Rivals: Rangers & Celtic – shades of green, blue and grey

Within the goldfish bowl of Glasgow, is there any question more loaded than “what’s your team, pal?” As far as most taxi drivers are concerned, there are only two possible answers: Rangers or Celtic. But you’re not really answering a simple inquiry about the football club you follow. You’re responding to a series of other, less innocent, questions: Protestant or Catholic? Loyalist or Republican? Friend or foe? Safer to plead Partick Thistle – the Switzerland of Glasgow’s sectarian warfare.

Rivals: Rangers & Celtic, a new documentary produced by Vice Media, attempts to lift the lid on the Old Firm and their legendary hatred of one another that splits their home town in two. “The image that’s exported down south is a very packaged extreme,” says Londoner Kev Kharas, Vice’s intrepid reporter who travelled up to Ibrox and Parkhead to spends some time with both set of fans. “On one side you have Rangers, and they’re all seen as a bunch of dower, miserable, right-wing Protestants, and on the other side you have the Catholic, sentimental, Irish republican supporting Celtic fans, and four times a season they get together and have a big fight.” Kharas knows this is a sweeping generalisation, of course – shades of grey reduced to a cartoon drawn in green and blue crayon – and that’s the reason he wanted to make the film. “It’s really supposed to be an outsider's look at the rivalry in 2012. We’re trying to refresh these stereotypes.”

If you live in Glasgow you don't need to follow football to know about this toxic side to the city's culture. Anyone who’s jumped on the clockwork Underground or stumbled down the Gallowgate looking for a bargain in the Barras on derby day will have come face to face with fans from both sides with hate in their eyes and a sectarian song in their voice. The beery supporters that Kharas interviews over the course of the film argue, however, that this is merely theatre, a pantomime to add atmosphere to an arena that can’t always be relied upon for silky entertainment. A football-nut himself, the film’s host has sympathy for this defence.

“Football hothouses certain aspects of personality,” muses Gunners fan Kharas when I ask if he buys this ‘ninety-minute bigot’ argument. “When you’re in a sweaty room full of men en route to getting drunk, polite communication becomes kind of difficult over this fray of collective roaring along to anthems. It is an atmosphere of a very aggressive consensus where that’s the only kind of communication that can exist there and that’s why it’s so good. I do it myself when I go to games – not that my team [Arsenal] have any reputation for being hard men. It doesn’t have that sectarian undertone to it, but it’s still the same: just guys in a crowded space aggressively agreeing with one another and anyone who doesn’t fit in is picked out immediately.”

There’s certainly a sense from the average fans Kharas speaks to that this is the case. It’s working class men letting off steam after a week of watching their p’s and q’s at their nine to five. “I think it’s about not being nannied, basically, about not being told what you can and can’t say by people who have never found themselves in a football context before.”

Impossible to defend, though, is when words lead to sticks and stones – and fists, knives and broken bottles. “We certainly didn’t want to make yet another hooligan film. I’d no interest in shuffling around Glasgow pretending to be Danny Dyer, talking about 'tastie lads'. It’s bullshit and nobody needs that,” says Kharas. “But we felt we had to include this side of the rivalry because it is a hugely interesting part of the history.” Indeed, the rivalry is at its most visceral and explicit when it compels gangs of grown men to do battle in the streets.

Fascinating discussions with notorious football casual John O’Kane, founder of the Celtic Soccer Crew, and his former sparring partner at Ranger’s Inter City Firm, Sandy Chugg, address the violence that perennially bubbles over when these teams meet. Using a series of juxtaposed interviews it becomes clear how similar these two men are. “Both were in gangs when they were young,” observes Kharas, “both maybe lacked a strong male parental figure when they were kids; both had ambitions to play football at some kind of professional level but got led astray, mainly by the fighting and the gang culture and the drinking; and from what I can tell they come from similar social/economic backgrounds. So without trying to be too much of an armchair psychologist I think it’s kind of easy to join the dots that are there and see how those men are using Rangers or Celtic or the identity of being in the CSC or the ICF as a way to feel like there’s a good enough ballast in the world.”

Rivals: Rangers & Celtic is full of similar insights. For anyone uninitiated in the Old Firm it offers a fine primer to its core dynamic, and for Glaswegians less forgiving of the reputation both teams' religious and political violence continues to give the city it is certainly refreshing to see it through a fresh pair of eyes interested in the fans' point of view.

With the blue half of the Old Firm on the brink of financial collapse, there’s no better time to ask what this rivalry means in the 21st century.