Footy Scran
As an English person, today is an important day, as the England football team take on Spain in the European cup final. What better day to talk about the food that comes with football.
I was born into a very long line of avid football fans - Aston Villa fans, to be precise - and growing up, football featured heavily in my day-to-day life, as my dad and brothers had season tickets to the aforementioned AVFC; I attended football summer camps; and have myself been to lots of premier league football games. I then married a passionate football fan with an encyclopaedic knowledge of basically every player going back to the late 90s (this made it incredibly difficult to name our son, but that’s for another time!). Despite all this, I could take or leave the beautiful game, but will forever be interested in the unique micro-food cultures that are spawned from football communities.
When it comes to Aston Villa, a team based in Birmingham, England, you can’t leave Villa Park without getting a balti pie. The balti curry was invented in the 70s in Birmingham, a place with high rates of south Asian immigration and famous for its amazing curries. Then the balti pie came on the scene in 1997 as the perfect fusion food for the football fan in Birmingham. Before this time, and even now at some team’s grounds, football watching foods were boring meat pies, greasy burgers and chips: uninspiring. Balti pies are a fantastic food (fullstop, but also) for watching the game - easy to hold, delicious and very warming for those freezing cold days in the stands. I believe they’re now sold at clubs across the country, too.
The Premier League clubs in England and Wales, with their ever-growing stadiums, generally serve soulless and anonymous food, ready for the 50,000+ fans coming through their doors, so the real good stuff here can usually be found in clubs further down the leagues and non-league. Dulwich Hamlet for example, a small club in London, has built an exceptional reputation for friendly and welcoming fans and fantastic food and beers. With fanbases becoming more discerning when it comes to food, and social media being a key part of promoting the experience of football, the pressure has been on to provide better food at football matches. Enter Footy Scran.
Footy Scran is a Twitter account dedicated to food at soccer stadiums across the world. In case it’s new to your vocabulary, scran is British slang for a good meal - a noun. Started as a way for the creator to document their eating around London clubs, it soon blew up and they were getting submissions from all over the world. It’s a beauty of a feed - a reason to stay on Twitter, imo. Oftentimes you can vote if a dish is ‘scran’ or ‘no scran’, which then invites all the memes and puns using the word scran. Like I said, I’m not interested in the actual game of football but the more I see the food at Sporting Kansas on Footy Scran, the more I am lobbying for a trip to see them play. What about insects, Victoria? Anywhere got insect scran? YES! It’s not all exotic places, though, thanks to Footy Scran, I know that Rayners Lane FC has amazing looking jerk chicken wings. Remember what I said about big clubs, though? This is something from Real Madrid, foul.
I spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at Footy Scran, especially during busy times of the UK football season and end up shouting to my partner ‘baaaabe, where’s suchandsuch FC’ then ‘ooooh really? Footy Scran suggests they have banging food! We should go!’.
So, no matter your thoughts on the actual sport, I can guarantee you will enjoy a peruse of the Footy Scran page.
And feel free to send me your favourite sports-stadium snacks and get them on my radar!