Football’s new breed of hooligans heading for the Euros

It’s unfashionable to speak well of football policing. To do so, some fans will say, is to be a cheerleader for a presence which intrudes on the simple pleasures of the game. 

As if Home Office data showing football disorder at a nine-year high were immaterial. As if the casual, barely reported acts of brutality were of no consequence. A man in his 60s was attacked by a teenager before the first of the Norwich/Leeds play-off games. An ambulance worker was assaulted at the same fixture.

It would have been good to have had some of the deniers there with me on a warm Spring day in Crewe a few weeks back, when, with fairly local neighbours Wrexham in town, Cheshire Police allowed me to be alongside them, to see what policing a ‘high risk’ game entails.

Such was the threat of serious disorder, the first of what would be 200 – yes, truly, 200 – officers working the League Two game that day were assembling in the sunshine at 9am, around the back of a former college building. Their conversations, taking place over the din of caged police dogs, were cut short when they packed into a lecture theatre for an operational briefing.

It was the tactical strategy, even more than the scale of the operation, which struck me. The bywords were engagement and, though police would not put it this way, appeasement. ‘Be alert, but engage,’ ‘bronze commander’ Inspector James Wilson told colleagues in his briefing.

Football violence defies logic. A group of Wrexham fans beat one of their own senseless a few years ago because he couldn’t convince them he wasn’t a fan visiting Torquay. Some perverted and imagined sense of rivalry saw Wrexham and Oldham fans also punching the hell out of each other, not so long back.

Hence the intensity among Wilson and his officers, positioned in Crewe Alex’s stadium control box, nerve centre of the task of keeping rival fans apart. But at the sharp end were police ‘spotters’ – a kind of diplomatic envoy on the front line, whose role is to befriend and understand fans, identify those who threaten peace and head them off.

As they worked, Cheshire’s officers described to me a relatively new breed of teenage football fan which has contributed to much of the rising levels of disorder since the pandemic.

The prevalence of cocaine is certainly contributing. There’s a reason why a new film about modern football hooliganism is called ‘Marching Powder.’ ‘But there’s an attention-seeking dimension to it,’ says one of the officers, who spends much of his time on events which pose a risk to public order. 

‘Some of these kids want to publish images of themselves fighting on Instagram. You’re talking about 15 to 18-year-olds who’ve never been in a fight, dancing around each other, not knowing what to do when they provoke a fight and get themselves punched. They’re the ones who need the police when that happens.’

It was striking how similar the German approach to policing seemed, when the head of the UK Football Policing Unit, Chief Constable Mark Roberts, invited two of that country’s officers to speak at a Euros security media briefing at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a few weeks back.

The mere presence of the Germans in the room revealed how far removed the policing of this event is from Euro 2016, where the uncompromising French cops simply rolled out water cannons and unleashed tear gas on offending supporters.

The Germans are bending over backwards to help any fans – intoxicated, cocaine-addled, or otherwise – to avoid arrest, welcoming with open arms the presence of British ‘spotters’ at the tournament.

But this tolerance has its limits. When I asked one of the German officers about the inclination of an intellectually-challenged English minority to sing continually about ‘Ten German Bombers’ and the ‘RAF from England’ which ‘shot them down’, he spoke of the need to ‘respect our country’ and cited penalties for breaches of public order, which can involve being marched to a cashpoint to pay a fine. The southern German states are broadly seen as the most conservative and least tolerant.

Making the Nazi salute is punishable by imprisonment in Germany, as is the use of the swastika, another of the German officers later explained to me. ‘You must understand that this is because of our history,’ he said. Setting an Israeli flag alight in Germany can also bring imprisonment.

The job of those policing England games at the Euros is made no easier by a court’s unfathomable decision to cut short a four-year banning order imposed on serial hooligan and trouble-maker Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League, freeing him to travel to the tournament and stoke violence.

But in Germany, as in Crewe, dealing with teenage attention-seekers from Britain seems the bigger challenge. The most senior operational British police officer on the ground at the Euros, Chief Superintendent Colette Rose, says what happens in the next month has much to do with good parenting. ‘We would urge parents to have a conversation with those kids about behaviour when travelling abroad,’ she says, ‘We will be there to help English supporters to go and enjoy it and not get into trouble.’

Diplomacy and engagement helped, that day in Crewe. There was no serious disorder. But the stakes, like the sun, will be higher in the weeks ahead. Fans who find themselves under arrest in Germany can’t say they haven’t been warned. They will only have themselves to blame.

MontyLitFest welcomes you! 

Montgomery, in mid Wales, is the most idyllic of little towns, with its brewery, cider mill and – if you’re still standing – a wonderful literary festival, MontyLitFest, where I’m privileged to be speaking on Sunday about the book, called ‘Tinseltown’, which I’ve written about my club and town – Wrexham. 

You might assume that the club’s ascent under Hollywood owners is a fairytale, pure and simple, but it’s become more complicated than that. It’s not a mere bed of roses. Join us for the discussion and the cider in those beautiful surrounds this weekend. Montylitfest.com.

A wonderful antidote to the dreary isolationism of post-Brexit Britain 

Neither Jude Bellingham nor Jadon Sancho set the Wembley stage alight, but to see young English players integral to both sides in the Champions League final seemed such a wonderful antidote to the dreary isolationism of post-Brexit Britain. 

We didn’t need our clubs in the final to command a place on the cosmopolitan European stage.

Three Lions could take note from classy Oranje touch 

The Dutch national team have class when it comes to knowing where the beating heart of its football resides. It’s become a tradition that when the national team squad assemble for a tournament, they gather for a photoshoot wearing the jersey of their first club. They did so last week. 

Were the English FA to do the same, it would be a reminder of the modest clubs, like Carlisle United, Exeter City, Barnsley, Hereford United and QPR which have delivered up the talents on which England’s summer just might rest. Players and clubs below!

(Carlisle – Jarrod Branthwaite; Exeter – Ollie Watkins; Barnsley – John Stones; Hereford – Jarrod Bowen; QPR – Eberechi Eze).