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Richie Howard, a palaeontologist from Merseyside who now works at the Natural History Museum as the curator of fossil arthropods and graptolites, had a great time watching Vissel Kobe defeat Cerezo Osaka 4-1 in a J-League football match last month.
But it wasn’t the fast-flowing football or the injury time goal, slotted into the bottom left corner from just inside the 18-yard box by Taisei Miyashiro, that most grabbed Howard’s attention. It was the beef steak donburi and takoyaki (battered octopus balls) that stood out.
After slapping down 1,700 yen (£8.70) for the beef bowl, served over steamed rice with the batter balls on wooden sticks, Howard took photographs of the food and shared it on X (formerly Twitter). “Absolutely immaculate vibes in the away end of the Sakura Stadium,” he posted. “And the scran omg”. In the post, he tagged two accounts: the official J-League English language account, and Footy Scran (@FootyScran). “I love Footy Scran,” says Howard. “I really enjoy seeing the food around the world.”
He’s not the only one. Nearly 600,000 people follow Footy Scran on X, with 40,000 more on Instagram. The profile is a documenter and enabler of a Damascene transformation in what people eat while watching football. This food revolution is a world away from the burnt sausage rolls, cremated pies, soggy chips, and questionable hot dogs that most football fans will remember from years gone by.
A food wagon at Burnley’s Turf Moor
Today, you’re as likely to get chicken katsu curry or bang bang noodles as you are a slightly grey burger. And it’s largely down to a single social media profile, run by an air conditioning installer living in the West Midlands.
The man with the scran
Tom Sibley set up Footy Scran in 2020 after seeing a photograph on social media of a portion of sausage and chips with curry sauce, served in half a hollowed-out bread roll, sold at Merthyr Town, a Welsh team playing in the seventh tier of the football league. Footy Scran has gone on to capture the changing face of football stadium food – and along the way, make its own indelible impact on both on- and offline culture.
Google search traffic for “scran” has increased significantly across the UK since 2020, a shift in part accounted for by the popularity of Footy Scran. Sibley himself remained intriguingly elusive as I was writing this, acknowledging the messages I sent him trying to set up a chat before dropping off the face of the earth. But several football clubs were happy to talk about the impact of Footy Scran.
One of the clubs that has upped its food offerings is Luton Town, who were relegated fromo the Premier League this year. The club contacted Raffaele Ruocco, a chicken shop entrepreneur, about bringing something new to the team’s stadium to match their standing in the top flight of football and their £10m refurbishment of the stadium. “They approached me last summer,” says Ruocco. “They had a concept of what they wanted. Being in the Premier League, they wanted to evolve the food.”
Ruocco now runs The Kenny Henny, whose BBQ honey glazed chicken burger with fries was featured on Footy Scran in April. “We’re trying to offer something to the people that’s not your usual run of the mill boiled burger or nostalgic pie,” he says. A broader range of food is important, says Ruocco, because football stadia can’t be exempt from more general shifts and trends. “Everywhere you go, people have upped their game. Even McDonald’s is fancier than it was.”
Footy Scran: The new banter
Howard says Footy Scran fills a hole left by the closure of banterlicious TV show Soccer AM, which had been on a downward trend for a decade or more before its final episode last year. “I reckon plenty of football fans are hungry for lighthearted, daft and inoffensive football content,” he says, “especially given how grotesque the general discourse is with all the bedroom pundits.”
What makes Footy Scran work is that it doesn’t name and shame or pillory bad food, instead letting the pictures do the talking. Users simply vote whether an item is “scran” or “no scran”. The account itself is studiously silent when sharing the photos submitted by its hundreds of thousands of followers.
But while Footy Scran has incentivised some clubs to drastically improve their matchday food – Tottenham Hotspur is one club often singled out in ‘best of’ lists since its eponymous stadium opened in 2019 – others have not bought into the idea. “The food at Newcastle remains terrible,” says Charlotte Robson, a Newcastle United fan and host of the True Faith podcast. She says she looks on in envy at Footy Scran’s feed: “It makes me want to be a football tourist.”
Non-league footy scran
One place many Footy Scran followers have on their must-visit list is Farnham Town FC, a semi-professional club that won the Combined Counties Premier Division South last season. One of the club’s directors is Harry Hugo, who runs a London-based social media marketing agency that works with Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators; he knows the power of social media to drum up offline interest.
“At a non-league level the main drivers of revenue are food and drink,” he says. So when he became a director in mid-2022, Farnham Town introduced a mystery kitchen concept to matchdays: a food truck would serve a rotating range of Instagram-ready, exotic dishes developed by a professional chef, alongside the standard matchday fare. “We had this idea that if we created a different dish every week, we would have the ability to publicise ourselves on Footy Scran every week. From a revenue perspective it’s a lot better for us to sell a meal of chicken and rice than it is to sell a burger for half the price.”
It’s strange to think that a miserable portion of sausage and chips served in a hollowed-out bread roll on a rainy afternoon in Merthyr Town changed the way we think about stadium food – but it’s a funny old game, innit?