FOOTBALL AND FOOTFALL: the Conflicting Right to the City by Wattana Songpetchmongkol

Everyone knows that for the respective communities who support the two big football teams in Glasgow, there is more than just football at stake. The issue is, of course, avoided in polite society, but down on the street it’s not so easy to pretend it doesn’t exist. This is a new Glaswegian’s view from Wattana Songpetchmongkol.

Two things recently happened in Glasgow that nobody has connected the dots on yet.

In May 2026, around 3,000 Celtic supporters gathered in the Trongate to celebrate their title win. Police officers were seriously injured by missiles and bottles, and Police Scotland called for “urgent discussions” with the club, football authorities, and Glasgow City Council. The week before that, four men were jailed for disorder on Argyle Street ahead of December’s League Cup Final, where rival fans in balaclavas walked through busy shopping streets toward each other while Christmas shoppers and children ran for cover.

Police Scotland’s statement afterwards contained a telling phrase: “once again,” the force said, “[it] had been left holding the responsibility.”

Once again, that is the problem.

Glasgow keeps reaching for the same answer, more officers, more arrests, more urgent meetings, and the streets keep failing in the same way. Nobody is asking what a spatial answer would look like.

This is not, fundamentally, a policing failure; it is a planning failure. And until Glasgow’s planners and politicians are willing to say that plainly, we will keep having this conversation after every Old Firm match, every title win, every moment when football’s gravitational pull drags tens of thousands of people into streets that were never designed to hold them.

The Trongate is a pedestrianised street, so is Argyle Street. Both were redesigned, at considerable public expense, to give the city back to the people who walk it. That is the stated logic of pedestrianisation: that the street belongs to the pedestrian, that movement through the city is a fundamental civic right, available to all, equally.

Except it is not equal; it never has been.

The Right to the City, as Henri Lefebvre argued more than half a century ago, is not simply the right to be present in urban space. It is the right to shape it, to use it, to inhabit it on your own terms. In Glasgow, that right is not distributed evenly. On match days and title nights, the city’s pedestrianised heart is effectively ceded to one form of collective behaviour. The pedestrian who simply wants to cross the Trongate to get home, the family with a pram, the elderly man heading to the bus, the delivery worker on a deadline, they all become secondary users of a space that is, in principle, theirs. No one passed a law to say so. No sign went up. But the message is understood. Tonight, this street belongs to football.

This is not an argument against football celebration; it is an argument about design, governance, and honesty. Cities that host large scale gatherings, planned or spontaneous, have a responsibility to plan for them. Glasgow has the geography for it. Celtic Park and Ibrox between them seat around 111,000 people^[i], both set within residential neighbourhoods with limited civic space nearby. When a team wins, supporters do not stay at the stadium. They migrate, along well-worn routes, toward the city centre, and they fill the pedestrianised streets because those are the most hospitable spaces the city offers. Glasgow designed streets that feel good to be in, then seems surprised when people want to be in them.

Contrarily, some cities have taken a more deliberate approach to this problem. For example, Geneva’s fan zone for Euro 2008 is often cited as a rare success in balancing tight security with a genuinely open, celebratory atmosphere, precisely because it was designed in advance as civic infrastructure rather than bolted on as crowd control. Similarly, the current build out of fan zones for the 2026 World Cup follows a similar logic. Host cities are choosing parks and plazas with capacity, sightlines, transport links, and family friendly layouts already in mind, rather than discovering after the fact that a shopping street cannot hold the crowd it has been asked to absorb. None of this is a perfect template for an unplanned title celebration, Glasgow cannot fan zone its way out of spontaneity, but it shows what the alternative to pure reaction looks like. Glasgow, with some exceptions, responds with additional officers and a statement of exasperation. The infrastructure of celebration is left entirely informal, which means it falls apart in exactly the ways informal infrastructure always does: unevenly, unpredictably, and usually at cost to someone else.

Here, it is worth pausing on what would be lost, and what would be gained, by taking this more seriously. Supporters would rightly resist anything that felt like sanitisation. Street celebration is not a logistics problem to be solved out of existence; it is part of what football means in this city, tied up with identity, memory, and a sense of collective ownership that no fan park screen can fully replicate. A planning response does not have to mean replacing the Trongate with a fenced enclosure on the outskirts of town. It can mean something closer to what transport planners already do for marathons or parades: pre-agreed routes, temporary barriers that guide flow without blocking it, toilets and stewarding paid for in advance rather than improvised afterwards, and an honest civic acknowledgement that this will happen again soon. The goal is not to police the joy out of the street; it is to stop treating that joy as an emergency every single time it arrives on schedule.

These title celebrations are not accidental. They are timed and known months in advance; someone will win the match when there is a game.

There is also something worth saying about who is blamed when it falls apart. In the aftermath of both the Trongate and Argyle Street incidents, the conversation moved quickly toward supporter behaviour, policing capacity, and alcohol. These are not irrelevant. But they are downstream factors. The upstream question, the one that rarely gets asked, is why Glasgow has not developed a serious civic framework for managing the space football occupies in the life of this city. It is one of the most football obsessed cities in Europe, with two major stadiums, a fixture list that places charged encounters at regular intervals across the calendar, and a tradition of street celebration that predates pedestrianisation by decades. None of this is new. None of this is unpredictable.

The street, in planning terms, is a social condenser. It concentrates life, activity, and conflict. That is not a failure of the street; it is its function. The question is whether that condensation is managed with any intelligence or simply allowed to resolve itself through friction.

Might it be said that Glasgow has historically been better at building streets than at governing them?

The right to the city is, in practice, always contested. Space is claimed and reclaimed, formally and informally, by different groups with different levels of power and visibility. Football culture in Glasgow is visible, loud, and deeply embedded. It has always found its way into the street. The question for planners, councillors, and perhaps the clubs themselves is whether that presence is treated as a feature to be designed for, or an inconvenience to be policed away after the fact.

Police Scotland cannot answer that question; it is not their remit. The city has to answer it. Three thousand people gathered on the Trongate to celebrate, and once again, the only thing waiting for them was more officers. Glasgow has been quiet on this for a long time.

What about you? How would you answer this?

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^[i] Stadium capacity figures (Celtic Park: 60,411; Ibrox: 50,817; combined: 111,228) are taken from Football Ground Map’s current capacity listings. Figures vary slightly by source (Celtic Park is sometimes cited at 60,355; Ibrox between 50,817 and 51,700), reflecting periodic stand redevelopments and minor recounts rather than any substantive change in scale.

Sources:
https://stadiumdb.com/stadiums/sco/celtic_park
https://www.ibroxstadium.co.uk/