All this aggro is bad for business

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Football's attempts to confront hooliganism have more to do with corporate PR than any real desire to get to its roots, says Stephen Wagg

It's that time again. Every so often, over the past 20 years or so, some group of young British men got involved in a fracas, at or near a football match. Chairs were thrown, blood was spilled, cameras whirred and the telephones of sociologists and other researchers began to ring. The question, whether it came from the Daily Mail, Radio Humberside or Richard and Judy, was always the same: "Are we seeing a return to the bad old days of football hooliganism?" On Sunday, agitated Cardiff City supporters invaded the Ninian Park pitch following Cardiff's FA Cup defeat of Leeds United. On Wednesday night missiles were thrown at players during the Worthington Cup tie between Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur and the same thing happened at Millwall last night. "I've never known anything like this before in England," Chelsea physiotherapist Mike Banks told the Evening Standard. So the question is back on every news editor's lips: "Has British football failed to learn the lessons of Heysel, Hillsborough and the 1980s?" When it was put to me, having scratched my head, my response was: "What lessons?"

The debate about "football hooliganism" has a long and often incoherent history. The term itself appears to have been used for the first time in the early 1960s. It's tempting, therefore, to think that the phenomenon the term is supposed to describe dates from then. But copious research by the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research at Leicester University showed that fighting at association football matches had been reported in local newspapers well before the Second World War. (Indeed, the royal box was vandalised during the muchadmired "White Horse" Cup Final of 1923.)

In the 1960s, therefore, the phrase "football hooliganism" seemed to describe an activity that was then regarded as a problem in a way that it hadn't been before. Why was this?

MY own feeling is that the consternation arose principally because British football was entering the television age. Attendances at English football matches had peaked in the 1950s. In the 1960s clubs had to deal with declining public interest at a time when, following the abolition of the Football League's maximum wage restriction in 1961, they were having to pay larger sums of money out. This was, in effect, an economic crisis for League clubs and they responded in at least two ways.

Firstly, they began to make public reassurances that football was a "family entertainment" worthy of the attentions of the comfortably off. Secondly, a lobby grew for the greater televising of the game. TV had been seen hitherto as a threat to football commercially, but now, from 1964, we had Match of the Day. This is where the problem of "football hooliganism" was born, out of the combined attempts of English football's administrators and communicators to present a retouched picture of their game to a wider audience of punters and, in time, sponsors.

For those who run the game, football hooliganism has seldom been a penal, or a moral or a social problem. It's always been seen primarily as a problem of public relations - as something that was "bad for the image of the game". In the past 20 years this has simply become more marked.

During the 1980s and 1990s, English football increasingly embraced the market. The bigger clubs threatened a breakaway unless they got a bigger share of the profits generated by League games. The Football Association, having historically held the line against undue commercialism, threw in its lot with satellite television and a multinational lager company.

The English football world, for so long the domain of chubby-faced gentlemen with crumpled suits and silver watch chains, embraced excess. The FA was now, in effect, a global corporation. Such corporations have to deal routinely with major PR difficulties, some of which arise from the massive enrichment of their employees (chiefly the players).

Regular press conferences took place supervised by the FA's "head of communications", who explained gravely how a particular player was seeking advice for his alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive gambling ...

The same PRs have dealt primarily with the problems of racism and hooliganism. They have, of course, deplored it. They've sought viable advice from academics and they have got it: sensibly deployed police, CCTV, restrictions on alcohol consumption, the greater involvement of women, and so on. But the seeds of these problems are someone else's problem. Football authorities just want them off the premises. Football hooligans need to be put somewhere where they can't interfere with lucrative commercial activities. This defines the "football hooligan". He's a nuisance at the world's favourite game. He doesn't necessarily believe things that aren't believed in a thousand boardrooms, dressing rooms or police stations, but he's tactless and expendable. If he did what he does on the streets of Oldham or Burnley, he wouldn't provoke the national breastbeating that he did this week.

Indeed, the Home Secretary might instruct his victim to learn English. Nothing brings this home more forcibly than the recent affair of the Leeds United footballers. If Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer had been in the crowd at Elland Road when they did what they did, the club would have disposed of them without a second thought. It's easier to indulge in hooliganism if you're a particularly expensive piece of human machinery.

Chelsea physio Mike Banks may well not have experienced anything before like the coin-throwing at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night, so I guess it's as well he only loosens the limbs of Jody Morris and John Terry, rather than taking a night on the town with them. Morris, of course, came to the match straight from Belgravia police station where he'd been charged with assault, but Morris, unlike most of those accused of "football hooliganism", has a rare skill to sell in the football market. Indeed, the Chelsea manager just happened to need "a midfielder who could keep possession", so he went straight into the side.

Business as usual, then.

? Stephen Wagg is Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University of Surrey and the editor of Giving the Game Away.