As the football season reaches its climax, by the very nature of competitive sport, it’s a fraught time on the field, and off it for those with the job of stadium security and safety, writes Mark Rowe.
An aircraft hired to fly a ‘sack the board’ message over Leicester City FC’s ground, as they were relegated. Protest matches to stadiums and demonstrations outside; chants and banners. They’re a trope of football because clubs do badly or that fans are simply disappointed, the same as some clubs do well and hold cups aloft to the cheers of crowds. There lies football’s problem; that fans care so much about their team emotionally, and in any season, any league’s division of 20 or 24 clubs has to have a spectrum of feeling. Some win or are promoted, while clubs that narrowly avoid relegation also may feel euphoria; some do moderately well, whose fans may not be satisfied if they are used to doing better; some are relegated.
Most fans – to take West Bromwich Albion’s yesterday, when a defeat meant they could not mathematically make the play-off finals, a place that once looked like theirs – choose to leave the ground early, rather than wait to vent their feelings at the final whistle. Most Tottenham fans did not take part in marches to the ground protesting against a lack of success under the owners; nor have most Manchester United fans gathered at the Best-Law-Charlton statue outside Old Trafford to protest at their under-achievement.
Such protests are in general non-violent. The historian Timothy Shakesheff in his 2003 book Rural Conflict, crime and protest: Herefordshire, 1800 to 1860 gave the idea of ‘protest criminals …. collective interest groups who were seeking a defined and pre-seat goal’. In his book that meant farm workers who burned haystacks, broke hedges and (at the extreme) maimed farm animals, as their way of expressing upset at the fast-changing rural economy. They had no political way to express themselves; they didn’t have the vote. Protests by football fans are not like that. Indeed, to be a regular football watcher you have to have quite a lot of spare income, let alone to have the spare time and energy to protest. Protesting fans typically take a ‘love the club, hate the owners’ line; to deface property would be to damage the club they love.
Still, those with the task of protecting stadia cannot be complacent. Any demo has to at least be kept under surveillance, in case a line is crossed, such as ‘pyros’ (such as flares) let off that pose a threat to safety. To take Manchester United as an example, the ‘Holy Trinity’ statue faces the front of Old Trafford and the club’s megastore that has security staff and detection arches, for loss prevention purposes as much to protect the glazing from vandalism. If Security were to at all intervene in a demo, or confiscate a ‘sack the board’ banner that a fan is trying to bring into the ground, they may be resented as ‘goons’ of the owners; but, for their own safety, protesters cannot be left to themselves – stewards can point to the club rules (signs setting out those rules, that people pass by without noticing, are on the outside walls) about what’s forbidden to bring in.
A club’s stewarding and security forces are in a tricky position; a comparison with widespread pro-Palestine protest at UK universities is a good comparison. Wise advice that uni security managers give officers guarding demos or accompanying protest marches is to be non-committal if protesters try to ask officers what they think, because such a conversation is sure to be filmed and recorded by someone’s phone, and put online, captioned to show that someone working for the club supports the protest; which at the least is embarrassing (and will mean an awkward conversation for the head of security to his line managers).
It’s worth considering where the stewards and safety officers stand. Some stewards will have been with the club since the year dot and may well share the protesters’ views. Some are only stewards for the money because they are trapped in zero hours contracts. As for the safety officers who carry the responsibility for the managing of protest, some may have been senior police officers who worked on match day operations and have simply transferred on retirement; their familiarity may extend to having feelings for the club. Many will have no such background, nor local feeling for a club; they’re only there for the pay (the day rate even in the third tier may be £300, whereas stewards are on minimum wage, £12.21 an hour as of April 2025, or maybe a pound or two more). A match day with 3pm kick-off is a full day for the safety officer, 9am to past 5pm, but not necessarily an unbearably stressful one, unless local rivals with grudges are the visitors, requiring a police operation (also meaning work, as more assets have to be tied in); that’s why you have policies, training and briefings, to iron out what’s foreseeable.
Fans’ unreality
What’s pointless is to try to reason with the protesters. They are complaining that extremely wealthy Qataris or American club owners, whose wealth is in the hundreds of millions, are either at fault for not spending enough, or not spending carefully enough; when, in truth, owning a football club is only a way of the colossally wealthy spreading their wealth, like a yacht in Monaco, or an estate in Kent. The nature of team sport is that for some clubs to win, others have to lose. Consider the so-called ‘big six’ of the Premier League that in April 2021 proposed to join a ‘European Super League’, thereby showing the owners’ common interests as financial, a plan cut short because of vocal fan protest. Of the six, some fans are feeling happy (Liverpool, because they are about to win the Premier League; Arsenal, for a long run in European midweek competition), some so-so (Manchester City and Chelsea, having relative unsuccess this season) and some protesting (Manchester United and Tottenham, pictured). The positions will change next year, but the unreality of it all, if the fans of those clubs could but see it, will remain.
