Lessons from a Wembley Final

Improvements in the approach to crowd management could be set back if some hard questions are not confronted after the Euro 2020 Final

The fallout from the disgraceful scenes surrounding the Euro 2020 final is starting to pan out in a way all too familiar to anyone associated with football. It’s an industry for which the phrase “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan” could have been created and, true to form, the various bodies involved have put a lot of time and energy into trying to convince everyone nothing was their fault. 

There will, no doubt, be legal reasons for that – admitting liability is a risky thing to do. And the understandable need to avoid becoming the subject of hindsight-driven finger-pointing will also play its part. When people are just looking for someone to blame, what’s the point of offering yourself up as a target? 

But the overriding need to avoid blame makes it harder to confront and deal with what went wrong, and dealing with what went wrong honestly and thoroughly is vital if anything similar is to be prevented in future. 

For those of us involved in safety and security matters as supporter reps, the events around the final are going to make the job we do much harder. We will continue to argue that the vast majority of football fans are decent people and should be treated as such. And a good number of the people we are dealing with will refer us to the scenes that unfolded outside Wembley to tell us we are wrong. 

The hard job we already have to convince some – and it is important to emphasise not all – safety and security professionals not to treat football fans as some kind of ‘other’, a constant threat to be managed, will have been made harder because of what happened at the final. Some attitudes have changed for the better, but I’ve come across some professionals in the field who will still say Hillsborough was caused by the fans, and those entrenched attitudes are now going to be harder to shift.

The irony is that it’s only among football fans where I’ve noticed a more balanced conversation. It may just be the people I’m in contact with, but I’ve not seen any supporter arguing that fans did nothing wrong. Those of us familiar with fan culture know there is an element of wilfully antisocial behaviour within the fan base. We’re also aware that simply saying it’s a minority spoiling things for everyone is true, but not enough. The fact is there are enough prepared to go to the disgraceful lengths we saw last weekend, and enough prepared to see it as part of the culture. 

There’s a conversation to be had among fans about how we challenge the mindset that leads people to think storming disabled entrances, attacking ticketless fans, and abusing and attacking people trying to do their jobs is reasonable. And that is linked to challenging the boozed-up, coked-up, beer-throwing, boorish behaviour that is too often a feature of what some people see as an acceptable part of a day at the football. It’s true, and necessary, to say behaviour of this sort is not confined to football, but those of us involved in football can do something about its manifestation around us.

I recognise that any talk of challenging behaviour is almost guaranteed to get the phoney libertarians frothing, but that’s tough. Trying to create mutually acceptable standards of behaviour is a basic building block of society, whatever the controversialist grifters say. We need to stop indulging the kind of relativist nonsense they feed off. 

But just as fans need to confront uncomfortable questions and try to get workable answers, so too do other bodies. The rush to avoid blame is simply not good enough, and many of the questions that need to be answered are raised in this excellent piece by journalist Melissa Reddy in The Independent. 

Who was responsible for what parts of the area around Wembley on the day, for instance? I know from experience that when a UEFA club competition is played at a club venue, UEFA takes control of the entire stadium to the extent that even some senior club staff are not allowed to move around without the express permission of a UEFA official. My understanding of Euro 2020 is that certain responsibilities were delegated to the host stadium and others were retained by UEFA. So what responsibilities were delegated, to whom, and why? 

Reddy’s article raises important questions about the role played by Quintain, which owns much of the land around the stadium, and by Brent Council. Like all local authorities with a stadium within its jurisdiction, Brent has a Safety Advisory Group. But unlike Haringey, for example, whose SAG accepts a fan rep at its meetings, Brent’s does not deign to communicate with the public it is supposed to serve. So again, clarity on who was consulted and who is responsible for what is hard to come by.

It’s perhaps best not to dwell too much on the statement from the Metropolitan Police. Whatever the intention, it comes across as ‘everything would have gone OK if it hadn’t not gone OK’. The fact that the police are there to deal with things when they go wrong seems to have escaped the strategic and PR geniuses who are currently doing such a good job of undermining confidence in the police. Many of the more clued-up officers on the ground must be despairing.  

It may well be true that the police prevented things getting worse. The point is that they got pretty bad. So we need to look at the planning and ask who took part in it and what the decisions were based on. The Football Supporters’ Association, which has years of experience running fan embassies at major international tournaments, had no input into planning for the final. Why not? 

The police, though, could be forgiven for viewing any calls for them to have taken a more high-profile presence a little wryly after years of hearing calls for them to take a less high-profile presence. Some of those calls are fuelled by an unseemly argument that has been pushed by the police and the football authorities over who pays the cost of policing football, but there’s also a solid body of work on crowd management that can provide answers and could have helped prevent the scenes witnessed around the final.

It may be that the Euro 2020 final was a perfect storm, a major international featuring a host nation staged after an unprecedented set of restrictions caused by a global pandemic and against the backdrop of some nasty pots being stirred by the host government. It may be that such a combination of factors will never occur again. All of which may be true, but there are also lessons that can and must be learned. Doing so means moving away from framing the discussion as one about who is to blame and who can score points. Everyone involved needs to confront some tough questions honestly, and focus on how to make things better. 

Header photo: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona