Plans to rid English soccer of hooliganism

Press, 12 January 1981, Page 16

Plans to rid English soccer of hooliganism

NZPA London England's soccer chiefs have announced plans to solve a problem that has blighted Britain’s reputation for sportsmanship — hooliganism on and off the playing field. A special committee of the game’s ruling body in England, the Football Association, has recommended that violent players who offend persistently should not be allowed to play for their country.

The most troublesome' fans could be banned for life from attending matches or have their passports withdrawn to prevent them travelling when their team plays overseas. Scarcely a fortnight passes without the news media highlighting new outbreaks of crowd violence resulting in injuries and arrests. Occasionally, someone is killed.

In September, a 17-year-old youth was battered to death at Middlesbrough in north-east England .as he was leaving a game between the local team and the European Cup holder, Nottingham Forest. The following month, a 20-year-old Loridoner was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a rival supporter before a cup tie between Crystal Palace and Swansea City last January. In other incidents this year:

English fans rioted in Turin, Italy, at ’ a European championship match last June; The Union of European Football Associations (U.E.F.A.) ordered a London club, West Ham, to play the second leg of its European Cup Winner’s Cup tie against. .Castilla, of Spain, behind closed doors after an outburst of hooliganism by English fans at the first game in Madrid in September;

Rival fans from Glasgow teams, Rangers and Celtic, fought a. battle at Glasgow’s Hampden Park after the Scottish Cup final last May. In the first such action since Britain’s general strike in 1926, mounted police

charged the milling crowds with batons; More than 50 rioting fans were arrested at an all-Lon-don game last week between West Ham and Tottenham Hotspur. One fan said later: “I wore my Spurs scarf to protect me from the cold. In the end I had to hide it to protect me from the hooligans.”

National statistics are not kept on the growth of violence in British sport, but Scotland Yard reported more than 3700 arrests at professional soccer games in London in the last two seasons — an almost four-fold rise over a comparable period of the early 19705. Many soccer officials believe that fear of violence is a main reason for falling attendances at soccer games. In 1978-79, English Football League matches; attracted 24,500,000 people, the lowest total since World War 11, arid 40 per cent down on pre-television days of the late 19405.

Psychologists, social workers, community leaders and football club managers have fretted over the problem of sporting hooliganism without reaching any unaniiriity bn its causes and possible solutions.

Some have attributed the wave of violence to a national psychosis caused by Britain’s retreat from empire, dwindling world status and economic decline.

A spokesman for the Social Science Research Council pinned some blame on the news media, some of which gave sensationalised accounts of spectator violence. Partisan ; supporters, attracted by the change of publicity, could end -up coiripeting to surpass one another in bizarre acts and bravado, he said. .... Some sociologists see soccer hooliganism as a kind of self-affirmation by predominantly young, working class males from deprived cultural backgrounds. They also point ;to the emotive atmosphere created by players on the field who adopt a “win at all costs” approach.

Whether British soccer produces more illegal play than it used to do is open to

debate. Gordon Taylor, chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, said that penalties against players had quadrupled in the last decade but he believes this is due entirely to more stringent standards of refereeing.

Proposed solutions to soccer hooliganism are of two kinds — either encouraging fans to behave well in the first place or prescribing punishments for those who get into trouble. On the preventive side, an F. A. spokesman, Glen Kirton, said the association was trying to persuade clubs of the American practice of packaging soccer as a family entertainment appealing to all ages. Ideas include ground improvements and. community involvement schemes. Birmingham’s Aston ' Villa club in the English Midlands has shown the way by, helping to finance an indoor sports centre and inviting the city’s unemployed youths to take part in training . sessions with club coaches. Further north, the Scottish Premier League champion, Aberdeen, last season became the first club in Britain to have an all seated stadium, ' with a resulting fall in spectator violence. “We had Rangers, Celtic and Liverpool here in the space of 10 days recently, and there wasn’t one arrest,” said the club secretary, lan Taggart. A . former Manchester United club manager, Tommy Docherty, advocated the birching of offending supporters after some of the team’s fans caused trouble at a match in St Etienne, France. Allan Clarke* manager of northern England’s Leeds United, startled fans by recommending that. persistent troublemakers should be flogged in front of the main, stand just before the kick-off. The British Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, favours increased use of attendance centres for young law breakers, where soccer hooligans would be forced to spend Saturday afternoons having cold showers and doing military drill. A Conservative M;P.,

Michael Ancram, suggested in Parliament recently that a new charge of mobbing and rioting should be laid against soccer hooligans. However, the Social Science Research Council says it would be unfair to treat a soccer hooligan more severely than someone who had committed the same offence miles away from a soccer ground. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board found that a big contributory factor in sporting Violence was excessive consumption of alcohol among spectators. To combat this, the latest F.A. plan seeks to ban the sale of alcohol at soccer grounds, except where . specially authorised by the association.

In Scotland, the government has gone further, with legislation which will make it an offence from next February to be drunk, or in possession of alcohol, at soccer grounds or on buses going to or froih matches.

Violence at soccer matches is not uniquely British, but Brian 1 Scove.ll,) chairman of the Football Writers’ Association, said British fans behaved worse than- their counterparts in countries such as West. Germany and the United States.

“Hooliganism started in Italy and Britain,” he said. “No wonder Continentals call it the British disease. As the inventors, we should surely have, the cure.”