You need wander only yards from the Brandywell Stadium to recognise Derry City’s position as no ordinary football club in no ordinary area. Slogans in support of the IRA, the INLA and a united Ireland feature on the short journey towards the Bogside Inn. Likewise, a large mural making plain what some of those in the vicinity feel the Northern Ireland assembly has delivered since its inception in 1998: poverty, unemployment, enforcing British government cuts and food banks feature on the list.

Derry City and Derry’s city – scarred by sectarian division, which still exists – are intrinsically linked. The old adage that sport and politics cannot mix is nonsensical in this electoral constituency where the vote to remain in the EU was the fourth-highest returned, at 78.3%. Derry City, the only Northern Ireland-based club in the League of Ireland, will kick off their season on Friday while – through no fault of their own – caught bang in the middle of political chaos. Little over a month into the season, the reality of Brexit means they will play every away fixture “back in” the EU, be it at Shamrock Rovers, Dundalk or Cork City. On Brexit Day, 29 March, they are due to host Sligo Rovers.

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Officially, although besieged by questions, Derry City are making no comment about Brexit. The Football Association of Ireland has adopted an identical stance. The explanation for that lies in a theme common throughout the UK: uncertainty. The key themes, though, are easy to pinpoint: travel for supporters, movement of players, contracts, insurance, Uefa status. Derry City have a handful of players based in County Donegal, officially the Republic of Ireland. The core business of the club’s multimillionaire chairman and benefactor, Philip O’Doherty, has the same geographical status.

It is left to those on the outside, with experience of what border controls in Ireland mean, to use pre-Good Friday agreement times as a reference point for messy checkpoint practicalities. “There were long queues; you might well be pulled to one side and asked all sorts of questions about where you were going,” recalls Michael Kerrigan, who has barely missed a Derry fixture in more than three decades. “Maybe the bus you were on was a different colour five years earlier so you had to go through a process of identifying it: ‘Why was the bus colour changed?’ and that sort of thing. If you answered a question the ‘wrong’ way … It is much, much better at the moment; plain sailing.

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen regards the physicality of a border and of course we would have concerns. People can talk and talk but we don’t really know. We are hopeful things will be much as they are now. We aren’t politicians; we just want to go and watch football.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Bogside area of Derry. Photograph: Paul Mcerlane/The Guardian

Like so much in Northern Ireland, no assessment of a future situation is possible without glances to the past. There remains resentment in Derry over the club being bundled first to Coleraine (because of security concerns) then out of the Belfast-based Irish League altogether in 1972. After a painful spell in the wilderness, Derry joined the League of Ireland in 1985, backed by home crowds of 12,000 and travelling support of routinely half that.

Jim Roddy, a civic leader, can give further context. “We had no senior club to aspire to be part of so when the club came back the impact in the households of this city … it transformed people’s views of themselves, of this place,” he explains. “They had something that truly represented what they saw as their identity. A sporting giant to us.

“It was four years after the hunger strikes and this was still a dangerous place. Soccer was an escape from what was happening on the street.

“In 74-75 this place was in turmoil, this place was in flames. Conflict was raging, Bloody Sunday had just gone by and the anger and hurt was very real. As a youngster there was a mix of excitement – when bombs go off you want to see it. But as each year passed and you grew you became more involved in the horror, felt it more, [had] been stopped by the troops on the streets, become resentful. All those sorts of things. And football wasn’t there, we’d no team to look up to.”

Roddy is the fascinating embodiment of this city and a football club he served as a director for many years. He heads the Derry-Londonderry City Centre Initiative and is a go-to guy for Theresa May and Karen Bradley, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Roddy recounts recently taking Brandon Lewis for an ad hoc drive to “see” the Irish border. Suffice to say, the Conservative party chairman’s perception was outweighed by reality where a subtle change of road surface was the only defining point.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Derry City’s Brandywell Stadium, pictured last March. Photograph: Oliver McVeigh/Sportsfile via Getty Images

It wasn’t always thus, of course. Roddy speaks from the heart when refusing to contemplate the Derry City support of 2019 encountering the kind of away trips that were common from 1985 to 1998. “It ain’t going to happen again, there isn’t going to be a hard border,” Roddy says. “For a start, no one wants it.

“Certainly for supporters there was tension; people would have resented being stopped by soldiers. Some of those soldiers would have been 18, 19, not even knowing what they were doing here. That’s the human reality. You’d have heard Scottish soldiers and you’d know that half of them would have been Celtic supporters – so would those calling them ‘Scottish b------s’. A real anomaly.

“It wasn’t easy. Not everybody had a drink but not everybody was dry. These were trips and see when you got across the border, you breathed a sigh of relief. Was it subconscious? I don’t know but it worked in reverse on the way back.

“Look, it was an experience, an experience that could not be contemplated again. Never ever.”

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Interestingly, Roddy does not consider that a return by Derry City to Northern Ireland’s Irish League – which could easily be considered cost-effective – would be a trigger for social unrest but regards the scenario as unnecessary. “We’re not divorced from our political setup. If our leaders are not working together at executive level, then that permeates down to all levels. Does that make life difficult? Yes, it does.

“But I’m a fervent believer that we should have a 12-team all-Ireland soccer league, properly resourced.”

In Declan Devine, Derry have a manager born and bred in the locality. “We are sitting in an area with one of the highest levels of deprivation in Ireland,” he says. “Whatever estate in Derry we come from, we have all had to fight for everything we have. We have come through a lot of hardship. We have to make sure that whoever we come up against, it is personal, it is a fight and an argument to make sure we aren’t overrun, outworked or bullied. Your football club represents your city.”

The form by which that representation will continue is, for now, so desperately unclear.