FRENZY SATURDAY — DAY OUT OVER THE FOOTBALLDRESS TO IMPRESS — DON’T FORGET YOUR ATTITUDE

It parodies the formality of a social invitation while promising confrontation. The phrase dress to impress captures how style and violence became intertwined; football firms adopting designer clothing as both armour and uniform. Even the uneven typography feels improvised, as if dashed off between shifts on an office machine. What was once engraved with precision is now reproduced with urgency.

Mocking the Masters: Logos and Power

The Aberdeen Soccer Casuals card takes this further, replacing Lacoste’s crocodile logo with a rough facsimile. The French brand, once the preserve of tennis clubs and yacht decks, becomes a symbol of ownership reclaimed. Below it, the declaration Founders of the Casual Movement in Scotland combines arrogance and irony. The same logo that signified leisure for the wealthy now marks a working-class subculture defined by confrontation.

If Aberdeen reworks Lacoste, Dundee Utility takes aim at Armani. It appropriates the brand’s eagle logo, fusing corporate aspiration with threat. This isn’t forgery; it’s commentary. The imagery of prestige is duplicated, undermined, and turned back on itself. The card looks official, but the imitation is deliberate, a reminder of how easily authority can be manufactured.

Smarter Than the Average Crew

The Cardiff City Soul Crew card feels like a catalogue and a taunt. Printed in black ink on grey card, it lists Giorgio Armani, Moschino, Ralph Lauren, Stone Island, Valentino, Gianni Versace — a roll call of luxury brands rendered through smudged toner. Beneath it, the slogan Smarter Than the Average Crew works on several levels: a boast of fashion literacy, a flash of irony, and a class critique disguised as bravado.

It’s a statement of taste in the language of the street, where knowledge of cut and label replaces inherited refinement. The cheapness of the print only heightens the message; luxury without legitimacy, aspiration through subversion.

The Joke That Hurts

Across all these cards, humour is central, not as a release from violence but as its extension. It relies on cultural fluency: an awareness of advertising tropes, brand hierarchies, and the tone of government authority. Their creators were fluent in the visual language of neoliberal Britain, where business, aspiration, and spectacle were indistinguishable.

Objects of Defiance

It’s easy to see these cards merely as crude artefacts of violence. However, as we have seen here, they’re deeply informed visual statements, merging class critique with design literacy. They reveal a working-class culture that had absorbed the aesthetics of neoliberal power — corporate logos, luxury fashion, and media spectacle — and weaponised those aesthetics through parody.

The original calling cards required fine printing, elegance, and leisure time. These required none of that. Their power came from accessibility: the ability to reproduce authority with a cheap photocopy. The shift from engraved copperplate to office toner marks more than a technological change — it’s a social reversal.

Each card is a small act of sabotage, exposing the pretence of status, branding, and civility. They are, in their own way, the perfect artefacts of Thatcher’s Britain: born from bureaucracy, styled in luxury, delivered through violence.

All cards are reproduced from Hoolicards, an archive of 1980s–1990s football firm calling cards.