English football has a problem with flares, thrown usually by away spectators at home fans, writes Mark Rowe. It’s a problem well down the tiers of football and a problem that the game shows no sign of solving, or even grasping.
Last night for the first time I went to a game of football that was abandoned due to disorder; Tamworth versus Nuneaton, in the Southern League Premier Central, the seventh tier of English football. To tell the story briefly, a Nuneaton fan in ‘the far corner’ (as the tannoy announcer later described it) on the terraces threw a flare onto the field at the start of the game. Apart from the usual noises, that was that until the second half when Tamworth went 2-0 ahead.
Then several flares at intervals got thrown again out of the Nuneaton end at the nearest Tamworth standing fans. The referee stopped play and most of the Tamworth players went to the Tamworth fans, apparently urging them to be calm and do as the stewards were asking. The referee took the players off. In what became half an hour of waiting, gradually the stewards moved Tamworth fans away from the corner of the ground nearest the visitors and out of sight.
The Nuneaton fans gradually calmed down, if only out of boredom; at their most volatile, some were shouting at and goading those nearest Tamworth fans, a couple of visitors even standing on a wall to do so. As the crowd waited patiently, the Tamworth players came onto the field and kicked a ball around, making plain that they wanted to resume; only one Nuneaton player came out. Apart from one public address announcement that the match was ‘suspended’, that was all the crowd was told until – after 9.30pm, about the time the game would have finished ordinarily – the announcer said it was abandoned, pointedly saying it was due to the referee, and ‘out of our hands’.
The opposite was true. The problem had been literally in the hands of Tamworth FC if they had searched visitors for flares brought (against ground regulations) in. The March print edition of Professional Security Magazine features a pair of fifth tier National League match Aldershot-Woking, that from Youtube footage appeared to have a similar amount of fan aggro and flares thrown, played regardless.
As acknowledged there, fans with flares are devious and will conceal them. That is the nature of people doing wrong like shop thieves and fraudsters; they make it hard for those in uniform to stop them.
It should go against the grain to complain about referees who are only human. The fact is however that the message the ref has sent to the Nuneaton fans is that if their team is ever losing, they only have to cause trouble to stop the game. Anarchy, in a word.
“Where’s the police?” a grizzled-looking fan standing in front of me said. Staffordshire Police were indeed nowhere in sight inside the ground. The answer came outside; I saw two police cars and a van, and as fans streamed out after abandonment more police with blue lights arrived. I watched from the road as numerous cops, the new arrivals in riot helmets, and barking dogs kept the Nuneaton fans inside the ground, presumably for their own safety while Tamworth fans walked through the car park, past the away gate and home. At no time did I see violence – as so often at football matches, while fans had ample opportunity to attack one another, they contented themselves with ritual goading and finger-pointing. I felt safe while walking through Tamworth town centre. The crowd had been a mix of ages, even including a tot in a pushchair.
The problem, then, is different from the 1960s to 1980s hooliganism, though safety and crime-security risks then and now are hard to disentangle. While not denying violence goes on around football, flare-throwing is showing itself the problem in itself. It appears that the authorities (as from the 1960s), whether by unspoken intent or lack of energy, are allowing football to be a more lawless place than the rest of society so that young men (mainly) may let off steam.
It’s easy to be wise after the event; Tamworth and Nuneaton are local, and rivals – both hope for promotion this season; the gate was not announced, but felt as large as in Tamworth’s better days a few years ago in the fifth tier, the National League. Could police have been in front of the away fans, to make arrests as flares were thrown? The Aldershot-Woking fan-footage and witnessing last night suggests police have no appetite for wading into an angry bunch of fans in an attempt to drag out a flare-thrower, even if confidently identified in the dark.
The upshot however, is at Wembley (pictured) in July 2022 when a couple of thousand of mainly young men tried to storm the Euros final without tickets (so little handle did anyone have on that riot, the Casey Review afterwards could only estimate the total of offenders). Those throwing flares get away with it, usually. In fact at Tamworth they were the only ones who had a night without consequences – the law-abiding fans had their evening cut short, and naturally without any announcement offering their money (£13 standing, £15 seated) back.
If the same men (presumably men) habitually threw flares in a cinema, or pub or concert hall, there would be consequences: venue closures as councils would take away licences, or the throwers would be identified from CCTV and hunted. The Tamworth ground does appear to have quite up to date CCTV, from its days in the fifth tier. The police and football club of a small town may well not have the skills to investigate flare-throwing (Tamworth’s police station that I parked near, a considerable building, was dark as I passed; like so many it got closed during 2010s austerity).
The problem of flare-throwing is widespread enough to call for a national unit to gather CCTV and pin offences on people. It’s a basic idea in crime prevention – show crimes have consequences to deter others and reassure the law-abiding. Football is a game where the premier clubs are sold for billions and can buy a player for £100m; to fund a police and civilian unit would be small change by comparison, as insurers do to go after insurance industry-specific crime.
Instead the football authorities content themselves with regular fine words, as at the outset of the 2022-23 season, featured in the September edition of the magazine, promising a ‘crackdown’ that made not the least difference. The same was said in 2013.
Football appears like banks to be too big to fail; no-one wants, to use a football cliché, to put their foot on the ball. Not even the national broadcaster the BBC wants to question the national game. Most editions of Match of the Day on BBC1 have a three-minute documentary slot showing how wonderfully beneficent a Premier League club is for doing something in the community, not like a cynical multi-national business. Just as the BBC reported next to nothing about the disorder at the Euros Wembley final (though it was there in force), it won’t give even one of those documentary slots to this problem of flares.
