Is Football Going Back To The 1980s With Fan Behaviour & Police Approach?

It is easy to look on the past with a sense of nostalgia, imagining things were so much better before than they are now. When it comes to football, it is difficult to do as much, especially when you consider that it was a time of the two greatest sporting disasters in the form of the Hysel Stadium Disaster and the Hillsborough Disaster. Football fans were generally treated like scum, in part at least because of the fact that many of them behaved like hooligans. In 1985, months before Hysel, Millwall fans stormed Luton fans at Kenilworth Road, ripping up seats and throwing them at opposition supporters.

Of course, the fact that some fans behaved like that doesn’t mean that all fans did. Today, the same sort of argument is taking place, with police treating supporters horrendously as a result of the actions of a few. Even so, there is no escaping the fact that the likes of pitch invasions and the use of flares and smoke bombs are in the up, giving those that would treat football supporters as animals an excuse to do just that. Is there any justification for it, or do the powers that be need to be better in their handling of events they’re in charge of?

What It Was Like In The 1980s

Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Most readers of this site will have little to no idea what life was like for football fans in the 1980s. It grew out of experiences that began to take shape in the decade before, with a trip to a football match in the 1970s being a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Stadiums weren’t comfortable places to visit, with crumbling terraces and regular crowd trouble. The fans at football matches in the 1970s were often feral, mostly made up of men who drank and smoke and would often be so tightly packed together that a smaller person’s feet could be lifted off the ground altogether.

That is the environment that police believed that they had to deal with heading into the 1980s. Gate takings were falling, no thanks to the perception that hooligans were ruling the roost; a thought that was exacerbated by crowd trouble at the European Championship when England drew with Belgium on the opening day of the tournament. In other words, football fans behaving in a way that suggested hooliganism put the police on edge every time a game was played, leading to fans being treated like animals and behaving in that way too.

Football fans were seen as scum by the police, assumed to be criminals in their intent if not their deed. People were literally herded like cattle, with heavy police presences at both the train station where visiting supporters arrived and at the ground. In 1982, The Times described football as follows, “A slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people.” The 1980s was the decade of Margaret Thatcher, in which working class people were treated like scum and football was the sport of the working classes.

Perhaps nothing sums up the manner in which football supporters were treated quite as sharply as the Hillsborough Disaster. In 1989, Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final, with Hillsborough Stadium being chosen as the venue for the game. A catastrophic failure of policing led to 97 people, predominantly Liverpool supporters, being crushed to death. As the bodies were being dragged from the Leppings Lane end of the ground, it was Liverpool fans that were treating them as police pushed people back into the crush.

What followed was a cover-up involving the police, local politicians and newspapers, which resulted in lies being told about Liverpool supporters that would last for decades. It took until 2016 for an inquest to rule that the supporters had been unlawfully killed, though no one was ever prosecuted for their deaths and the sense of injustice continues to this day. It was said that supporters arrived late, that many of them didn’t have tickets and that drunkenness played a part, all of which were proven to be lies. It was the darkest day in the history British football, with policing being at the heart of the problems.

The New Era

The response to the Hillsborough Disaster was to launch an inquiry, with Lord Justice Taylor laying the blame for what happened squarely at the feet of the police and those responsible for keeping supporters safe on the day of the football match. One of Taylor’s suggestions was that football grounds of clubs in the First and Second Divisions become all-seater, which needed to happen by August of 1994. Within five years of that, grounds of teams within Leagues 1 and 2 needed to follow suit and also become all-seater.

This move heralded something of a new era for football. When Rupert Murdoch agreed to pay £304 million for the rights to live coverage of the newly formed Premier League, with the previous deal having been worth just £44 million, it was clear that football would need to have a much more sanitised image. Sky made English football rich, with much of that money pumped into improving stadiums and ensuring that safety was high on the list of priorities for the clubs taking part in the new-look top-flight, which also led to an increased popularity for the sport.

Standing Room Only gave football a new, youthful look that sat alongside the likes of Soccer AM and Fantasy Football as a way of offering football’s ‘laddy’ nature a more sanitised look. The Lightning Seeds worked with Frank Skinner and David Baddiel to produce Three Lions in time for England to host Euro ’96, which was a signal that football truly had changed. There was optimism that matched what was taking place elsewhere in the country, thanks to the arrival of Tony Blair to end Conservative rule of the UK, whilst the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1999 ensured a lasting peace in Northern Ireland.

Things Have Started To Revert To How They Used To Be

Oldelpaso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For some, the idea of ‘keeping politics out of football’ is key. Football, so the argument goes, is meant to be a fun thing, whilst politics is serious and dreary. There is a desire, therefore, to ignore anything that might not be directly about the sport, with many happy to ignore the idea that politics is intrinsically linked to football whether they like it or not. The Conservative and Unionist Party in the United Kingdom, is one that hates the working classes. Best demonstrated by Margaret Thatcher, the Tories regularly try to help the rich get richer off the back of the work of others.

Though the invention of Sky Sports and the sanitisation of football meant that the game slowly became too expensive for many working class people, the sport was still seen as being one of the working classes. Consequently, the Tory Party slowly but surely did what it could to demonise football fans in the years that followed its election back to office in 2011. In the decade that followed, football fans began to be treated as hooligans and criminals again, resulting in some behaviour from certain sections of supporters that played into that stereotype.

That isn’t to say that football fans have behaved impeccably over the years. In 2018, for example, a number of incidents occurred to suggest that a return to the dark ages of football’s past was all but unavoidable. The biggest game of the season in South America, the Copa Libertadores Final, saw the second-leg take place at the Santiago Bernabéu in Spain after the bus of one of the competing teams, Boca Juniors, was attacked en route to River Plate’s stadium. Numerous windows were broken and players on the bus were injured by glass and pepper spray.

When AEK Athens were playing host to Ajax Amsterdam in the Champions League, three days after the second-leg of the Copa Libertadores final should have taken place, there was more crowd trouble. Flares and even a petrol bomb were thrown in to the end containing the Ajax fans, whilst firecrackers were set off at the beginning of the second-half. Thankfully nobody died, though many people were injured. Remarkably, nobody was arrested in the immediate aftermath of the game, but a worrying return of fan violence seemed to be on the cards.

In January of 2022, Jermaine Jenas declared ‘we’re in the dark ages’ when Matty Cash and Lucas Digne were struck by things thrown from the crowd during Aston Villa’s clash with Everton at Goodison Park. In the months that preceded it, all of Matt Lowton, Antonio Rudiger and Sergi Canos had been hit by items thrown at them by supporters. Police figures showed a 36% rise in disorder during the first half of the football season, with missiles thrown from the crowd joining the lighting of flares and smoke bombs as part of the offences.

That rise was in comparison to the 2019-2020 season, with the figures also showing that there was more policing of games in the 2021-2022 campaign. The number of games in which more police were believed to be required was up from 46% to 66%, with arrests also rising from 547 to 802. The question is, was the increased presence of police as a result of fan behaviour, or was the fan behaviour due to the increased risk of police? There are certainly sections of football supporters that behave as though they need policing when more police are present.

Part of the problem is that the top police office in England at the time, Chief Constable Mark Roberts, consistently acts as though football supporters are criminals that need to be policed like animals. Evidence suggests that when you police football fans in such a manner, rather than treating them as human beings attending a sporting event, then they will behave as you think they’re going to. He repeatedly said that football supporters should not be allowed to have a drink in their seats, for example, in spite of the fact that rugby fans or tennis spectators are allowed to do so.

Alcohol, he said, was ‘freely available in concourses before and after games and at half-time’, little realising that this tends to cause people that want to have a drink to binge their alcohol consumption because they know that they’re not allowed to drink once they are in their seat and ‘within sight of the pitch’. Football supporters are routinely treated in a manner that would not be accepted for any other person trying to enjoy an event, such as concert goers or people at a music gig, to say nothing of lovers of other sports.

Liverpool In Paris

Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Just as Hillsborough is the most noteworthy example of how football fans were treated in the 1980s, so too is the manner in which Liverpool supporters were treated in Paris in 2022 a good example of how poor policing is a big part of the problem in football. The Merseyside club were playing Real Madrid in the final of the Champions League, which was being hosted by the Stade de France in the Saint Denis area of the city. The match was originally supposed to be in Saint Petersburg, but was moved to France after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

The policing of the event was atrocious, with the French police having prepared for the arrival of English hooligans but greeted by football supporters merely hoping to watch their team play in a match. In spite of the fact that the Liverpool fans were calm and behaved in an entirely appropriate manner, French police threw tear gas into crowds and pepper-sprayed supporters. Kick-off was delayed by 36 minutes, with UEFA choosing to put a sign up in the stadium saying that it was due to the late arrival of fans, in spite of the fact that most had been there for hours before the match was due to get underway.

Following the path set out by the police and politicians in the wake of the Hillsborough Disaster, the French police said that the problems were caused by fake tickets. They claimed that 35,000 people turned up with fake tickets, in spite of the fact that all evidence showed this to be complete nonsense. It was also claimed that Real Madrid fans had no problems, even though Real Madrid themselves asked for an explanation about why the club’s fans were treated so appallingly by the French police and had issues getting into the stadium.

Is It Supporters Or Policing?

Paris police in riot gear during yellow vest protest – kriss_toff, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Though there can be no doubt that a small minority of supporters have behaved appallingly in recent times, the reality is that the rise in incidents at football matches is as much to do with poor policing as it is anything else. Football fans are no different to lovers of other sports, yet they are policed in an entirely different way. Rugby fans aren’t kettled into small spaces or pepper-sprayed when they go to watch matches, nor are those at horse racing meetings routinely banned from drinking alcohol whilst watching races take place.

The idea that we are returning to the bad old days of the 1980s is true, only insomuch as the police are using the poor behaviour of a few to treat the majority like criminals. A more sensible approach to policing football matches, in which those in attendance are human beings, would doubtless see a decrease in poor behaviour. Though flares and smoke bombs have seen an increase, as have pitch invasions, the vast majority of football fans merely want to be treated like people paying a lot of money for the right to attend and watch games.