There were howls of disbelief when the former captain of Chelsea FC, John Terry, replied “100% yes” to a social media post by Rupert Lowe calling for “foreigners” to be barred from claiming benefits and for the deportation of migrants who can’t support themselves. How could a footballer – in 2026 for goodness sake! – lean to the right on politics? Haven’t we all quietly agreed that footballers are supposed to be cuddly liberals now?

Terry is not alone in occupying football’s political right flank

Ever since the England men’s team of the 2020 Euros was presented as a progressive collective with shin pads, there’s been a tendency to imagine the whole sport drifting gently leftwards. But, just as the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics turned to be a fairytale, Gareth Southgate’s men proved something of a mirage.

Terry is not alone in occupying football’s political right flank. Dennis Wise, his former Chelsea team-mate, agreed with Lowe’s post, upping the stakes with a “200%” comment of agreement. Ex Man City player Joey Barton has breathlessly tried to rebrand himself as an anti-woke crusader who rages against “inclusion quotas”; Rickie Lambert, the former Southampton striker, has slammed “15-minute cities”; and Matt Le Tissier, a fellow Southampton ace, has…well, where to even start?

Elsewhere, former Wolves midfielder Karl Henry has urged people to vote Tory, and Sol Campbell said that although he liked “the mentality of Labour”, he preferred “the policies of the Conservatives”. The Arsenal legend revealed that he considered a bid to be the Tory candidate for Mayor of London in the 2016 election. Frank Lampard, who took his Coventry side to Championship glory this year, has previously said he is a Tory.

Why wouldn’t they be? Ever since big money flooded into the game in the 1990s, like an unexpected inheritance, the game has felt an increasingly conservative sphere. Off the pitch, the sport underwent a process of gentrification that echoed the broader political climate of the time, shaped in part by Margaret Thatcher’s vision of Britain.

The game began to offer mainly working-class young men a superfast route to serious wealth. As these players saw significant chunks of their earnings disappear into the pockets of their agents, is it a huge surprise that many of them began to resent the prospect of an ever-growing chunk going to the taxman?

Resent it some of them did: during the 2015 general election campaign, Henry said the “clear message” from Labour was: “If you do well for yourself, we’ll take it all from you and give it to those who haven’t.” Campbell has also attacked Labour’s plans for what he called “a tax on aspiration” and said most footballers were “probably” Tories.

I interviewed hundreds of footballers during the 1990s and although they were hesitant to talk about politics on the record, once the tape machine was switched off, some of them spoke with unprompted resentment of how much of their pay packet went to the government.

The game’s right-wing streak long predates the Premier League era. Arguably, it dates back to the game’s very roots. As Terry Eagleton wrote: “If every right-wing think tank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice…the solution in each case would be the same: football.” It is not only a distraction but a mechanism: a twice-weekly transfer of wealth flowing, with remarkable efficiency, from the many to the few.

There’s also the tribalism. Football encourages a very clear sense of “us” and “them,” and while it’s mostly harmless – songs, chants, a bit of pantomime hostility – it does train people to divide the world neatly. The opposition are “scum,” even if most fans would admit they don’t really mean it. Still, once you get used to seeing one group as fundamentally ‘other’, it’s not a huge leap to start doing it elsewhere.

On the international stage, football has become an acceptable vestige of nationalism. Margaret Thatcher decried the football hooligans who regularly embarrassed England during the 1980s but those foot soldiers and their chants of “Rule Britannia” were perhaps closer to her philosophy than she might have cared to admit.

Of course, there have been plenty of footballers who don’t lean to the right. Mick McCarthy, a son of a miner, refused to shake Thatcher’s hand before the 1988 Scottish Cup final in Glasgow. Marcus Rashford campaigned for free school meals for underprivileged children, and Gary Lineker famously raged against Britain’s asylum policy under the Tories.

But in the game’s gleaming new billion-pound stadiums, multimillionaires perform before audiences who have paid dearly for admission, and the chant goes up: “Keir Starmer’s a w**ker.” For all the talk of football’s progressive turn, that hints at where the game’s centre of gravity still lies.