A Tifo for an Empty Stand

That feeling after the full-time whistle at Wembley. If you’re a Palace fan you’ve almost certainly got a cold tingle running through your body as you recall it. You can’t buy this.

The ten minutes before it were among the most wretched forms of tension, of arousal imaginable. Added time standing still. Hands gripped, breath shallow, pulses racing, tears welling up. Lucky rituals performed, prayers recited to the footballing gods, pacts made with the devil. Every City attack a small death. Nobody sane would pay for that feeling on its own. And yet it’s the reason the whistle felt the way it did.

In 1971 the psychologist Dolf Zillmann called it excitation transfer. Arousal doesn’t switch off when the moment passes. The racing heart, the adrenaline, the tension: it hangs around, and it pours into whatever emotion comes next. Lose, and it becomes despair. We know that feeling too. Win, and it becomes something you don’t have a word for. Sports researchers have tested it on fans: the suspense of a nervy game turns into elation at the end, as long as your team wins, obviously. That’s why a backs-to-the-wall 1-0 beats a 4-0 stroll.

The tingle has its own science. In 2011 Valorie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre, neuroscientists in Montreal, scanned people listening to music that gave them shivers. The brain’s reward system fired twice, in two different places: once in the build-up, as the moment approached, and again at the moment itself. Wanting and getting, wired separately. Four minutes to go. I sensed the moment coming. We’re going to do this. I knew it was too soon. Go away, I didn’t ask for those words. An attempt to delay the first wave.

But when Doku dragged it wide, we knew. The first wave proper. A collective exhale. The final whistle. The second wave. The release.

And behind those minutes of added time lies a hundred and nineteen years. Or a hundred and sixty-four, depending on what you want to believe. Not of expectation. Not of belief. Of hope. Hope is different. Desperately wanting something while preparing yourself for the inevitable. Palace don’t win things. It’s not what we’re for. Yet in our end of Wembley, every grip tightened anyway.

Some of it wasn’t even mine. The German historian Jan Assmann split memory in two. Cultural memory is what institutions keep: records, monuments, anniversaries. Communicative memory is what gets passed on by people who were there, and it lasts about eighty to a hundred years, three or four generations.

Palace’s wait, the part anyone alive remembers, is the second kind. My dad’s shop. Tickets for vinyl. Nil-nils recounted as badges of honour. From father to son. Era after era. Me and my boy, holding hands through ten minutes of torture.

The record books will say Palace 1, Manchester City 0. The club shop will sell you a commemorative scarf. Neither of them knows whose hand you were holding. You can’t buy this.

I. Lapsed

Something changed. I’d been sensing it long before Leipzig. I felt it again as I left the stadium, mingled in with the elation. With a little more clarity.

Change rarely announces itself with a whistle. It’s dirtier than that. It creeps up on you. Something feels different. You deny it, push it down. You sort of know, still you cling. I can’t point at the specific moment when I decided not to renew my season ticket. I let it lapse. The deadline came and went and one day I didn’t have one.

Leipzig was four days of elation and debauchery. One last passionate fling with someone you know you shouldn’t be with any more. I only half-sensed it at the time. It’s clearer now. It was The Last Stand. 2026 edition.

That half-sensing has a name. Psychologists asked students how they felt on graduation day. The ones reminded that it was the end felt happier and sadder at the same time. Hal Ersner-Hershfield and his colleagues called it poignancy. Joy and gloom felt simultaneously, and even stronger when some part of you knows you’ve made it to the end.

Tom took a photo of the stadium as he walked away. Maybe he knew too?

Pulp’s Something Changed took a phrase that usually means something’s gone wrong and inverted it. A moment of beauty. Two people brought together. Was it randomness, destiny or serendipity? Does it matter?

I’m turning it back.

II. Remote control

In 1970 the economist Albert Hirschman argued that when something you belong to starts to decline, you have three choices. Leave. Complain. Or stay loyal and hope it gets better. In the early 1980s the psychologist Caryl Rusbult tried his idea out on couples and found a fourth option he’d missed: neglect. Staying, but quietly letting it rot.

That was me last season. Me and my son were still season ticket holders. Still going. To most games anyway. But it was increasingly a chore. We watched several Palace games on TV, tickets unused. My wife called it a bloody waste of money. Rusbult would have called it neglect.

I often switched off the moment VAR started drawing a line through someone’s armpit, chucking the remote on the floor in disgust. Toddler-ish faux defiance. Well, Brehm’s reactance, actually. Take away someone’s freedom and they’ll grab back whatever freedom they can. Two-year-olds do it.

The psychologist Daryl Bem explains what happened next. Most of us assume we act on what we feel. Bem argued it often runs the other way: when our feelings are unclear, we work them out by watching what we do, the way we’d size up a stranger. I watched myself turn off the telly, again and again, until I believed it. Training myself not to care wasn’t a figure of speech. It was a method.

III. Who are we?

So why did it take so long, and then feel like it happened so fast?

Rusbult had another model for that. Commitment, she argued, rests on three things: how satisfied you are, how much you’ve put in, and how good the alternatives look. My satisfaction had drained recently after years of ebbing and flowing. But I’d put in over three decades, and the alternatives were nil. There is no other Palace. My commitment held until it didn’t. Thirty years of fuse, three trophies, the Europa League to look forward to. Then nothing.

Hirschman spotted the cost of that. The people who care most about quality are the first to leave, and if they leave quietly, the organisation learns nothing. My seat went to the waiting list. Nobody asked why.

Then there’s the bill nobody sends you. Erica Slotter and her colleagues studied people after breakups and found that what hurts isn’t only losing the partner. It’s losing a clear sense of who you are. It’s part of my identity. My routine. It’s what I do. My week has holes in it.

Watch the pronouns, too. Robert Cialdini found that students said “we won” after a victory and “they lost” after a defeat. Fans move towards winners and away from losers. I’ve done the opposite. We won the Cup. We won in Leipzig. Recently, I’ve noticed myself referring to Palace as “they”. Not because we lost, and only occasionally. I guess I no longer recognise who “we” are?

IV. Emptiness

“I’m out. For now.” The last two words matter more than the first two.

Back to Hirschman. Leaving on its own is silent. A customer who walks away teaches the shop nothing. Complaining on its own is noise with no cost. Put them together, leave and say why, and say what would bring you back, and you have a boycott. It isn’t really a breakup. More of a negotiating position.

The empty seat is my exit. This piece is my voice. “For now.” Until we’re heard.

And a confession, while I’m here. Psychologists have shown for decades that after a hard decision we build the case for it. I can’t be sure how much of this is the reason I left, and how much is the reason I need it to have been. Probably both. Up the Palace.

The early 90s. At first I didn’t make a connection between raving and football. But I soon realised that the Holmesdale at 3pm and a club or a field in the middle of nowhere at 3am were pretty much the same thing: a few thousand people coming together as one, creating something that can’t be packaged and can’t be sold.

The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich had a name for that. In Dancing in the Streets she called it collective joy, and traced how often the people in charge have tried to stamp it out. The church drove the dancing out of the churches and into the streets. The Protestants banned carnival. The fear was always the same: a crowd that makes its own fun might start making its own rules. She drew a line between two things. Festivity, which we make ourselves. And spectacle, which is made for us and watched. She ended her book on football, with fans turning stadiums back into carnivals in the 80s and 90s. She could have been describing the Holmesdale.

Then came 1994. The year Palace won the First Division. In May, we played Watford in front of the Holmesdale terrace for the last time. There was no tifo. We didn’t need one then. “The Last Stand” was printed on our tickets. It may have had a question mark after it. I can’t remember. I’ve got the ticket in a box of memorabilia somewhere. Old techno club flyers, beer mats, love letters from girls with whom something changed.

A 1-0 defeat. Not that it mattered. It was a day of celebration. We were Movin’ on Up.

I didn’t know it then, but we lost more than that match in ’94. Later that year the Criminal Justice Bill gave police powers to shut down gatherings of ten or more people, in the open air, at night, playing music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.

Rewind five years. Hillsborough. Ninety-seven people unlawfully killed. A disaster caused by fences and police failures, not by fans, delivered a fix aimed at the terraces. At the old crowd and the old prices. The fighting was already on its way out. Thrills, pills and bellyaches helped see to that. The seats went in to fix a problem that had been loved up.

Both my tribes, same year. We fought the law. We lost. The Jilted Generation.

Festivity was soon to be replaced by spectacle. And recording and broadcasting the spectacle was to become more important than being immersed in the festivities. In 1998 the consultants arrived. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore told businesses that goods and services had become commodities, and that the money now lay in staging experiences. The subtitle of the book that followed said it all: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. They were Yanks, like our owners.

Nobody I knew in the 80s or early 90s went to a matchday experience. We went to the football. We didn’t film ourselves enjoying ourselves.

The memory of the festivity is now for sale too. The club shop sells a retro 1993/94 First Division champions shirt. The terrace that they filled with plastic (for balance, it does now have a roof), sold back on a shirt to the people who stood on it and those who’ll never know what it felt like.

In May 2023 the Holmesdale Fanatics covered the whole stand in a tifo of Maxi Jazz. South London boy, lifelong Palace, the voice of God Is a DJ. Hand-painted. Fan-funded. Nobody sold it. Nobody could have.

We Come 1.

There’s a video you’ve probably seen. A music festival, 2009, a grassy hillside. One shirtless bloke dancing on his own. Badly. Everyone around him sitting on the grass, pretending not to look. Then a second man gets up and joins him. Then a third. A couple of minutes later the whole slope is on its feet.

The dancer isn’t the interesting one. The second man is. He turns a lone nutter into the start of something, and shows everyone else how to join in.

In 1978 the sociologist Mark Granovetter suggested that everyone in a crowd carries a threshold: how many others need to be doing something before they’ll do it too. Some people’s threshold is zero. They start things. Some need one other person. Most need to be surrounded. Put that in a football stand and you get my five types of fan. 1. The ones who start the chant. 2. The ones who join in straight away. 3. The ones who pick and choose their moments. 4. The ones who’ll only sing when everyone around them is. 5. And the ones who think it’s all frightfully uncouth.

That’s a scale of how readily you sing, not how much you care. A 5 with a forty-year season ticket is as much a supporter as any capo.

Whether a stand roars comes down to two dials. The first is who’s in it: how many vocal supporters, how many 1s and 2s. The second is where they are: who’s sitting next to whom. Every chant starts somewhere. What matters is whether it keeps going. News travels with a single telling: hear the score from another ground from one bloke and it’s round the stand in a minute. A chant doesn’t work like that. Many won’t join in just because one voice three rows back is singing. They join in when several people around them are. The sociologist Damon Centola calls this a complex contagion. In a cluster, where everyone hears it from several sides, it keeps spreading. Among scattered singers, however loud, it dies out.

Football turned both dials down. On the terraces, fans gravitated to their preferred position. Those who thought it uncouth opted for a seat and a Bovril. Allocated seating froze everyone in place and scattered the singers among people who’d never join them. The hillside worked because it was a field. Anyone could walk towards the dancer. A seat number can’t. Meanwhile prices rose, the Sky razzmatazz became more glitzy, and more people came to watch than to back the team. You didn’t need to conduct a survey. You just had to listen. Selhurst was no exception.

Enter the Holmesdale Fanatics. A handful of lads in the bottom corner of the stand took matters into their own hands and adopted the ultra model. The capo was the man on the hill. The other ultras were his second men, backing every chant without fail. Then, one Saturday at a time, people who’d never sing on their own found they weren’t on their own. Slowly but surely, we had an atmosphere. Something unique.

But it plateaued. A cluster only spreads to the people at its edge, and past a certain point the edge was 4s and 5s. The HF’s answer was a full reset of the stand. Shake things up. The ultras in the centre behind the goal, anyone wanting to join in able to sit close to the singing, those who didn’t fancy the drum and the ‘moronic droning’ could move further afield. This plan was an attempt to fix that: to let people walk towards the dancer again.

In one of Centola’s experiments, a committed group of about a quarter was enough to change what everyone else did. You don’t need the whole stand singing. You need a quarter of it, in the right places.

Even a reshuffle of the same individuals can have a positive effect. It may not add more 2s, but it may turn 4s and 5s into 2s and 3s. A 4 sat near a large group singing begins to feel part of something, becomes a 3, then a 2. One dial moves the other. Crowd psychologists such as Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott would say the same - shared identity is what turns an onlooker into a participant.

Wembley proved it. Both dials up: an end full of people who’d come to sing, the singers together behind the goal. By the time half the end was going, it took almost nothing to tip the rest, even the ones who’d come for a quiet afternoon.

Then the team joins in. They feel part of it too. Players turning to the end to demand more, the manager crediting the crowd. It becomes self-fulfilling. Habitual. Fun. Have you ever heard a player say ‘massive thanks to the crowd for being quiet, it really helped us focus’?

This mentality is unstoppable.

The reset was a bold plan, fraught with administrative headaches and riddled with perceived unfairness. Under the HF’s version, the four hundred fans in the seats behind the goal could have had first choice of any other seat in the stand. What was eventually agreed was severely watered down, and they were booted out to other parts of the stadium instead. It was never given a proper chance to work, and four hundred loyal fans were left angered and disrespected.

What the HF got instead of a gradient was an island. One block of singers, ringed by people who’d rarely or never join them.

There’s an epidemiological term for it: a cordon sanitaire. An intervention. A ring drawn around an outbreak. Whether anyone meant it or not, that’s what Block E became. Contagion needs neighbours. Not a moat.

And the moat was made of people. In the 1970s the German researcher Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann noticed that people who think they’re in the minority go quiet. She called it the spiral of silence. Sit a would-be singer among disapproving faces and he decides singing is a bit odd. Not the done thing. The 3s stay 3s.

The test has already been run. The home games since the HF stepped back. City was bad. Newcastle was atrocious. Fans who’d stood in the same spot for decades called it the worst atmosphere they’d known. At Wembley, with the singers together, half the end tipped the rest. At Selhurst, with many of the 1s and 2s not doing their thing (turning themselves into 3s, 4s or the equivalent of 5s) and with the PA to compete with, the rest remained quiet.

Same people. Different fans.

Ball hits the net. Half a second later you’re off the ground, hugging whoever you can get hold of. Nobody decides to do it. It just happens, to thousands of people at once.

That half-second turns out to be special. Researchers put heart monitors on Brazilian fans and tracked how in sync they were. Most of the match couldn’t touch the ritual before it: the flares, the chanting, the team bus arriving. Only one moment beat it. Your team scoring.

One moment when a crowd becomes a single body. That’s the moment VAR was targeted at.

Now the ball hits the net, you instinctively start to lose it, before dragging yourself back into your body. The players start to celebrate. Then they realise too. They jog back, looking over their shoulders, at the ref. Talking to each other behind cupped hands. Everyone waits. The referee fiddles with his earpiece.

Check complete. Goal stands.

You cheer. But violently happy isn’t ecstasy. It’s relief. Your joy credits have been spent on the anxious wait.

Fuck VAR.

In March the Football Supporters’ Association asked nearly 8,000 Premier League fans. More than nine in ten said VAR had taken the spontaneous joy out of a goal. In 2020 two researchers in Munich studied what Premier League fans tweeted when VAR got involved. The mood fell off a cliff. They called their paper Video Kills the Sentiment. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

So why keep it? Because it works, if you only count what it was built to count. In 1971 the social scientist Daniel Yankelovich described what he called the McNamara fallacy, after the US defence secretary who ran the Vietnam War by the numbers. First you measure what’s easy to measure. Then you ignore what isn’t. Then you decide it doesn’t matter. Then you decide it doesn’t exist. ‘You’ is doing some heavy lifting in each of these sentences.

VAR is that fallacy built as a machine. Correct decisions can be counted. Joy can’t. In 2024 the clubs voted nineteen to one to keep it. Sorry, Wolves. The fans weren’t asked. Not in any meaningful way. What do they matter?

And it takes one more thing. When Covid emptied the grounds, researchers studied nearly 5,000 games across Europe. Without crowds, home advantage almost halved, and referees leaned less towards the home side. The noise mattered. It was one of the few powers a crowd ever had over the game. Now the decision is made in a business park in west London.

‘Who’s the wanker in the business park’ doesn’t quite have the same ring.

Thirty years of hurt. Delayed gratification as an extreme sport. That’s the long clock, and VAR can’t touch it. It works on the short one: the split-second between the net bulging and your feet leaving the ground. The twilight zone where time stands still. Or used to stand still. That moment has been stolen by a machine built to remove ecstasy.

No alarms and no surprises please.

Fans of every club have had this reply, in one form or another.

Thank you for your feedback...yada yada...we’ll do it our way.

In 1969 an American planner called Sherry Arnstein drew a ladder of how much say people really get. Eight rungs. At the bottom, manipulation. At the top, citizen control. In the middle, a stretch she called tokenism, and the highest rung of that is placation: you’re allowed to advise, and they keep the right to decide.

The HF asked for ten minutes without music before kick-off. The answer was UEFA regulations. They asked again, for a league game where UEFA had nothing to do with it. The answer was a production plan. Then the club said it was in dialogue. That’s the thank you.

The yada yada is the recent social media campaign aimed at appeasing the restless natives. This is Crystal Palace. Together. A few clips of Zaha and co scoring goals. Cuts to crowd shots without the HF.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted...

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

You know the rest.

The our way is the show. In 2017 the HF wrote to the club about NFL-style light shows, T-shirts thrown to away fans, and Selhurst being called a “Stadium Bowl”. Last season they accused the club of forcing an “American-style experience” on the ground. Three of the club’s four big shareholders are American. Just saying.

We used to sing along to Americanos, semi-ironically, back in the early nineties. It was played before the game, long before the players took the pitch. They wouldn’t have dreamed of pumping it out as the players were about to kick off.

Then there’s our way with your things. The Situationists, French radicals of the 1960s, had a word for what happens when the system takes the thing made against it and sells it back: recuperation.

The semi-final tifo became a pre-match anthem. What was intended as a moment in time, a glitch in the timeline when we were more than we thought we could be, was co-opted into the show. Like grandad wearing his cap back to front to be down with the kids.

The HF were the heart and soul, the South London and Proud, of the club’s adverts. Then the HF banner came down so LED advertising could go up.

In 2000 the media theorist Tiziana Terranova called this free labour: work that’s given freely, never paid, enjoyed by the people doing it and profited from by someone else.

The fans make the atmosphere. The club sells it.

It’s just good business.

And there’s the state’s version. An organised home end still gets policed as if it were 1985. Banning orders. Cameras pointed at the section. Even Steve Parish has said the authorities told him, more than once, to ban the whole group. In their August statement the HF blamed “relentless harassment and legal action” for scaring off the younger fans the group needed. Crowd researchers have argued for years that treating a whole group as a threat makes things worse, not better. The state wants the crowd controlled. The market wants it tidy for the cameras. Different motives, same result. Nobody has to plan it.

In August the HF stopped all organised activity inside the stadium. Twenty-one years of graft. Of passion. If the atmosphere was free labour, have a listen to what it sounds like when the labour stops. You know it’s true.

Thank you for your feedback.

The dream of an empty stand wasn’t entirely a dream. In 2020 it happened. Empty grounds, and on Sky the roar of crowds recorded at real matches in years gone by, supplied from a video game’s sound library and played in live by a man at a mixing desk. Our own voices, sold back to us through the telly. Brighton went as far as putting some cardboard cutouts of fans in the stands. I’m not sure if anyone noticed the difference. The man who designed the sounds said it was only ever meant to be better than no crowd at all.

Better than nothing. That’s how the copy gets in.

Picture a machine that could give you any experience you wanted, perfectly, for the rest of your life. Would you plug yourself in? The philosopher Robert Nozick put that to people in 1974. Most say no. We want to actually do things, not just feel as if we’re doing them. Fair enough. Nobody chooses the copy when it’s sold as a substitute. It wins when it’s sold as an upgrade. The light show isn’t instead of the crowd; it’s enhancing it. The PA isn’t drowning you out; it’s building the atmosphere. The anthem, the flag bearers, the pom-poms. Each one an extra. Until one day the extras are all that’s left, and the stand is empty, and the fireworks go off anyway.

So what do you do? In 1978 the Czech playwright Václav Havel wrote about a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window, among the onions and carrots: Workers of the world, unite! He doesn’t believe it. Nobody does. It’s just what’s expected. Then one day he takes it down. That’s all. And by doing it he shows everyone else that it can be done. My season ticket is my sign. I didn’t renew it. It can be done.

The same year another Czech dissident, Václav Benda, went further. Stop trying to fix the official structures, he said. Build your own alongside them. A parallel polis.

The ravers did it after 1994; the party went underground and came back with renewed energy.

The HF did it for twenty-one years. Fan-funded, hand-painted. None of it ever needed the club’s permission. It still doesn’t.

I know I’m not the only one that feels this way.

The protests are coming. That’s the fucking spirit. Count me in. And if anything I’ve said resonates, come too. As you are. Not how they want you to be.

A tifo for a packed stand.

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