London’s police force has blamed “football hooligans” for violent scenes in the capital last weekend in which dozens of people were arrested.
Around 300,000 people calling for a ceasefire in Gaza marched in the capital on Saturday. A far smaller group took issue with the timing of the march on November 11 — Armistice Day, which marks the truce that ended World War I — and vowed to “protect” the Cenotaph memorial from pro-Palestinian marchers.
Although the march did not pass near the Cenotaph, counter-protestors carried out “extreme violence” in confronting marchers, according to the police, which reported nine officers injured and 145 people arrested, the “vast majority” of whom were counter-protesters.
Football hooliganism was a dire problem in England in the 1980s but has, at times, felt like a problem that has significantly reduced in the following decades. Yet Police said those responsible for trouble at the weekend were mainly “football hooligans from across the UK”.
Although those causing trouble for political reasons under the guise of football hooliganism have little to do with the sport watched and enjoyed by millions in Britain every weekend, experts have told The Athletic that the problem is real and people should not be complacent.
Nick Lowles is the founder of Hope Not Hate, an anti-racism advocacy group, and has written a book about football hooliganism in England. He witnessed the events in central London on Saturday and his organisation had been closely monitoring social media channels used by football hooligan groups in the build-up.
“I saw a massive change in the last week,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and some of the outpouring of racism quite shocked me.”
Most of the sentiments expressed were anti-Muslim and expressed in clearly racist language, rather than expressing legitimate criticisms of religious beliefs or political opinions. There were a smaller number of offensive anti-Jewish posts too.
“Some of the racism, the threats — people were leaving voice notes in which you could see who it was and their phone numbers.”
He says the emotive issue of the Cenotaph “touched a nerve”, possibly whipped up by voices in politics and elements of the media who made it into a culture war issue in which pro-Palestinian protestors and the wider left were seen as disrespecting the war dead.
Lowles’ group estimated there were about 2,000 counter-protestors, of which 700 to 800 were “hell-bent” on causing trouble.
It is important to point out that this one-off crowd is vanishingly tiny compared to the numbers who watch football every week in the UK. Around 400,000 people watched a Premier League game the same weekend, and slightly more than that watched a match in one of the three divisions of the English Football League.
Including non-League football, that means upward of a million people attended a football match — almost two per cent of England’s population — multiple times the number marching in London.
And although violence in football still occurs, the sort of organised hooliganism that plagued football in the 1980s is rare.
“From the late 1980s through to the mid-1990s, we got on top of the problem domestically,” says Geoff Pearson, an academic expert on football disorder at the University of Manchester. “We do still have people that attend matches looking to fight fans on rival teams but the numbers of people that do that are very low. The vast number of violence is spontaneous.
“You only have to see what happens when England travel abroad to places like Marseille.”
In 2016, there were violent scenes in the southern French city when England played Russia. Two years ago, the problems were closer to home when the final of Euro 2020 at Wembley Stadium was marred by crowd violence.
“What there definitely are — and this has been noted post-pandemic — are groups of young ‘casuals’ who can be problematic in terms of anti-social behaviour and nuisance.”
Pearson says it is “unfair” to blame what happened at the Cenotaph on football and says it is inaccurate to characterise football fans — even football hooligans — as far-right agitators.
“Football hooliganism in England and Wales has never really been politically motivated,” he says. “The (far-right) National Front in the 1980s made many attempts to make inroads and there were also attempts by some left-wing organisations.
“But while there were some high profile individuals on the left and the right in the football violence scene, generally hooligan firms don’t fight for a political cause,” he says, making England strikingly different to many other European countries.
However, Pearson says it would also be unwise to completely dismiss the role of football hooliganism in modern British politics.
“We do need to acknowledge that there is a loose-knit casual organisation which came together in the form of the English Defence League (EDL), which is Islamophobic, and that poses a challenge.”
The EDL was founded in 2009. It was rooted in football hooligan groups and was a presence in British society in the early 2010s, organising marches against “Islamic extremism”, often clashing with other groups on the streets.
While the EDL has declined in influence, other groups — like the Football Lads’ Alliance and Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance (DFLA), which organised big marches in 2017 under the guise of “anti-extremism” following terror attacks in the UK — have grown in the interim.
The DFLA, which says it is not racist, put out a statement last week “calling on all football lads up and down the country to join us in standing shoulder to shoulder with our veterans” to stop those who seek to “desecrate and disrespect our monuments”.
Modern right-wing groups claim to not be overtly racist.
Lowles says “casual racist abuse” by football crowds is far less common these days. Ubiquitous CCTV and camera phones make it far easier for perpetrators to be caught and clubs and football authorities take it seriously.
“Now (racism) is much more likely to be by one person, or to be online,” he says, adding that the crowd in central London on Saturday was primarily an older crowd, people who may have been involved in hooliganism in previous decades.
In the 1990s, issues relating to Ireland were a big motivator for hooligan firms at a time when the Irish Republican Army was committing terror attacks in Ireland and England. A friendly between England and the Republic of Ireland in Dublin in 1995 was abandoned after a riot by English fans, some of whom were later identified as belonging to neo-Nazi group Combat 18.
“More recently (English hooliganism) has taken on an anti-Muslim slant to it,” he says.
“In some of these chat rooms over the past week, the outpouring of racism has quite shocked me,” he says. “It’s quite revolting.”
While Lowles agrees that organised hooliganism is a shadow of what it used to be, “spontaneous” violence is still a problem, citing violent disorder at a match between Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic in August in England’s north west.
Although the numbers marching in London were relatively small, Lowles says it is important not to be complacent.
“My fear was if this escalated, that just like the EDL 13 years ago, just like the Football Lads’ Alliance, it starts to have a knock-on effect in small towns and cities around the country,” he says.
He says the EDL period “politicised a generation of young lads” in ways that had an impact far beyond protests and there is concern it could happen again.
(Top photo: Martin Pope/.)
