‘Football was a pariah activity’: The Rise and Supposed Fall of English Hooliganism
“A slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people who deter decent folk from turning up.”
That was how The Sunday Times described football in 1985 in the wake of the Bradford City stadium disaster.
Valley Parade’s hazardous wooden grandstands enabled a huge fire to spread throughout the stadium, killing 56 fans.
The 1980s was the nadir of the modern English game. Dreadfully unsafe stadiums, incompetent policing and organised violence was prevalent throughout football.
Large ‘firms’ of troublemakers at clubs were common. England was so associated with hooliganism it became known as the ‘English disease’. In the 1988/89 season, there were 6,185 football-related arrests across England’s four divisions.
Compare that to thirty years on, where there were just 1,381 arrests in the 2018/19 season despite significant increases in attendances and stadium capacities.
Yet the past two years has seen increased concern about fan disorder in the men’s game.
Football related arrests from 1 July to 31 December 2021 rose by 47% compared to the same period in 2019 pre-lockdown. Cheshire Constabulary’s Chief Constable Mark Roberts, who also leads the UK’s Football Policing Unit, has warned that Britain is facing its worst increase in football disorder since those apparent ‘dark days’ of the 1980s. Last season saw high profile pitch invasions at the Etihad and City Ground, while the Euro 2020 final was marred by ticketless fans storming Wembley.
Too often discussions around this subject treat football fans as a homogenous social group, who behave completely abnormally from the society they come from. This series will seek to identify the root causes of fan disorder and place it within the context of Britain, and the world, today.
In this first piece, we will go back to that 1980s nadir to examine the activities of these ‘slum people’ and why their prominence in football fell dramatically over the next twenty years.
Part two: ‘They could be from any walk of life’: Understanding the Modern Football Troublemaker
Part three: ‘It’s descended into carnage’: Spectator Culture and Policing Across Sport
Part four: ‘There is a clear stigma’: How concerning is football fan disorder — and how is it best tackled?
For Riaz Khan, football hooliganism was an antidote to the troubled circumstances he found himself in.
He describes his hometown of 1980s Leicester as “very, very racist. The BNP had their headquarters here. Racism was a daily occurrence.”
Khan, like other Asians in Leicester, found a sense of belonging in a firm, something which had been eluded him throughout school and college.
He joined the Young Trendy Squad (YTS).
The “camaraderie” of a day out was everything, more important than the football itself (which Khan would not take a serious interest in until later years).
There were “plenty of hairy moments” when in the YTS. This included being chased by hordes of Aston Villa fans outside Villa Park after an away match.
“There were hundreds of them. I thought, ‘that’s it, we’re dead.’” Eventually Khan and the others found a house that was having an extension built and used the bricks as missiles.
“We started throwing these bricks at the Villa fans. We were holding them at bay, we thought we got them. Then the bricks started flying back.”
A further chase ensued, with Khan’s brother narrowly avoiding a brick to the head. The YTS were soon exhausted. They were “saved” by the police, who arrived just as they stopped running.
Michael Layton was on the other side of the divide. As Detective Sergeant of West Midlands police, he was responsible for managing Operation Red Card. This was a taskforce aiming to infiltrate and take down the Zulu Warriors, an infamous firm of Birmingham City supporters.
Hooligan groups were similarly diverse in the activities and profiles of their members. According to Khan, there were “several splinter squads” amongst Leicester’s fanbase that fell under the “umbrella” of the Baby Squad.
In Layton’s work studying the Zulu Warriors, he found that the group’s membership had different approaches to troublemaking.
At the “core” of the “apple” were those who “rarely went to matches but were involved in planning violence and were not afraid to get up close and personal using weapons such as coshes and Stanley knives and leaving calling cards.”
He goes on to explain that the “middle” of the apple was filled with “up and comers” hoping to join the “core”.
The majority were part of the ‘skin’. For Layton, these were “the Saturday drinkers, the fantasists, and those who simply wanted to feel as if they belonged to the tribe.” Some of these “Saturday warriors” had good jobs and would refrain from physical fighting.
There was no ‘one size fits all’ to a 1980s football hooligan. While some were skinhead racists who carried deadly weapons, others were young men who enjoyed a punch up on a day out. And of course, many football fans attended matches during this time without any involvement in violence. Many matches saw no violence at all.
Even within a firm there could be a multitude of different groups and sub-cultures, who had different codes of conduct. But the prevalence of violence at football matches cannot be questioned. Given that football grounds were overwhelmingly male and working class at this time, hooligans naturally reflected that demographic.
Speaking to the BBC last year, former Manchester United captain Gary Neville recalled his father protecting him and brother Phil from bust-ups on the terraces.
“There were quite often fights on the forecourts. It was not an environment for the family.”
Former gymnast and now broadcaster Gabby Logan, whose dad Terry Yorath played for Leeds in the 1980s, similarly recalled the “threatening air” at Elland Road to The Athletic. “There were a lot of skirmishes in the crowd. It was a very hostile atmosphere and I just didn’t like it anymore. I felt like I wasn’t safe.”
This anecdotal evidence was reflected in attendances, as violence kept spectators away from football stadiums. Throughout the 1960s, average attendances in England’s top flight were 30,000 or higher. By the late 1980s, that had fell to just over 20,000.
Football violence would soon be curtailed however by multiple, almost simultaneous-occurring events.
Stringent legislation made it much easier to find and imprison hooligans. Previously, the worst a troublemaker could get after a fight, according to Khan, was a small fine. Firms effectively had little to fear from law enforcement.
The Football Spectators Act 1989 changed that entirely. Football banning orders were introduced, barring known troublemakers from stadiums for up to 10 years. When faced with these threats, combined with increased CCTV and growing awareness of the damage he was causing, Khan and his friends thought “fuck this” and threw themselves into the rave, ecstasy filled youth culture of the 1990s.
This, along with policing such as Operation Red Card, made hooligans fearful of the law according to Layton. “Football hooligans like to operate within the shadows of anonymity. Once that was stripped away it left them feeling vulnerable and exposed.”
The best performing English clubs were also punished in the aftermath of the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster. After 39 Juventus fans were killed after a charge by Liverpool fans, all English clubs were banned from European competition for five years, with Liverpool banned for six.
Then there was the 1990 Taylor Report which recommended that major football grounds in the top two divisions should be converted to all-seater stadiums. Standing terraces could enable ease of movement throughout the stadium, making fights more likely.
Finally, the creation of the Premier League saw football promoted in a completely different light and facilitated much greater diversity in match going crowds. Jim White was one of the founder members of The Independent in 1986. He claims that, due to its association with violence, football was considered a “pariah activity” in many newsrooms and he had to keep his love of the game a secret.
“It was pushed by the media,” says White, “that football was connected solely to hooliganism.”
That changed when Rupert Murdoch’s BkyB acquired a £304m deal for television rights of England’s top flight. Murdoch also owned The Times and The Sun, which he used to put a new positive spin on football. The Sunday Times went from calling football a slum sport to being one of its fiercest cheerleaders.
“[Football} now suited the financial purposes of those who were in charge, whereas it didn’t in the ‘80s.
“To promote it, they made Sky look like the sexiest thing. Huge spaces were given to football in a way that hadn’t been seen before, and other newspapers had to keep up.”
While White acknowledges that hooliganism did reduce from the 1990s onwards, the lack of media attention on the subject made it seem like it had disappeared completely.
“It was not in the interests of the game, or those promoting it, to talk about [hooliganism] more. It was happening, it was still going on. But it was almost kind of behind closed doors activity.”
Layton too acknowledges that his work eradicated the issue completely. “It was a very successful tactic at the time, but it didn’t eradicate the problem completely.”
No longer a source of shame for the mainstream, by 2010s English football was the richest and most watched league in the world. The 2011–12 season saw the lowest number of football related arrests on record, leading one commentator to declare that “hooliganism, which was once considered a cancer, is now more like a cold sore.” Media depictions of English hooliganism were largely restricted through violent films and autobiographies of reformed troublemakers.
Hooliganism was a prominent part of the English game in the 1980s which, through a combination of genuine reduction and newspaper narratives, fell out of view dramatically. Understanding what drove people to hooliganism, let alone reporting on it, was no longer on the agenda.
