Football, faith and belonging: a tale of two teams in Cardiff's docks
Faisal Ali traces the stories of Cardiff Bay Warriors and Tiger Bay FC, and finds Butetown's thriving Somali football clubs offering community, pride and talent
In his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Christopher Alexander argues that the best modern cities are a ‘mosaic of subcultures’, residing in identifiable areas with unofficial boundaries. This arrangement enables these communities to preserve their distinctiveness, cultivate their own institutional ecologies, and add depth and texture to our urban experience.
The Somali community in the docks is a part of Cardiff’s ‘mosaic’, and is sustained by four hubs which act as its ballasts. Two mosques – the South Wales Islamic Centre and Noor El Islam – provide spiritual anchoring at the geographic tip and tail of the area. The shops along Bute Street offer a range of products from Somali food, to fish and chips and regular groceries. And nestled between the shops, the mosques, and the Dumballs Road industrial estate is Canal Park, home to Cardiff’s two main Somali football teams, the Cardiff Bay Warriors and Tiger Bay FC.
This intersection between faith, ethnicity, and football illustrates their deep and mutually reinforcing relationship, particularly for diaspora communities. Frank Roy, the Scottish Labour MP, encapsulated the visceral character of that bond when he said: ‘Monday to Friday, my body belongs to the trade union movement. Saturday my heart belongs to Celtic. And Sunday, my soul belongs to the Catholic Church.’ In a similar manner, the Somali community in Cardiff finds its identity tethered to its faith, hybridised culture, and passion for football.
Every weekend, Canal Park turns into an arena in which young men from this part of town make their presence and skill known to the rest of the city – and where the community comes to get behind them.
At the end of September, I watched the Warriors play a highly anticipated Welsh Cup match against West End AFC, which they won 2-0. At least 60 spectators attended the game, seated both in the stands and around the perimeter of the pitch, cheering every nutmeg, dummy, and tackle as they taunted the challengers.
Like commerce, work and other big events in Cardiff, football acts as a kind of connective tissue, suturing different parts of the city together. Football being more than just a game is a cliché we often hear, but for the Somali community, whose presence in Wales is scarcely noticed, it offers a rare and valuable chance for visibility. As Eric Hobsbawn once aptly put it: ‘the identity of a nation of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.’
Diasporic teams are a familiar story. Some of the greatest teams were built around diaspora communities seeking sporting glory and an avenue to celebrate their distinct identities. Hibernian FC for example was founded in 1875 in Edinburgh by the Catholic Irish diaspora, followed by the world famous Celtic FC in Glasgow twelve years later. As hundreds of thousands of Italians moved to São Paulo at the turn of the twentieth century they established Palmeiras, one of Brazil’s most successful football teams and in 1920 Club Deportivo Palestino emerged to represent Palestinian diaspora in Chile, the largest outside the Arab world.
During the same period Somalis arrived in Britain’s port cities, Cardiff in particular emerged as vital because of the nearby coal mines in the south Wales valleys. Shipping, the lifeblood of the UK’s maritime empire, had undergone a major technological transformation, from relying on sails to steam and coal – and a new pool of labourers was needed for the engine rooms. The community then, referred to as laskars, were still a small group of largely transient workers.
The roots of Tiger Bay FC and the Warriors are much more modern, having more to do with the second wave of Somali migration in the early 1990s which followed the collapse of Somalia’s military dictatorship and a subsequent civil war in the country. Many Somalis with ties to Cardiff – my family included – moved here then, and so a population large enough to sustain a football team emerged.
As some of the early figures in Welsh Somali football explained to me, the initial challenges of adjustment were complex for a population made up largely of refugees. The country they had arrived in was cold, with a different language, faith, and customs. Racism was a widespread challenge. Football served as an escape, but also a bridge between these men and the rest of the city.
The emergence of diasporic teams can be partly seen as a reaction to feelings of dislocation and marginalisation, even a desire to feel part of a community, says Dr Joseph Bradley, an academic who specialises in the sociology of sport at Edinburgh University. ‘Sports have the capacity to help people feel more comfortable and more justified: something akin to not always feeling a need to be on the defensive,’ he told me over the phone.
Cardiff Bay Warriors and Tiger Bay FC are the end result of several iterations of Somali football teams which stopped running and then re-established under new names. The teams initially emerged around a group of young men in the mid-1990s who played five-a-side games in Leisure Leagues and the Lazarou Cardiff Sunday Football League under the name Somali Dragons, an obvious nod to the Welsh flag and the ancestry of the majority of the players.
They would spend the next few years also playing against other Somali teams from across the UK, but in 2005 they made a splash when they were invited to the better known and more prestigious Canada tournament, where Somali teams from around the world compete. In 2006 and 2007 they reached the final, losing out narrowly. In 2008, they won.
In the mid-2000s the Cardiff Bay Warriors also fielded a team in Wales’ local leagues. But in 2009, Tiger Bay FC was formed in its place, competing in the Premier Division of the Cardiff Combination League. The links between the clubs have historically been fluid and organic, but Tiger Bay FC is now the longest running Somali team to compete in the official Welsh league pyramid.
Like the Warriors, Tiger Bay bills itself as an institution which is more than just a football club, seeking to serve the community it represents. Mahmoud Jama, its first player-manager, expressed his delight at how the team has become a pillar of the community, now fielding several youth teams.
Originally established as an exclusively Somali team by the first generation of migrants who settled in Cardiff, it has since been handed over to younger players from the area and now comprises individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds. Mustafa Mohamed, club manager, signalled a shift in its function and ambition in an interview with Wales Online saying: ‘The team is for all young people who are disadvantaged - regardless of their race, nationality and religion. Now we have players from around eight different nations in the men’s team, from Moroccan to Egyptian, Sudanese, Yemenis, and Libyan.’
The Warriors on the other hand, pooled the talent of the community across Cardiff to take on teams outside the city in summer tournaments. They eventually rejoined the official Welsh football structure under the management of Ahmed Noor, a veteran of the local footballing scene, who has big ambitions for the club.
Noor was a quick and nimble winger in his heyday, who spent more than a decade playing in the Welsh league with Butetown FC, Taffs Wells and the Grange Quins. Throughout those years he also played in football tournaments for the Warriors and eventually joined Tiger Bay. He’s an example of how the football scene here has developed its own leadership pipeline to keep the clubs running.
Sitting in a café on West Bute Street, he told me that he wanted to share his experience with the team, nurture a new generation, and ensure they had both opportunities and guidance. ‘The footballers in this area are also pretty much untouched territory,’ he says. ‘There is a lot of talent to choose from.’
During our conversation we reflected on the team’s humble beginnings.
Canal Park was once a weathered patch of grass; it became muddy and puddle-strewn when it rained, the grass would sometimes become overgrown, and the only barrier separating it from the neighbouring industrial estate was a large corrugated black metal fence. Ffion Lewis, a senior reporter at Wales Online, thought about an ‘irony not missed by the players… the protruding spikes of the Principality Stadium can be seen from the pitch - a stark contrast to Tiger Bay FC’s home ground.’
However, like the Cardiff skyline now, dominated by cranes and the skeletal structures of the city’s soaring new high-rises, Canal Park has also turned a new face. Today, it features a sleek AstroTurf, a gantry, a small stand for both home and away supporters, floodlights, and a large net to prevent stray balls from entering orbit or landing in the nearby housing area — an issue that, in my recollection, would cause frequent annoyance.
‘We’ve come a long way,’ Noor laughs.
A moment of immense pride arrived when the Warriors were invited to Cardiff City Stadium in the summer of 2022, following their victory in the Somali British Champions League, a national football tournament featuring the UK’s top Somali football teams. ‘We had a lap of honour through the stadium, the big screens were showing clips of our games and all the fans were cheering,’ says Noor.
BBC covered their victory, calling them the ‘comeback kings’ for the way they clawed themselves back into every game despite initially trailing. ‘We’re living up to the name Warriors,’ says Noor. ‘We fight right til the last.’ Both ITV News and S4C’s Sgorio have since featured the club.
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‘We now get invited to primary schools to speak. I get a lot of messages about people who want to learn about us, and we’ve even got supporters outside Cardiff,’ he says.
I chatted with several other players who used to play for the team who were proud of how far things had come. ‘There were games when we never had enough players some days,’ said Mohamed Dualeh, a former striker-cum-goalkeeper. Dualeh, who moved to Cardiff in 1990, was among the early founders of the Warriors and also spent years playing for Tiger Bay, Butetown and other local clubs. He said the goal was to bring people together around sport, but also to create a team which represented ‘the areas of some of our fathers and grandfathers.’
‘We’re proud that we’ve made a team which creates a pool of mentors, gives kids something to take pride in but also preserves the values and culture of our area,’ he says.
The two teams have become a sporting monument to the spirit and history of the docks, which both clubs draw upon to shape their identities and reaffirm their connection to the area’s history. This is evident in Tiger Bay FC's decision to move from the Marl in Grangetown in 2010 to Canal Park, as well as in the symbols used on club badges and the choices of the clubs’ names.
Wales also plays a significant role in this, and the club’s success has enhanced their agency and their ability to define what it means to be Welsh for them. Football has become a vehicle for the community to carve out space within the broader fabric of the city, the clubs a couple of tiles in Cardiff’ rich mosaic.
‘We’ve overcome the stigma associated with the area, and now we’re being celebrated,’ says Ahmed Noor, the Warriors’ manager. But he isn’t satisfied with that. ‘We want to strengthen this team and reach the highest possible level in the Welsh leagues. Just imagine how incredible it would be if ambitious footballers from here didn’t have to leave, but instead had this fantastic club right on their doorstep.’
Faisal Ali is a Guardian multimedia journalist who has previously written for Cwlwm on how Wales’ music scene has been inflected with Multicultural London English.