A song for Europe
Does a flurry of headlines about the treatment of football fans at European matches herald a change in the mood music, or is it just the same old tune?
Recognition that the treatment of fans at matches in European club competitions is too often unacceptable is growing. Fans of English clubs in particular have had to deal with some disgraceful treatment over many years, but the legacy of 1980s hooliganism has too often meant our concerns were brushed aside.
Recent articles in The Independent and The Times (the latter paywalled) have given the supporter experience in Europe, something I’ve written about here before, a wider airing. Those articles were prompted by a new report that gathered fan experiences from games since 2020, and which singled out Spain, France and Turkey as places where the treatment of fans was particularly bad. It is positive that what fans have been saying regularly over a long period about treatment on European awaydays is gaining traction, but the source of the latest flurry of interest prompts some questions.
The latest batch of headlines were prompted by a survey carried out by the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU) at the behest of its Chief Constable, Mark Roberts. Roberts’s name rings alarm bells among fans and researchers who have been involved in work around crowd behaviour, and it’s safe to say he’s not widely regarded as being on the progressive wing of policing. He achieved some notoriety by claiming the reintroduction of safe standing would lead to an increase in drinking, drug taking, missile throwing and racism. Unseated Armageddon seems, so far at least, to have been averted.
Roberts has previously been dismissive of football supporter organisations, which is one reason why his apparent willingness to work alongside them raised eyebrows. Another was that Football Supporters Europe, the pan-European fan organisation, has carried out a regular in-depth survey of away fan experiences for some years. Last January, FSE and UEFA signed a Memorandum of Understanding formalising their working relationship and setting as one key priority “initiatives to safeguard and enhance fan experience while attending football matches in UEFA club and national team competitions”.
Given that there is copious information already available, gathered by a body that is working with the organiser of European competitions, on the poor treatment of fans – English and otherwise – at venues across Europe, it’s reasonable to wonder why the head of the UKFPU has decided to replicate the work. Although replicate is not an entirely accurate description.
The ‘report’ is actually a series of collated comments from a disparate selection of fan groups. At Brighton and Hove Albion, the club’s Fan Advisory Board provided a response. At Arsenal, the rather more niche East Herts and Beds Arsenal Supporters Club answered the survey. Given that all English teams that have taken part in European competition in the last few years have well-organised supporter groups encompassing a broad section of the fanbase, any report that seeks to carry some weight really needs to include contributions from them. It is, of course, possible that some groups chose not to respond because the work is already being done better at FSE/UEFA level, and because of lingering suspicions about Roberts’s motivations.
While the amplification of fan voices in these circumstances is to be welcomed, the report as whole is an extremely top-line contribution to a complex debate. It says that “it is not unusual for English supporters to report concerns about their safety and treatment at fixtures on the continent”. It isn’t, but while the report notes that the Dedicated Football Officers (DFOs) attached to clubs “generally corroborate fans’ concerns” it doesn’t explain why those concerns have not been followed up. The report, we are told, will “provide the basis by supporters an UK police officers” and “will be updated for every game played in Europe” in order to make “evidence-based interventions” to “local authorities, stadium management, UEFA and others”.
This whole process already exists, something UEFA itself referenced in its response to the report, saying: “Our work with FSE already includes an away fans survey after each club competition match week which guides the discussions and actions of our visiting fans sector working group,” and adding that “this research from the UKFPU serves to reinforce the consistent messaging from our own studies”.
Of course it is outcomes that matter, and some readers might see it as a tad petty to be griping about the bureaucracy of who does what. But what looks like an attempt to bypass an existing framework and plant yourself at the centre of a new one is inevitably going to raise suspicions.
One of the most glaring and basic omissions from the report is any mention of the St Denis Convention. In short, if you think there should be a law to ensure fans are treated better at European sporting events, that is it. It has been in force since 2016, and if you want to go into more detail, I’ve written about it. It’s all in there, including very specific stuff about integrated multi-agency approaches to achieve desired outcomes. This particular wheel does not need reinventing.
Roberts couldn’t resist the opportunity when he was doing his press rounds to talk up the possibility of disorder at the European championships in Germany this summer, citing unspecified ‘Ultra groups’ as a potential source of danger. All this comes against the background of the UK Home Office moving the goalposts on the compilation of the annual football arrest figures so that figures appear to be at a nine-year high.
So, good news that the reality of fan experience is being recognised. Not so good news that working with fan organisations as equals is less so.
The Football Association would like you to believe that the FA Cup is one of its Crown Jewels, and that the protection of its status and standing is extremely important to it. And yet, in a move that has so far received surprisingly little comment, it has struck a deal with broadcaster TNT that will see the majority of the games in the competition go behind a paywall from 2025/26 onwards.
Expect to hear much about how maximising value enables the FA to invest in the grass roots and do lots of good work. And of course, the FA, like every other business, needs to make money. But once again the phrase about knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing comes to mind. The fact is that the latest move is another step in the devaluing of the world’s oldest football knockout competition.
The FA Cup was special not only because of its history, but because it was a leveller. FA Cup giant-killing was romance and excitement on steroids, providing the earliest memories for many of why this sport can be so magical and engaging. It’s true that ‘cup minnows beating the giants’ gave way to ‘cup minnows secure money-spinning replay against giants’ as the more regular romantic narrative – who says the competition hasn’t moved with the times – but the magic lingered.
The magic of the cup was that every FA-affiliated team could enter the same competition, and on their day everyone had a chance of winning. Of course some teams always had a better chance than others, and the clubs higher up the pyramid were given a pass to the latter stages. But enough genuine chance and jeopardy remained to capture the imagination.
Letting the top side in the country skip the competition to play in another tournament that was important only in as much as it might have secured some votes for a World Cup bid (that didn’t turn out well) can arguably be seen as the beginning of the modern decline of the competition. But the increasing disparity in resources within football has slowly whittled down the upsets and surprises, as has axing replays in some rounds, moving entire rounds from weekends to weekday evenings, and the insidious drip drip of ties being moved by TV or the police to times that are more inconvenient for the matchgoing fans we keep hearing are so important. Even the final is televised as an afterthought in the schedule, rather than the event the schedule is built around. That’s what happens when the TV tail wags the football dog.
Expect replays to go entirely, by the way. They will be what is axed to attempt to deal with the fact that clubs are asked to play too many games now – although we all know that what really bothers football’s top bananas is that there are too many games of the wrong kind being played. Why indulge Maidstone United’s dream when you could be playing a lucrative exhibition game or a transcontinental tie.
The fact is the FA Cup is not seen as a Crown Jewel at all. It is the embarrassing relative at the wedding. Cups don’t cut it, it’s leagues that are where the action is – and by action I mean guaranteed number of games with a reduced chance of the best-resourced teams losing them while securing maximum TV income.
For clubs further down the pyramid, the game’s current disparities mean the FA Cup is a distraction from the more necessary business of securing league position. For those at the top, it’s just a distraction, a sideshow. When he was manager of Tottenham Hotspur – a club that once held the record for most FA Cup wins and which remains the only non-league side to win the trophy – Mauricio Pochettino said winning cups was ‘only good for the ego’. He was merely saying what an increasing number in the game think. (Although after his Chelsea side’s crushing defeat to Liverpool in the weekend’s League Cup Final he may also be realising how not winning cups is bad for the ego).
If we’re honest, fans pretty much think the same too. We really try not to, but if forced to choose between league and cup success – and unfortunately by success I do mean finishing in a position that earns you more money than another – we will choose the league.
It’s been a long journey for me, and I’d still say I love the FA Cup. But I can take or leave the final, I can no longer reel off the list of finalists going back decades, and I lose interest when my team gets knocked out (so every year). The truth is, the FA Cup I love ceased to exist some time ago. A feeling I increasingly have about the game in general. I’m not sure that’s fertile ground for broadcasters long term.
Jason Stockwood, the owner of Grimsby Town, is usually worth listening to. And no more so than on a recent episode of the Unofficial Partner podcast. It is a fascinating discussion about squaring socialistic principles with capitalistic necessity and why that is a tension at the very heart of the game, and there is some great observation on some of the many false oppositions that plague those who try to navigate their way. My favourite quote was ‘those improved Scotch eggs don’t get us three points’. Tune in, you won’t be disappointed.
While we’re on the subject of other good stuff to consume, I’d also heartily recommend Nick Harris’s Sporting Intelligence Substack. Nick is one of the most thoughtful and rigorous sprts business journalists out there, and he is using his new-found freedom on Substack to good effect.
Shouts too for Ian King’s Unexpected Delirium, Tony Evans’s Political Football, and Chris Nee’s High Protein Beef Paste.
Finally, congratulations to the Unsere Kurve and all the German fan groups for their success in getting those who run German football to think again about price and value. The picture at the top of this post shows the stadium in Gelsenkirchen.
Photo by Dominik Kuhn on Unsplash