Last weekend, thousands of Manchester United fans marched in protest at their club’s ownership. A week earlier, there was a similar protest at Chelsea, and at Tottenham and Fulham there are rumblings of discontent too. In fact, it seems there are problems to be solved at roughly three-quarters of Premier League clubs.
Fans are often at the heart of these stories, but it can be hard to know what to do about them. They are not easy to categorize as political activists, and even if they are, their goals can be difficult to pin down. Often, they are acting out of pure fandom, but other times their actions have real-world political significance. In the Civil Rights Movement, Black folks turned their fandom into a nonviolent weapon, and they brought that same passion to the stands of their teams.
It is a good idea to try to find some sort of common thread or motivation that unites the protesters, and if possible, get them to talk about it in interviews. That can help you capture the tone of the story, and it also gives readers a more complete picture of what was happening on the ground and why it mattered to them.
One thing we have found is that stories that humanize the teenager whose death led to the protest prompted more positive attitudes toward the teenager,5 and they also tended to make people view the protests as more credible. This research, which was part of our Connective Democracy project, is consistent with what we’ve found in our research on other topics such as immigration.