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How a fake football club has taken over Twitter

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London, UK
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Caught up during the UK election in a purge of parody Twitter accounts, a surreal project that tows the line between social media trolling and performance art is exposing some serious hypocrisy on the platform.

The Streatham Rovers are like any other small South London non-league football club. Their garish green and purple jerseys are emblazoned with the logo of their sponsor – a shady Russian public relations firm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The Greyhounds, as they’re colloquially known, have a supporters’ association called the Streatham Hardline Independent Trust (or SHIT), a group of self-described ‘anarchists’ who believe that their club is supported unconditionally by the spirit of Karl Marx.

They have a fierce rivalry with Dynamo Catford (another South London team) in the Xtermin8 Rat Poison Football League, whilst their club motto, #NeverStopNotGivingUp, epitomises their attitude towards the game.

By this point it may be apparent that The Streatham Rovers are not like any other small South London non-league football club because the Streatham Rovers don’t exist. This fact caused a mild amount of embarrassment for the BBC when their satirical news show Have I Got News For You broadcast a segment about a controversy between the Streatham Rovers and the equally fictional Sydenham FC, who, the Rovers claimed, had wilfully arranged their player’s names on the schedule for an upcoming game to spell out: SRFC ARE SHIT.

The Rovers are the brainchild of a demented Twitter mastermind who goes by the alias Trevor Bastard, and over time they’ve come to form the central node of an elaborate comic world called the Trevor Bastard Extended Universe. The TBEU encompasses not only other fictional non-league teams, but also SRFC’s lawyer, a divorce solicitor named Oliver Laughdugry (a man who is so anti-Brexit that he had his pet dog put down to protest it full time, a ‘tragedy’ he blames on former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn), the club’s inept manager Taff Goose, who is constantly fighting off rumours that he faked his own death, and a protest group called Enya Fans for Communism that frequently hijacks the SRFC account.

At points the history of SRFC is elaborated on – for instance, in 1983, during an away game at Dynamo Catford a group of Streatham fans ‘got a bit carried away’ and ended up fire-bombing an orphanage, presumably igniting the rivalry (pun intended).

SRFC has 33 reviews on Google, resulting in a total of 3.7 stars, with comments vaguely hinting at oddities such as the club serving hedgehog meat in their burgers, playing Enya during halftime breaks, and a history of ‘unfortunate deaths’ associated with the club. According to the clubs Tweet history, past matches have been delayed due to malfunctioning VR headsets, the death of the club chickens after they were spray-painted in the team’s colours, and a robot on a murderous rampage at their kit launch.

Various personalities representing the club are at times either being kidnapped, starting online anti-bullying campaigns, or running for office in obscure constituencies.

There are many layers of detail to be found in this fever dream, and it seems to have tickled the funny bone of Twitter users, with the club boasting 13.5K followers. The satirical creation, whilst predominantly poking fun at loutish stereotypes associated with minor league football, can also be understood as a form of all-encompassing performance art (they have a word for this in German – Gesamtkunstwerk). The disparate elements of blog posts, spoof podcasts, fake newspaper columns, and low-production videos all coalesce in Twitter, and this allows it to occasionally leak into the real world.

This was perhaps best exemplified by a bizarre interaction with London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart in October last year, who pledged to help the club with a ‘dog muck issue’ outside their ground before realising he’d been had.

According to a 2018 Contemporary Art Practice dissertation submitted to the Royal College of Art by student Allan Struthers, who used the TBEU as a case study, the collective, online nature of the comic universe allows it to express a unique form of ‘ideological critique’. He states that ‘using the variously falsified media personas… to engage with other users on the Twitter network, the TBEU makes a public display of deceiving those incapable of correctly interpreting the intended political meaning in each interaction.’

The account’s collective voice may be a bit bonkers, but it also functions to attack the foibles of dominant capitalist ideological narratives and centrist politics. Its multiple appeals to socialism and Marxism sends up current leftist groups that are trying and failing to tap into these ideologies. satirical aims are twofold. It at mocks performative appeals to sensible, rational discourse discussion that are often used to denounce socialism without engaging seriously with its underpinnings. And, if you’re not willing to dive too deep into the theoretical, it serves to parody the use of Twitter as an echo chamber of the absurd in today’s political climate.

Many procrastinated hours of looking into this universe later, I firmly believe that the TBEU is one of the best and most creative uses of social media yet, combining people with common interests in a highly unusual way. It was therefore deeply troubling that recently, during the lead up to the UK General Election, the Streatham Rovers were one of several TBEU accounts suddenly banned from Twitter by the right-wing crackdown on ‘fake news’.

This was around the time that the UK Conservative party, without any prior warning or public mandate, changed their Twitter handle to @factcheckuk, confusing and misleading voters during election debates.

Over the course of a few months anyone who wasn’t using Twitter to voice their own clearly stated, non-ironic opinions about why Marvel wasn’t real film or whether Martin Scorsese should apologise to Spiderman (or whatever) were placed under suspicion. The SRFC account has since been restored, but at time of writing a number of the associated accounts remain banned.

If, as I do, you consider the TBEU a form of legitimate artistic expression, then this raises an important question about censorship. Other mediums of artistic expression, like a sculpture for example, is not something any individual or corporation can own. But anytime we use social media either as a canvas or a digital display cabinet for our art we’re effectively giving away ownership of it to the company running that platform.

Often, we fear that online content will be over-preserved – that you and your progeny will never able to escape the imprint of your old self that will be branded forever online. But, in truth, a lot of online content is ephemeral, and subject to the whims of tech companies. Early in 2019 MySpace admitted to losing some 50 million songs by 14 million artists uploaded to the platform – music that may not have been preserved elsewhere.

Twitter already pulled the rug out from online culture in a major way when it closed down vine in early 2017. And issues like this are bound to continue to happen whilst Silicon Valley executives, who would never have the inclination to trawl their platform for high concept offerings, and are even less likely to take the time to understand them, continue to run the show.

The needless targeting of accounts like this is particularly infuriating considering that Twitter routinely fails to respond to easily identifiable incidences of racial abuse, while it has been accused of tolerating violent ideologies and white nationalism. Perhaps their time would be better spent cracking down on actual accounts, like the Conservative Party, when they blatantly violate transparency policies. It feels like a surreal summary of everything wrong with the platform that they’d hold imaginary non-league football clubs to a higher standard than the actual government.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that it’s rather unfortunate that Gen Z’s main form of communication and self-expression has turned out to be social media. The TBEU reminds us of both the power of the internet and its transience.

A possible solution to this could be removing social media platforms from private hands once and for all. These platforms are public goods and should be treated as such – their founders don’t exactly need the money. Tech companies shouldn’t be allowed to own means of artistic production, particularly if the artists don’t fully comprehend their own rights.

Departed London, UK

My interests include social and climate justice, women’s issues, and human rights. If you\’re keen on current affairs and social change, check out my profile! Follow me on Twitter and drop me some ideas/feedback via email.

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