Another season of English football has begun, with the authorities promising a ‘crackdown’ on bad behaviour, and meanwhile the grubby violence around grounds goes on. Inside stadia, all those to do with football have to deal with various sorts of hooliganism, something those in football understandably would rather not have to do, writes Mark Rowe.
Loud and menacing bodies of football fans, many teenage but of all ages, nearly all blokes, are as part of British weekend culture as a Sunday pub lunch or a snooze afterwards. To take only two examples from the first weeks of the 2023-24 season, a policewoman outside a branch of Domino’s Pizza keeps Tamworth and Scunthorpe fans apart, across the road from Tamworth railway station. Some of the hundreds of travelling Scunthorpe fans as they make their way slowly through Tamworth town centre to the football ground are goaded by home fans, as shoppers take cover from the threatening noise and police do their best to keep the two sets apart.
A fortnight later, on a corner of one of the shopping streets in Crewe across the road from Crewe railway station, itself a stone’s throw away from Crewe’s football ground, several men scuffle. Before a policeman intervenes, a pot-bellied man beside a shop window scoops the legs from under a younger man – which fan supports which club seems irrelevant – and makes the young man fall to the pavement. The pot-bellied man swiftly bends down and punches the downed man three times in the face. A third man in shorts runs up to intervene, pushing the pot-bellied man off the victim. All three split and the policeman grabs the one who pushed the attacker off. While the man grabbed by the cop isn’t necessarily a Good Samaritan, even judging by the few seconds of a video clip uploaded to social media by someone from their car (earlier, he was standing on the pavement with palms held out, as if to taunt others for not fighting), the grabbed man has some cause to raise his hands and in effect complain that police aren’t going after other, more violent people.
Four things about these two sordid and at the same time depressingly representative snapshots of football-related disorder. First, that the number of arrests (if any) don’t bear any resemblance to the actual hooliganism. Police numbers are limited routinely after a decade of austerity, and even before the 2010s, police might find themselves short of numbers if football supporters turned violent. They cannot very well make many, or any, arrests and take officers off the ‘front line’ to do the processing.
Second, and true for some time, hooliganism is a lower-league phenomenon. While Scunthorpe a couple of years ago was in the Football League, after relegations it’s now in the sixth tier of English football, the National League North, as are newly-promoted Tamworth. Crewe versus Walsall was a League Two, that is, a fourth tier, match. The gates for the two games were 2000 and 3600, a fraction of the tens of thousands that commonly attend matches in the top two tiers. That is not to deny that Premier League clubs have their share of hooliganism; except that the bigger, wealthier clubs have video surveillance cameras and cadres of stewards, SIA-badged security and police to deploy in numbers to incidents inside grounds and on the stadium’s ‘footprint’ outside.
Third, and also long true, disorder is if anything more likely to happen on the way to or from grounds, whereas inside the grounds clubs may have good enough video surveillance to make an identification of offenders, and the motive to use the ident to issue bans. Outside the ground, football clubs don’t have the same responsibility. Put less kindly, the disorder is anyone else’s problem.
Fourth, and perhaps least important, is that the hooligans don’t need any excuse for being disorderly beyond opportunity. Local rivals – City and Rovers in Bristol, Wednesday and United in Sheffield, County and Forest in Nottingham and so on – may well play in different divisions, so that fans don’t have occasion to clash. While Crewe and Walsall are fairly near geographically, Scunthorpe and Tamworth are not, and have not been in the same division before. As hooligans are so young – a fan who trespassed on Stevenage’s pitch in February, leading to a recent FA fine against the fourth tier club of £7500, was aged 14 – they hardly have built up any grievance against any rival team.
At the start of the 2022-23 season, the football authorities in England and Scotland made much of their ‘crackdown’ against flares, technically ‘pyrotechnics’, thrown inside grounds, for safety reasons. As featured in the September 2022 print edition of Professional Security Magazine, flare-throwing went on regardless; including at Tamworth-Nuneaton, a midweek sixth tier league game in February that the referee abandoned in the second half after flares were thrown on the pitch; the match had to be replayed minus fans (who didn’t get their money back nor any offer of compensation). Disorder inside grounds, then, requires all sides to respond: fans, even though near all of them are not hooligans; match officials; club officials; and police and football’s authorities.
In a joint statement on the eve of the 2023-24 season, football’s authorities stressed a ‘crackdown’ on offensive chanting, gesturing and displaying offensive messages based on football-related tragedies; such as, the mass crushing of Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, Sheffield in 1989; the Munich air crash of 1958; the Bradford stadium fire of 1985; and the death of newly-signed Cardiff City player Emiliano Sala in a plane in 2019, to name only four. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and other authorities have even given it a name, ‘tragedy related abuse’, and Douglas Mackay the Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor for the West Midlands and CPS’ Sports National Lead Prosecutor, has stated ‘that this vile behaviour will not be tolerated’. However as with other crimes, the perpetrators know that in a crowd there is protection. The Football Association (FA) has recently fined Leeds United £150,000 for homophobic chanting last season.
A panel heard that ‘a very considerable number of Leeds supporters’ ‘engaged’ in ‘homophobic chanting’ when Leeds hosted Brighton in the Premier League in March. In a letter to the FA’s commission looking into the case, Leeds club secretary Hannah Cox wrote that the fixture was ‘originally categorised as police free due to the perceived low risk nature of the match and the low incidence of disorder’ at past matches, that we can add is a remarkable tribute to the private security developed by clubs. Cox added that the match was changed to ‘policed’, ‘to address the risk of homophobic language and chanting as the club were aware of the potential for fans to engage in this behaviour’. As she added, police can ‘assist in the arrests of persons involved in this behaviour’.
“All matchday safety and security staff were briefed on dealing with any offensive language or chanting, particularly reminded of the potential for homophobic remarks against Brighton fans and players. All staff were informed to listen out for any type of offensive language, to ascertain who was partaking in this behaviour, speak to those involved and gather relevant evidence.”
The FA told Leeds what to do – to review its stewarding – management, provision, deployment, and the quality of training; incident reporting (verbal and written). Besides, the club should prepare Public Address messages; and evaluate cctv, including body-worn cameras; and do media campaigns across the club website and social media accounts, to stress ‘zero tolerance’ toward discriminatory, abusive and insulting language, behaviour and conduct.
The trouble is: if a ‘significant’ (hundreds? Thousands? the panel’s report did not say) number of people chant, so that a club is fined (£150,000 is about halfway between the minimum of £20k and maximum of £300k that the FA could impose), not only has the criminal behaviour been tolerated, without personal consequence to the chanters as few or none of the chanters are arrested or prosecuted, the fine is in effect on all fans, even the innocent majority. While clubs such as Leeds newly-relegated from the Premiership, may be relatively able to take such a sanction in their stride, even a four-figure fine for a fourth tier league club (the FA has the power to fine up to £15k for a chanting offence) may well hurt the playing side, as Carlisle United (pictured) described this month after the FA fined the Cumbrians for ‘crowd misconduct’ on December 26 (when a number of fans – neither Carlisle nor the FA settled on a number – made racist shouts about Bradford).
To return to the beginning, far from well-meaning PA and social media messages converting anyone into altering their behaviour, social media is routinely used to upload incidents, for those online to view and comment on as they wish, whether to gloat or enjoy some vicarious pleasure.
It’s only fair to state that hooliganism is the exception; as Trevor Birch, chief executive of the English Football League (EFL), pointed out, more than 22 million attended EFL games last season; even if a match had flares thrown, or chants, or other behaviour ‘that crosses the line’ in Birch’s words, even if law-abiding fans witnessed it, they may well have not felt unsafe (or; they suspend their sensitivity to things that would provoke a far greater reaction outside a football ground).
Jack Pearce, FA vice chair and chair of the National League said on the launch of this year’s ‘crackdown’: “It is vital that football comes together and acts now, to reset the culture within our game. Unfortunately, the game has normalised unacceptable behaviour on and off the pitch in recent seasons and the message is clear; we will not allow this to continue.” Even though among all the official comments, Pearce acknowledged the sheer normality of disorder, he too fell into the trap of saying something demonstrably not true; that the authorities ‘will not allow this to continue’, when it happens somewhere every Saturday. Indeed, in their ruling on the Stevenage pitch incursion, the FA’s panel quoted the summer 2022 ‘crackdown’.
