twofootedtackle.com

Football hooliganism, we’re told, is back. In reality it never went away, instead becoming both reduced and displaced as legislation, policing and the repulsion of the ordinary supporter combined with the post-Hillsborough/Italia ’90 modernisation of the game and its surroundings to drive the firms of casuals away from the limelight or out of existence. There were other factors, of course. The ageing hooligans stepped back from the scene as football finally resolved to make them unwelcome and the incoming thugs entered a whole new ball game culturally and economically.

Today, football violence is considered to be almost obsolete in England. We know it isn’t extinct but we put it to the back of our minds because it happens away from the stadium and occurs rarely compared to the bad old days. For the last 15 years football has felt safe for most supporters most of the time. For those not seeking out trouble it seldom becomes an issue, the occasional instances of normal supporters facing problems being attributable, by and large, to especially incendiary matches or the type of street attacks that can and do happen elsewhere.

Now, thanks to figures from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) seen by the BBC, we have a new folk devil. Forget the under-fives, hooliganism is now child’s play. But is it really worth panicking about again? The Football Supporters’ Federation’s spokesman Jon Keen is right to call for a sense of perspective.

The New Generation

On Friday, a piece by BBC Radio 5 Live reporter Rowan Bridge appeared on the corporation’s website revealing that the number of incidents of football-related violence involving young people has trebled in the last three seasons. ACPO recorded 103 such incidents in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2009/10 and only 38 in 2007/08. The latest tally represents 47% of the total number of recorded incidents. But reading between the lines, it seems clear that ACPO is also concerned about non-quantitative evidence.

The biggest concern of ACPO’s football policing spokesperson Andy Holt is the age at which this supposed new generation is becoming involved in hooliganism. It suggests the likelihood of a significant problem going forward as the potential career of violence lengthens. The possibility that football violence is a cyclical phenomenon is a more frightening one and we won’t know for many years yet whether this perceived fresh face of violence forms part of a more long-term trend.

In reality hooliganism is evolving, not resurrecting. Keen stresses that hooliganism “is no longer a major problem”, and regular supporters who attend matches every week with years in between witnessing incidents of trouble would endorse his view - so does the miniscule number of arrests and incidents relative to the size of the match-going public. But it still exists and it will probably never completely go away. My assumption as an experienced supporter is that trouble now takes place outside the traditional sphere of the everyday supporter’s routine. Football is safe, but there are still pockets of violence every now and then.

So are hooligans really getting younger? The forthcoming figures also reveal that 290 teenagers are now subject to football banning orders, but we’re looking at too small an increase in the percentage of the total number of incidents involving youths - and over too small a number of years - for me to be convinced that the statistics prove this to be the case. However, instinct makes me almost certain that it is, even if it isn’t anything to get overly concerned about.

Promotional shot for “The Football Factory”.

Fighting back in fashion?

Meet “Phil” and “John”, two little scrotes from the Coventry Legion firm - both in their early 20s and both subject to football banning orders - who have been quoted in Bridge’s article.

“Football hooligans may not be true fans to you, we’re there every game. What are you doing? ‘Oh lets sit at home on the chat boards slagging off how bad Coventry City are doing.’ Come back when you know what you are talking about. We’re prepared to fight whether it’s windy, snowy, rainy, we’re prepared to fight every weekend through the football season for Coventry City and for everything they represent.”

The idea that football hooligans are somehow not supporters of their clubs is something I’ve always found difficult to grasp. There are some thugs, of course, who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in football, but overall I believe attempts to distance football-related disorder from football - and hooligans from their clubs - are naively optimistic and deeply problematic. But trying to portray firm members as better supporters is frankly ludicrous.

But the most interesting thing about “Phil” and “John” is not how misguided they are, or what their idiotic notion of support is, it’s that they are both probably too young to remember life on the terraces and everything that came with it. They’ve been influenced from elsewhere, whether it’s older hooligans or something even more worrying.

While it doesn’t necessarily explain the involvement of these two particular fans, the explosion of hoolie-lit over the last ten years has to be considered problematic if hooliganism has indeed spread to a generation that’s grown up in a football community so willing to vociferously condemn violent activity. This pornographic portrayal of hooliganism as nobility, loyalty, camaraderie and social addiction began with a wave of books written by retired thugs that paint their crimes in such a way as it could seem acceptable to impressionable youths. It gives you an unbeatable buzz, they say. We never attack scarfers, they say. It’s all about being at one with the lads.

Then, we had The Firm, then The Football Factory and then Green Street. While the first arguably errs slightly towards a negative depiction, the hooligan movies of the 2000s have certainly glorified football violence with no reference to its impact on the wider game and little more than a nod to the very real risks involved. Football may have flushed the majority of hooligans from its midst, but with impressionable youngsters (with other issues, one suspects, as I’ll come on to) being treated to such rose-tinted nostalgia, it might never truly go away.

Taking football out of the equation

Football can’t really be taken out of the equation here, but it’s important to recognise some other factors. Without wishing to be too disparaging, most of the 290 banned teenagers probably lean towards violence away from the game too. In life some people are just like that and the numbers - again - are tiny compared to the whole football-going population. One way or another, fighters are going to fight. Football must (and usually does) take responsibility for its problems, but it does not turn normally law-abiding supporters into frequent offenders, although I’m sure it has helped more than a few drunken fans earn an unwanted criminal record.

More fundamentally, we should remember that for the last two years Britain has been in the gutter financially. Disorder during a recession is not a new phenomenon and neither is participation in forms of civil unrest that meet a primitive human desire or affirms one’s identification as and with the working class. If ever football violence was going to return to the fore, it’s now. A tiny minority of young people are both apathetic and demonised, prone to anti-social behaviour, and victims of their own inaction and society’s overblown response.

Often on the fringes of employment, it stands to reason that these people are likely to have been closely affected by the bust economy and are disenfranchised, angry and desperate. Let’s not kid ourselves that football culture doesn’t breed hooligans that are only violent because of football, but for many it seems logical that the sport is merely the vehicle through which external factors are called to account. No matter how many times I’m contradicted by those closer to the action, I simply don’t believe that football hooligans come from all walks of life, at least at a young age.

Lets be honest: to some extent, football-related disorder is surely a function of the stresses, rigours, excesses and frustrations of working class life, and in no way is that intended as an excuse or justification.

Regardless of all the intricacies and influencing factors, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to be concerned about a return of large-scale hooliganism, new generation or otherwise. I definitely subscribe to the FSF’s view on all this and I hope that the media doesn’t see the need to isolate and villify (a) football supporters and (b) young working class males on the basis of an increase in incidents that I consider to be no more dramatic than a natural rise based on the social and economic circumstances of the day.

Tags: Football Policing, Hooliganism