Britain Plans Controversial Crackdown on Violent Soccer Fans

LONDON — A police cordon began at the local subway station and wound continuously through a half mile of drab, East London side streets on a recent Saturday.

Some officers equipped with hand-held metal detectors pulled young men aside for a quick body search while others held firmly to fierce-looking German shepherd dogs. Most of the police were helmeted, and even the horses of the many mounted officers wore protective plastic visors over their eyes.

It might have been a scene from a politically turbulent country in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the Middle East. But actually, it was just a regular Saturday afternoon setting for a professional soccer match between cross-town rivals in this country, which sees itself as the cradle of democracy.

The Sunday Observer next day reported the crowd at “20,000--double that if you count the police.” That was an exaggeration, but not by much. And it underlined the problem of hooliganism, a bitter truth about British soccer, or football as the game is known almost everywhere except in the United States.

Well over a decade has passed since football violence became a domestic issue here, and nearly four years have elapsed since British hooligans made it an international scandal by triggering a riot that killed 38 people at Heysel Stadium in Brussels. Harsh measures taken since then have helped to contain violence, but they have fallen far short of rooting it out.

Sweeping Action

So the government plans its most sweeping action to date this week, when it will introduce in Parliament the Football Spectators Bill. The legislation would effectively close the country’s football stadiums to all but members of the respective football clubs--an unprecedented measure and one that other nations in Europe and elsewhere are carefully following.

“The government are determined to break the link between football and hooligans,” Sports Minister Colin Moynihan said. “We hope all true supporters will join us in ridding the game of hooligans.”

The proposed legislation has stirred such angry passions, even before being introduced, that Peter Jenkins, a political columnist for the Independent newspaper and a biographer of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote last week: “By far the most enjoyable, and possibly the most instructive, issue on the political agenda this year is football. It promises to bring out every kind of hypocrisy and class prejudice, and present the character of the prime minister in an unfortunate light.”

Some political observers, possibly reacting more out of wishful thinking than hard analysis, suggest that opposition to the measure, even from within the ruling Conservative Party, is so great that the government could suffer an extraordinary defeat on the football measure. A column in the Times of London spoke of “the simmering revolt against Thatcher’s pet bill.”

The legislation would establish a government-controlled Football Membership Authority to administer the compulsory, national membership scheme. While many details would be left for the authority to work out, the plan envisions a computerized, national registry of football fans who would gain admittance to the country’s 92 professional club stadiums by inserting special cards in electronic scanning equipment at the gate.

Denial of Membership

Fans with a record of football-related offenses would be denied membership for up to five years and would thus be barred from games. Also, convicted football hooligans would be required to report to some local authority at specific times when British clubs were playing elsewhere in Europe--a feature meant to keep them at home and avoid tragedies such as the Brussels riot in 1985 or the violent scenes of rampaging fans in West Germany last summer.

The plan is said to have the strong, personal backing of Thatcher, who let it be known during a meeting with football league executives last July that if they did not come up with a membership scheme voluntarily, her government would impose one.

The idea seems to be opposed by nearly everyone else. Owners of the 92 clubs affected complain that it will be costly and drive away the casual fan who represents an important share of their revenue. Smaller clubs in the lower divisions of the professional ranks are particularly concerned.

The police say that at best it will just transfer the violence from inside stadiums to outside. At worst, said columnist Jenkins, “it may provoke turnstile riots as fans pour from the pubs and queue to feed their magnetic cards into unreliable electronic scanners.”

Some football fans complain that the bill appears to lay on them all the blame for a general rise in the level of violence in Britain. And civil libertarians are aghast at what they see as a possible first step in a national identity card scheme, a notion they describe as symbolic of sinister regimes elsewhere and thoroughly un-British.

Class Consciousness

Underlying it all is a class consciousness that still colors a great many aspects of British life.

A Sports Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that it is not correct to blame football violence on any particular group of people. “The problem is that football has attracted people whose intention is to cause trouble,” he said. “No one seems to be immune. It’s almost this gladiatorial, Saturday afternoon thing.”

In fact, however, football is a sport of working-class fans here. Richer sports enthusiasts prefer rugby or cricket.

Football fans are overwhelmingly male and young. At a recent cross-town match in East London, it seemed to a first-time visitor that he could count the women spectators on one hand. There were also few children of either sex.

In the equivalent of the bleachers, the fans stood shoulder to shoulder, swaying as they chanted obscene tributes to their own team and heaped scorn on the visiting squad.

Fans Separated

Vast, empty sections of stands were kept clear to separate the home and visiting fans, and particularly burly policemen kept a close watch for any sign of trouble. If they spotted a troublemaker, there was no argument as they grabbed the miscreant under both arms and hustled him roughly out of the stadium.

There were 6,147 arrests at Football League matches last season--a record. No one keeps track of the number of people who are simply ejected for making trouble, but it is no doubt many times higher than the arrest figure.

In a line for hotdogs and hamburgers outside, two young men were discussing the finer techniques of fighting favored by the fans of various clubs.

The Sports Ministry official said that attendance at British football matches has declined steadily for a generation, from more than 30 million in the late 1960s to about 19 million last year.

“Undoubtedly, a contributory factor is that the atmosphere and bad language that exists at the moment is a deterrent to the man who might take his kids to a match,” the official added.

May Boost Attendance

Ultimately, its supporters argue, the compulsory football membership scheme may turn that attendance trend around as more people are attracted to the sport when the hooligans have been rooted out.

Club owners object that they are already doing a lot on their own to change the image of the sport. Many already have some sort of membership system, although only a handful have as much as 50% of their capacity set aside for members.

Millwall, an East London club with a particularly rough reputation, now employs a community sports development officer to forge closer links with the community. His latest innovation: a plan to give convicted football hooligans a second chance by doing community service.

Thatcher, however, has apparently run out of patience with the sport and seems determined to push the membership scheme through.

Columnist Jenkins sees a Machiavellian motive in her determination. “Labor (the opposition party) is predominantly the party of the working class,” he says. “To identify football with hooliganism is vicariously to identify Labor with violence.”