Glasgow's other football club

The fate of every Partick Thistle fan is to be endlessly asked the same question: who do you really support? Football in Glasgow is dominated — some might say menaced — by the Old Firm fortresses on either side of the Clyde. To defy this duopoly, to resist the glamour and the gloom of the Celtic versus Rangers power bloc, is to mark yourself out as an interloper in your own town, a preening contrarian with no true fealty to the game. 

But Thistle fandom is a profound and keenly felt thing. On a freezing Saturday afternoon in December, round the back of Munns Vaults, a bar on Maryhill Road, I find myself cornered by a small pack of Thistle ultras. Through a shroud of vape smoke and sleet, with the patio lights blinking strobe-like above our heads, one of them, Gordy, explains to me how and why he became a Jag (the colloquial term for a Thistle supporter). “It’s a genetic disorder,” he says. “I was born this way. You have to be to show up for this team.”

Occasionally, Thistle — it’s always ‘Thistle’, never ‘Partick’ —  will burst through the psychic constraints imposed by its overbearing neighbours. In recent years, the club has enjoyed a sustained dose of social media virality thanks in part — really, in whole — to its David Shrigley-designed mascot, Kingsley. 

Memorably described by The Telegraph’s JJ Bull as a flayed, melted, and meth-addicted Lisa Simpson, Kingsley — a spiked yellow orb on legs with empty white eyes and a gaping, pitch black mouth — has brought an existential energy to Thistle’s candy-striped aesthetic. “He represents the angst of being a football fan,” Shrigley, a Turner Prize-nominated artist, explained when his creation was initially unveiled, to much public excitement and mockery, in 2015.