Both teams share a unique friendship based on anti-fascist and activist priorities, providing a safe home for identities who don’t fit the typical sporting trajectory
~ Alice Hoole ~
The Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls (Cowfolk) and Republica Internationale were founded forty years ago in Bristol and Leeds. Some of the original members were punks, anarchists, socialists, and squatters; identities that teetered on the margins of society that weren’t often conflated with football. The founders wanted to reject many of football’s toxic traits such as hyper-masculinity, homophobia, racism, nationalism, capitalism, and the typical sporting mentality of domination at all costs.
Bringing in their experience of DIY organising, teams screen printed and sewed their own kits, merchandise and banners; created their own tournaments that celebrated friendship, solidarity and amateurism with handmade trophies; and blended the teams’ identities with their local political and DIY music scenes.
Each team has its own unique history and culture, which has been previously documented by Mick Totten and Beth Simpson and Michael McMahon. But what both teams share is a unique friendship based on anti-fascist and activist priorities, providing a safe home for identities who don’t fit the typical sporting trajectory.
While both teams were founded by men, many women and gender-diverse players have been able to step into key organisational roles and help build these clubs to what they are today. As an organiser within Republica, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of these voices for my research. By representing their voices, we can begin to redress the representational imbalance of women and gender-diverse players in discussions of radical football.
As one participant told me, “You can be in a football space, a punk space, an anarchist space, and sometimes it’s still a fucking boys’ club. But if you step up, collectively step up, like DIY, Do It Together, you can change that. We can be good at organising too, sometimes better actually, and maybe we can help make that space a bit better for everyone”.
Activism and Care
Activism is integral to the club. From supporting refugee football teams, hosting community meals and winter clothes drives to antifascist demos and fundraiser queer ceilidhs, these radical left groups are in it for more than the football. “The politics of the club”, says one of the organisers, “was that we were a group of people who were brought together because we all wanted to play football, and then, as a byproduct of that, we had a group of people who could then take actions which were in line with those beliefs”.

As well as local community activism, both Cowfolk and Republica have a long history of international solidarity. Most famously, both clubs have made multiple trips together to Palestine to show solidarity in the face of occupation. One organiser commented: “Like the Palestine trip, we use football to break down the barriers between us. And women’s lives in Palestine are obviously so different to our lives here but using that football match is a way to be like ‘this is a thing we all love doing, and we’re going to do it together’. Or even to be like ‘these are some of the struggles we face as women trying to play football in Palestine’. And us being like, ‘oh yeah, we have those problems too’. And finding those commonalities for good or for bad”.
As well as outwards-facing activism, some organisers told me about the gendered work of creating communities of care. As Ewa Majewska argues, communities of care and the emotional labour of anti-fascist and anarchist action are often not valorised in the same way. “If history was down by who was in the roles, then it might look a little bit different”, points out one organiser. “But that doesn’t mean to say that’s who did the emotional labour.”
Documenting and celebrating those acts of care were felt to be as important in creating a radical community. Within the clubs this was experienced through collective childcare, providing physical care or packages when people were physically or mentally unwell, supporting each other’s personal and professional events, and tracking each other’s menstrual cycles or menopausal changes. As one organiser commented:
“It’s the joy of the community, and that kind of togetherness within the Cowgirls. I almost feel sometimes that the Cowgirls, especially when we wrap around people, we’re almost like a coven. We’re a whole bunch of witches. Witches were ‘other’, and they were always intergenerational, and always alternative, and always looking after people.”
Tournaments and Safe Spaces
Both Cowfolk and Republica have developed within an international network of similar left-wing clubs which come together each year for tournaments. These tournaments are more like 3-day autonomous festivals with a carnivalesque atmosphere of punk bands, DJs, and various other entertainment taking as much precedence as any football playing. “I think it’s like creating a little self-contained world that’s very distinct from normal life”, said one organiser, “And you have a lot of people who are a lot older, and intergenerational friendships. And there’s definitely something reassuring in that. I often just feel like that’s what I can do to continue to behave like this for the rest of my life and that’s fine.”

Another organiser commented, “the network tournament is like you’re in a utopia. To me, it’s a utopian community, like a bubble and when I step out of it, I’m like ‘oh, I’m in normal society again’.”
Many organisers advocated for ensuring women and gender queer voices were central to the organising of those spaces. Says one organiser, “I think some of the safer spaces issues that have come up in anarchist spaces previously have been that the only rules are ‘don’t be a dickhead’ which historically, it’s probably been mostly men. But there are more people of different genders now coming in that just needs a little bit more like, okay, but what does ‘don’t be a dickhead’ mean now?”
“I think it’s important to have older, loud female voices in an antifascist space, because I think a lot of cis-men take that space for granted. They’ve never had the same barriers to football. So, I think there’s a lot of empowerment in using the space as a vehicle for social change.”
For a lot of the organisers I spoke to, being part of their footballing communities had changed their lives. or most, playing football for the first time was a political and queer-feminist act, but one that was also bound up in a lot of joy. Those senses of pride and joy were what sustained their long-standing activism.
Top photo: Republica playing a Palestinian women’s team from Diyar University in 2017