Striking and unexpected portraits of Millwall Football Club

It’s bare­ly three min­utes into an evening mid­week Cham­pi­onship clash at the Den, the south­east Lon­don home of Mill­wall Foot­ball Club. The Lions are fac­ing mid-table side Black­burn, and left back Joe Bryan whips a loop­ing free kick towards the penal­ty area. After a brief back and forth with some head ten­nis, the ball drops neat­ly onto the fore­head of Wes Hard­ing, and the Mill­wall cen­tre back nods it below Blackburn’s sprawl­ing goal­keep­er and into the net. As it cross­es the line, the rough­ly 15,000 home fans jump to their feet and col­lec­tive­ly break into cho­rus: ​“No one likes us, we don’t care/​We are Mill­wall, super Millwall/​We are Mill­wall from the Den.”

The chant is one of the stadium’s most pop­u­lar – a sub­ver­sive wink to the fanbase’s rep­u­ta­tion. A lega­cy of the peak of Eng­lish football’s hooli­gan­ism era, Mill­wall has long been a club asso­ci­at­ed with the most vio­lent aspects of the sport’s fan­dom and cul­ture. Across the 70s and 80s, fight­ing among club ​‘firms’ became syn­ony­mous with Eng­lish foot­ball, and that image was par­tic­u­lar­ly exac­er­bat­ed by its por­tray­al from sec­tions of the media. Mill­wall, led par­tic­u­lar­ly by its F‑Troop firm, became infa­mous for vio­lence, with a BBC Panora­ma episode from 1977 that por­trayed hooli­gan­ism as endem­ic in the club help­ing to cement its image to the British public. 

“The ungen­er­ous view would be they’ve got a chip on their shoul­der,” says Har­ry Law­son, the cre­ator of new film Mill­wall on the Screen. ​“The more gen­er­ous view would be that they think the folk­lore around Mill­wall is fun­ny and they tap into it.”

Cur­rent­ly being shown on loop at the Chemist Gallery in Lewisham, south­east Lon­don, Mill­wall on the Screen is a 52-minute-long part-doc­u­men­tary, part exper­i­men­tal art film explor­ing the wider com­mu­ni­ty of Mill­wall at the heart of London’s his­tor­i­cal­ly work­ing-class, dock­land area.

From the les­bian cou­ple who man­age Millwall’s com­mu­ni­ty food bank, to its pas­sion­ate stew­ards, fam­i­lies, and LGBTQ+ team Mill­wall Romans – the film is a win­dow into the diver­si­ty of the club’s fan­base in 2023, show­cas­ing a dif­fer­ent side to the club than what is usu­al­ly cap­tured in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. A short, silent ver­sion (below) is played on the big screen in the north­east cor­ner of the sta­di­um at half time.

“Mill­wall [fans] weren’t more aggres­sive or [fought] in greater num­bers than clubs like Man­ches­ter Unit­ed, who now have a more sani­tised glob­al image,” Law­son explains of why the club has retained its rep­u­ta­tion. ​”Walk­ing around the Den, it’s not graph­ic designed up to the eye­balls. Mill­wall don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have the bud­get for these con­sid­er­a­tions, and nev­er play­ing Pre­mier League foot­ball, they’ve nev­er had the TV neces­si­ty to clean that up per se.”

Yet that image of vio­lence and thug­gery belies much of the heart­warm­ing acts of com­mu­ni­ty and mutu­al sup­port found around the club. For the film, Law­son spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time in the Mill­wall Com­mu­ni­ty Trust – a build­ing next to the sta­di­um that hous­es a food bank fund­ed by Mill­wall FC. With­in a cost of liv­ing cri­sis that is bit­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly hard in Bermond­sey, as rapid­ly ris­ing rents and gen­tri­fi­ca­tion is cre­at­ing incred­i­bly tough sit­u­a­tions for those on low incomes – the food bank pro­vides food relief, as well as a place for peo­ple to catch up with their friends over a cup of tea. Head­ing up the oper­a­tion are Ellen and Kel­ly, a proud­ly les­bian cou­ple who got mar­ried in the director’s box of the Den.

“Their com­mit­ment to the food bank is an amaz­ing thing to wit­ness,” he says. ​“Homo­pho­bia is a prob­lem in foot­ball grounds, and Mill­wall is one of those clubs that have this rep­u­ta­tion, and they are an open­ly les­bian cou­ple wear­ing Mill­wall track­suits. They wouldn’t think of it in such grandiose terms but in my mind they are rewrit­ing what you’re allowed to look like as a Mill­wall fan.”

The film is the cul­mi­na­tion of near­ly two years of work, and an insight to the deep mean­ing that foot­ball holds to its fans, beyond the 90 min­utes on the pitch. ​“One of my rules going into the shoot was that there wouldn’t be a foot­ball in the film – like a spher­i­cal foot­ball,” Law­son explains of his process. ​“So for a long time I didn’t shoot any game­play. There are three or four instances where you see some­one whack the ball and then it cuts back to the fans, but the fans are the action – it’s about peo­ple watch­ing football.”

One scene in the film focus­es on a pair of six-year-old twins, both don­ning grey flat caps and puffer jack­ets as they cheer on the boys in blue. Their out­fits are rem­i­nis­cent of the hooli­gans of decades past, but the boys aren’t look­ing for a fight. ​“There’s an inter­est­ing thing that hap­pens with the match­day uni­form peo­ple adopt,” Law­son says. ​“So when you see a group of Mill­wall fans on the train, they do dress in a way that mim­ics a lot of the hooli­gan image, so they’ll be wear­ing a flat cap, Stone Island jack­et, a par­tic­u­lar mod­el of Adi­das trainers.

“But for a lot of these boys, it’s the last thing that remains – they’re not meet­ing up at a pub on a Fri­day to dis­cuss where they’re going to be fight­ing, all they’re doing is wear­ing the uni­form of a hooli­gan,” he con­tin­ues. ​“So the two twin boys, that type of image is the strongest for a project like this because it speaks to all these cul­tur­al rem­nants – whether that’s hooli­gan­ism or this dock­ers’ aes­thet­ic – but then dif­fus­es it by being these angel­ic boys. And that’s what the project’s try­ing to do.”

Mill­wall on the Screen by Har­ry Law­son runs at the Chemist Gallery from Novem­ber 3 until Novem­ber 26, 2023

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