Snow is starting to fall outside Lincoln Financial Field and Philadelphia Eagles fans are talking about Christmas.
They are referring to the game in December 1968, when a fan dressed as Santa Claus was pelted with snowballs. It was the day, these supporters say, when the notoriety of Eagles fans was born. It’s a reputation that has stuck for nearly six decades.
Last week, Ryan Caldwell was filmed abusing a female Packers fan in a video that went viral. He called her a ‘ugly, dumb c***’, he lost his job and he has been banned from coming back to this stadium.
It was the latest controversy involving Eagles fans and it cemented the notion – at least in the eyes of their rivals – that these supporters are aggressive, unpleasant, even violent.
But in the parking lots outside Lincoln Financial Field, fans want to paint a different picture.
‘We don’t claim that guy,’ says Harrison. ‘We definitely are a hard fan base, but what he did was too far. And most fans would agree with that.’
‘He was being an a**hole,’ another fan adds. ‘You have a very vocal minority of Eagles fans that are a**es like that. The majority of them are good people, great fans… what sums us up? Passion.’
Harrison adds: ‘People from Philadelphia are definitely very outspoken. We’ll let you know how we feel about it. But don’t take it to heart… (there’s) no real enmity, no hatred for other fans. It’s just a love for our teams.’
Joe, whose t-shirt reads ‘It’s a Philly thing. No one likes us, we don’t care’, echoes the thoughts of many fans when asked what Eagles fans are really like.
‘I don’t think it’s violence, it’s passion,’ he says. ‘People shouldn’t be talking the way that that guy did on the video, for sure. But people get a little intense and passionate about their team… that’s what it comes down to.’
He adds: ‘There’s people like that at every stadium, to be honest. We have a bad reputation for sure. Most people aren’t like that, though.’
Joe occasionally hears about violence at Lincoln Financial Field. But he insists: ‘You hear about it in a lot of different stadiums, too.
‘It just doesn’t get blown up as much as it does when it happens here.’
That sense of unfair treatment is shared by Stephen – ‘other cities are definitely much worse than us’ – and Vinny, who interrupts his game of cornhole to say: ‘There are some people that give us a bad reputation… (but) for whatever reason, every time we have an instance, it seems like everybody piles on us.’
He adds: ‘It’s just easy to latch on to the reputation or the perception of the Eagles fans… you have a national media that’s based in New York, which is one of our biggest rivals.
‘So you have all these talking heads that come on top of us when these incidents happen – and they should – but it’s not equal when it happens in other places… (there are) fights, stabbings, killings.
‘What that guy said was terrible. But we’re not killing anybody over here… we have to go an apology tour – there’s 70,000 people in here, one person made an idiot move and now everybody’s got to apologize for it every single time. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it’s annoying, I can tell you that.’
He points out that Steelers fans were filmed fighting each other last week. He is quick to condemn Caldwell, too, but Vinny believes those Packers fans came looking for trouble.
‘That guy should not have said what he said, obviously. However, that guy came in with a YouTube channel and a GoFundMe, looking for something to happen.’
