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Long article, the below title says what it’s about :
Investigating the rise in football fan violence: missiles, cocaine and political agendas
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Kick-off is still 90 minutes away but Stoke City are ready.
The car parks are open, the sniffer dogs have done their rounds and safety supervisor Craig Burton has just briefed the 100 or so stewards who will be working in the Bet365 Stadium’s South Stand.
“Ladies and gents, what you do is amazing — remember that,” he says. “Success for us is everyone going home, safe and sound, having had a good time.”
Burton has been doing this for more than five years and before that, he spent 30 years as a copper on this patch. He is a Stoke City fan and loves his job. Even this season, despite it being… well, harder than most.
Not as bad as at the start of his career, when he had to break up fights between 200 or more fully grown hooligans, but worse than the seasons immediately before COVID-19 arrived and clubs had to shut their doors for 18 months. For reasons nobody can entirely pin down, some of the fans who have come through the turnstiles this season have forgotten how to behave.
Burton’s boss is Stoke City’s head of safety operations Rob Killingworth and he has been looking after fans since 2008.
“This is been the most difficult season so far,” he tells The Athletic. “Tonight should be fine — although I’ve said that before — but this will be only the second police-free game we’ve had. Usually, we have six to eight of those a year — I’m 30 per cent over my police budget.”
By police-free, Killingworth means he has not asked Staffordshire Police for extra bodies in the stadium beyond the four who attend every game, two from the local force and two with the visitors, who for this evening’s Championship fixture are Swansea.
When he gave his pre-match briefing to Burton and the rest of the supervisors, Killingworth told them they were expecting about 300 to make the trip from south Wales for the midweek match.
“Swansea are generally well behaved,” he said. “They’ve got a few who will drink to excess but that’s the same as everyone else and they will respond to fair and firm stewarding.
“Remember, we steward on behaviour, not reputation. Be vigilant but don’t overreact. Keep the responses positive and professional.”
He then reminded them of last Saturday, when League One side Wigan brought a big following to Stoke for a fourth-round FA Cup tie. There is no history of animosity between the clubs and the Lancashire side are not known for being particularly troublesome. But it was a long day for Killingworth’s team.
Two home fans were ejected for blocking the stairs and being aggressive to stewards in the Bet365’s liveliest section, Block 38. Two more were arrested for an alleged assault on two female fans, and then seven were arrested outside the stadium for fighting, which left one police officer injured. The away fans also smuggled in bottles of alcohol and let off flares in the concourse and stands.
“A tough crowd but we dealt with it,” says Killingworth.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, you might have expected the trouble at Stoke-Wigan to be noteworthy beyond the Potteries. But when the national picture for crowd disorder seems so bleak, nine arrests at a game in Stoke is hardly man-bites-dog stuff.
On the same day, the League One match between Morecambe and Bolton Wanderers at the Mazuma Stadium was stopped for 10 minutes after a Bolton substitute was allegedly racially abused by a home supporter. When Bolton later scored to make it 1-1, some of their fans came onto the pitch, a criminal offence. Five were arrested for offences that included being drunk and disorderly, pitch encroachment and assaulting a police officer.
On Wednesday, Bolton announced it had issued 14 banning orders to individuals aged between 15 and 57 for “incidents of disorder and anti-social behaviour” at three of its recent games, including the visit to Morecambe. Bolton have now banned more than 30 fans this season.
Going back to Saturday, there was what AFC Wimbledon described as “significant disorder” at London Bridge railway station after their game against Charlton Athletic, while two Rotherham United supporters were arrested for invading the pitch and assaulting an Accrington Stanley player after a controversial penalty was awarded in their League One clash.
And then on Sunday, live on BBC television, a 19-year-old Leicester City fan climbed over the advertising hoardings at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground and started swinging punches at three Forest players while they celebrated a goal in their 4-1 FA Cup triumph. On Tuesday, he was charged with three counts of assault and going onto the pitch and will be back before the magistrates later this month.
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Nottingham Forest players were attacked by a Leicester fan in the FA Cup match (Photo: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)
A bad weekend, then, but the weekend before was no better. There were flares, missiles and vile abuse thrown at games at Crewe, Millwall, Tranmere and Wycombe.
“Following multiple incidents of inappropriate and reckless crowd behaviour on Saturday, the EFL will work with the relevant authorities and respective clubs to ensure those responsible are held to account,” said a statement from the English Football League the following Monday.
“Any form of anti-social behaviour is unacceptable and whilst these instances only represent a very small section of people attending matches, the mindless few who choose to behave in this way are only demonstrating a complete lack of respect for the clubs they claim to support. Our message is simple – those intent on causing trouble are not welcome at our matches and we ask you to ‘Stay Away’.”
The statement went on to note that the timing was particularly disappointing as a break in the Premier League calendar meant that weekend was a chance for EFL clubs to shine. That is not, however, to suggest depressing headlines about crowd trouble have only been an EFL problem this season. The weekend before, Aston Villa’s Matty Cash and Lucas Digne were floored by objects thrown by Everton fans at Goodison Park.
Two of the incidents listed above — the pitch incursion and assault before Accrington’s penalty, which was missed, and the missiles thrown at Crewe — involved Rotherham fans.
“I’ve been the custodian of this club for 14 years now and in that time we’ve been a very well-behaved club,” club chairman Tony Stewart tells The Athletic. “It’s a good fanbase, they don’t boo the manager, they get behind the team.
“But since COVID and coming back, we’ve witnessed, like one or two other clubs, some incidents we’re not used to. I never condone anyone going on the pitch and it’s something we’re not going to get used to. We will eradicate it. We’ll put the bans in place to make sure that if they want to do things like that then they’ll stop watching Rotherham United for life.”
Stewart has owned the club since 2008 and the Yorkshire side are currently top of League One.
“I’m not embarrassed but I am annoyed,” he says. “These incidents overshadow the football. We’re not talking about football, we’re talking about the actions of supporters. I’ve been very proud to be the custodian of this football club for so long so I’m hurt by it.”
It is half-time at Stoke and it has been largely incident-free on and off the pitch.
There was some unease in the control room when stewards noticed a Swansea fan trying to do their job for them in the concourse below the South Stand. He was wearing a Security Industry Authority badge but had no credentials for the game and Stoke’s safety team had no idea who he was.
After watching him on CCTV for a while — and they really can watch you — a supervisor was dispatched from the control room to have a quiet word. No harm done. It turned out he is a regular presence at Swansea away games and was only trying to help.
Then several messages came through to the control room at once about a flare being let off in the away end’s toilets. Again, stewards and the two police from South Wales were sent to the area to see what was going on but it all blew over pretty quickly.
And that is what most people in the football industry think will happen with the increase in anti-social behaviour at games. Most but not all.
Mark Roberts became chief constable of Cheshire Constabulary last year, having previously held senior roles with the police forces in Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire, but he is best known for his role as the national lead on football policing.
It is a position that has given him a platform to speak regularly about the need for football to be vigilant against any return to the bad old days of the 1970s and ’80s, when the game was dogged by hooliganism. It is a platform he has not been afraid or shy to use.
Last month, depending on who you talk to, Roberts’ UK Football Policing Unit either published its mid-season report on disorder at football games to focus complacent minds on a growing problem or it effectively leaked unverified, raw data to fit a nakedly political agenda.
For Roberts, the numbers speak for themselves.
They show that incidents of disorder reported at matches have grown from 560 in the first half of the 2019-20 season, the last season with fans in stadiums, to 759 this season, an increase of 36 per cent. Almost half of all games this season have had at least one incident, as opposed to a third in 2019-20.
These increases are particularly marked in the Championship and National League, where the numbers are up 58 per cent and 56 per cent.
Arrests are up, too, with 802 in the first half of the season, compared to 547 in the same period two seasons ago, an increase of 47 per cent. And these are just for what are known as football-specific “schedule 1” offences. If you include non-schedule offences, such as the possession of Class A drugs, the number increases to 901. We shall come back to that.
Roberts also points out that these numbers actually come from fewer games than in 2019-20 because of the spate of COVID-related postponements we had in December and January.
And, as Stoke’s Killingworth can attest, police are attending more games this season, with additional police inside grounds at two-thirds of all fixtures, whereas it was under half in 2019-20.
At face value, Roberts is right. Those numbers appear to back up what The Athletic has heard from clubs up and down the country, and seen with its own eyes. In the course of researching this story and others, we have not heard from a single person involved in putting on professional football matches who does not think the behaviour of some fans has deteriorated.
Where a great many of them, however, disagree with Roberts is on to what extent the behaviour has deteriorated, why it has done so and what should be done about it.
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Lucas Digne and Matty Cash are hit by missiles thrown by the Everton fans at Goodison Park (Photo: Neville Williams/Aston Villa FC via Getty Images)
Owen West is a former superintendent at West Yorkshire Police but is now a consultant to Enable UK, a research project that brings together academics, clubs and police forces to find innovative approaches to crowd safety, and a senior lecturer at Edge Hill University.
“There are a few things going on here,” says West. “The first is Mark Roberts and the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU) have marginalised themselves from the rest of the industry because of their constant claims the world is going to hell in a handcart.
“They’ve cried wolf so many times they’re just ignored now. Roberts was ignored after his ridiculous call for neutral venues in Project Restart, he was ignored on safe standing and he was ignored on the pilots for the relaxation of the alcohol ban. The release of these statistics, which demonise all fans, is a strategic move to regain the initiative.”
West was the only person willing to go on the record with comments like this but these opinions are far from unique. He also questions how much anyone should read into the UKFPU statistics, as “context is everything and football arrest stats have always been very vague… an incident can be almost anything”.
“I always take the UKFPU reports with a large dose of salt, as Roberts has been using them to claim it’s all going to rat shit for years,” says West. “And people in the game have just stopped listening to him.”
Geoff Pearson is a professor of law at the University of Manchester and an expert on football crowds and policing.
“Arrest statistics are notoriously unreliable in terms of using them as a basis for wider judgments,” explains Pearson. “They usually tell us more about police resources, targets and priorities than criminality. After all, we’ve been told by Mark Roberts not to read too much into the falling arrest statistics of recent years, so it would seem odd to do the reverse now they are rising.
“We also shouldn’t be surprised to see arrests rising when we know more police are being deployed at football matches. If you have more police at games, you are going to get more arrests.”
Roberts strongly disagrees.
“It would be a real folly to poke holes in the stats,” the chief constable tells The Athletic. “They have been collected by police officers and the methodology has not changed. If you don’t like the message, you are just burying your head in the sand.
“Yes, there are more police at games but that is because clubs are requesting more police, and they are doing so because there is an increase in incidents. The number of games with an incident has increased 36 per cent this season. That is a fact.
“We’re seeing more pyro, more public disorder, more drug use, more attacks on officers, more missiles thrown, more pitch incursions. These are real increases. Clubs don’t like paying for police. They would not be asking for our help if they didn’t need it.”
It is a message he has been repeating to media outlets for the last fortnight. On Tuesday, the day of the Stoke-Swansea game, BBC Radio 5 Live aired two, almost identical, long interviews with him.
He used both to hammer home the messages he believes everyone involved in the policing of football, including the government, needs to hear: hooliganism is back, if it ever really went away, it is being fuelled by rampant cocaine use, football clubs are not paying their fair share of the bills for policing matches and it is “madness” to even consider relaxing the ban on the consumption of alcohol while watching a game.
Stoke wake up in the second half, Swansea do not, and the home side claim a comfortable 3-0 win.
With a small crowd expected for this one, Killingworth had plenty of room to play with in terms of where he put his “seg line”, the no man’s land of empty seats, netting and stewards that keeps away fans away from most clubs’ liveliest set of home fans. In Stoke’s case, the previously mentioned Block 38.
They get their own slide — Killingworth’s “favourite” — in the pre-match briefing and the club is trying to resolve the issues that keep occurring in that part of the ground without tarring all fans with the same brush or muffling the loudest part of the ground. Block 38 generated most of the atmosphere on Tuesday and apart from a few “wanker” gestures across the expanse of two blocks of seats, there really was nothing for Swansea fans to get annoyed about. And they gestured back. It was fine.
But there have been far more serious issues this season.
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Stoke City fans at the Bet365 Stadium (Photo: Adam Fradgley/West Bromwich Albion FC via Getty Images)
The local paper, the Stoke Sentinel, contained a story on Tuesday about a 20-year-old Stoke fan who had just been given a five-year banning order that will keep him out of all football grounds in the UK for five years and when England play away, he will have to hand his passport into the local police station.
Introduced in 1989, football banning orders are similar to civil orders, similar to anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), specifically designed to tackle violent disorder at football matches. They last from three to 10 years and if you breach one — by trying to attend a game, for example — you face an automatic custodial sentence of up to six months, an unlimited fine, or both.
Stoke City’s designated football officer (DFO) Ben Greensides and the club itself had tried to warn this particular fan to “get off their radar”. After being kicked out of one game for fighting, they visited his house to give him a friendly warning. When he did it again, they called him into the club for another warning. But he did it again and again. Greensides only requested a three-year ban but the magistrate looked at his rap sheet and gave him five.
Cocaine was not a factor in that case but the drug du jour came up time and time again in conversation with police and stewards at the game. The Athletic has also spoken to DFOs at other clubs who tell similar stories — tales of there being so much cocaine in a pub, queue or toilet that the sniffer dogs do not know where to start.
When the police sent a dog into one of the toilets at the Bet365 Stadium a few weeks ago, it had the deterrent effect they were hoping for. After the game, cleaners found £500 in notes stuffed behind one of the cisterns, presumably stashed there by a dealer in the hope that he could retrieve it later.
At present, the possession of cocaine is not a trigger offence for a football banning order. Roberts has been lobbying the Home Office to change that, as he believes it is one of the root causes of the deterioration in behaviour at matches.
“It’s a significant problem, a contributory problem,” he told the BBC on Tuesday. “It is one of the factors that’s leading to the increase in disorder we are seeing this season.”
He then cited research conducted by Dr Martha Newson, an expert on group bonding and social cohesion.
However, Newson’s support for his argument, that football has an acute problem that requires urgent legislative action, only goes so far.
As she explained to the BBC: “Cocaine use is on the up but that’s not just in football, that’s everywhere, that’s across classes and industries. It’s not appropriate to make a moral panic about football specifically. As it often does, football is holding up a mirror to wider society.”
Several other sources have also pointed out that possession of cocaine is already a criminal offence and if Roberts or any other police officer wanted to arrest somebody for it, they can. These same sources have also noted that one of the criteria the Home Office uses to allocate funding for policing football is the number of football banning orders forces achieve.
“Cocaine is an easy arrest,” says one senior industry source. “You are bang to rights and the paperwork is easy. Of course, Roberts wants to add cocaine to the list of criteria for something that is linked to his funding. Unfortunately, for him, he has no evidence to prove that cocaine use is up at football or it is the cause of more violence. And that is what banning orders are intended to tackle.”
Roberts rejects the idea he is using cocaine busts, or any other argument, to boost his budget, although he points out that clubs pay police forces about £7 million a season for the officers who work inside stadiums but nothing for those who work outside the clubs’ footprint on public roads, even if those roads are closed to manage traffic because of the match. This is costing British forces £40 million a year.
Roberts sees this as a subsidy for an industry that can afford to pay players’ agents almost 10 times that amount every year. The Premier League, on the other hand, would point out its clubs alone pay £3.6 billion in tax a year, at least some of which should find its way into police budgets.
So what is happening then?
Football might not like the messenger but Roberts is not wrong about the obnoxious behaviour of a small but significant minority of fans.
“There has been a general deterioration in behaviour at matches,” says Pearson. “For the first time in a long time, I am hearing the same things from police forces, safety officers and fans’ representatives around the country and I think there are several possible explanations.
“The first is related to COVID and the fact people were locked down and cooped up. They missed the outlet that football provides — the carnivalesque element and the opportunity to vent — so when it came back they hit the party a bit harder than usual.
“This was part of the story at the Euro 2020 final and it means common-or-garden games are being treated like crunch matches. You would think that this should settle down.”
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England fans before the Euro 2020 final at Wembley (Photo: Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images)
But Pearson believes there are more tangible explanations, too. For example, there has been a turnover in who is going to matches, with some older or more vulnerable fans, who do not want to attend large events again yet, being replaced by young men, and it is mainly men, who have not yet learned how to behave at games.
This theory came up several times at Stoke, where several stewards talked about a group of teenage fans who just behave “recklessly”. This could, of course, be related to cocaine but it could also be age-old teenage daftness, combined with strong lager and a desire for a moment of infamy on social media.
Another theory relates to the impact COVID-19 had on stewarding and policing.
“If you speak to any DFO, they’ll tell you good policing is based on relationships you build up over time,” says Pearson. “They will know who they need to speak to and negotiate with to de-escalate things; they’ll spot trouble before it happens.
“But those relationships were broken when football went behind closed doors. The police have lost that intelligence and need to rebuild it, but they’re doing so while they’re rebuilding their resources.
“All of that applies to stewarding, too. With no football for 18 months, the industry lost loads of good people and that is something you hear from pubs and nightclubs, as well. Those guys are now more likely to be delivering for Amazon than working games on Saturday afternoons.”
Burton made the same point after he finished his briefing. He explained that Stoke had lost about half of the 240 stewards they would typically bring in from agencies. This means the average age of a part-time steward at Stoke has fallen from 40 to 25, and the club is having to use twice as many firms to supply staff. There is a lot of training to be done.
“It’s true that clubs are struggling to recruit and retain good stewards, and that has degraded their ability to control what happens inside grounds,” says West.
“What I would say to this, though, is you know who these people are: it’s the same fans, in the same place, at the same time. What’s your strategy for dealing with them? You can be sure if they were meeting up to stab people every Saturday, we’d do something about it but because it’s football we don’t.”
To be fair to Roberts, however, he says this is exactly what he is doing and it is why he is calling on the EFL, Football Association, National League and Premier League to work more closely with him on finding strategies to address the situation before it gets any worse.
Nobody The Athletic has spoken to thinks industry-wide dialogue, involving police, local councils and relevant experts, is a bad idea. It is just that some have lost confidence in Roberts’ ability to offer anything constructive to the debate.
They would point to the claim that he made twice during BBC interviews on Tuesday — that the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) is “an apologist for hooligans” — as an example of his failure to engage properly with fans.
“We were talking about a deterioration in behaviour, particularly among a section of young fans, even before COVID,” says FSA chief executive Kevin Miles.
“As ever, it’s a very small minority of fans but that does not make it any less serious. And we have skin in the game because the main victims of this uptick in bad behaviour are our members. But what we are endeavouring to do is ensure whatever measures are introduced are effective and proportionate.
“Many of these issues are societal problems and they will not be fixed by football-specific responses. As for the idea that we are apologists for hooliganism, well, that is just laughable.”
With a 180-mile journey ahead of them, Swansea’s fans are in no mood to linger after the game. There is a short delay while one “disorientated” supporter finds his way out of the stand but the two official supporters’ coaches are rolling out of the car park within 15 minutes of the final whistle.
It has been the quiet night Killingworth predicted, with the flare in the toilet being the only incident of note and no arrests. And it is worth pointing out that even this season, with all the problems discussed above, there is only one arrest every other game.
But Killingworth is already thinking about the next home game, the visit of Birmingham City on Saturday, February 19. In fact, he is holding a “tabletop exercise” with his senior stewards on the Tuesday evening before the match to make sure “we’ve all got the same hymn sheet”. A tabletop exercise is a meeting to discuss simulated emergencies.
One wag asks him if there will be a buffet. “A packet of biscuits, mate, I’ve got no money,” says Killingworth.
No money for sandwiches, perhaps, but they will be paid to attend that meeting and he is expecting at least 60 to turn up. There is no sign of any complacency at Stoke but equally, there is no indication of panic.
Everyone can see the problems, they might disagree on the cause or which one is the most significant, but there is a determination to find solutions that either weed out what one steward called the “one per cent we spend 99 per cent of the time worrying about” or persuade them to change their ways.
As the second half unfolded, Stoke’s supporter liaison officer Anthony Emmerson popped in to say “hello”. He has noticed the same things as everyone else but he has also heard from more fans who are willing to speak up about bad behaviour, fans who are fed up with abusive language or beer being thrown around.
“That is how this will settle down — the sensible fans won’t stand for it. It’s happening already.”
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