The day Birmingham and Leeds hooligans caused ‘absolute chaos'

Telegraph

11-05-2025

It was obvious something big was going to kick off. In their final match of the season, Leeds United were taking on Birmingham City away, and this meant war. The same was true of so many games during the mid-1980s, the nadir of football hooliganism; but 11 May 1985 would turn out to be a particularly dark day, even by the standards of the time.
In Birmingham, it started with minor skirmishes and ended with hundreds of injuries and the death of a child. 'More like the Battle of Agincourt than a football match,' Lord Justice Popplewell said later. But that afternoon, history was no doubt far from the minds of the lads. Only the history of tribal rivalry mattered, and even then it was more about the buzz for many; the adrenalin rush of unleashed chaos and violence.
Hooliganism, which had taken root in the 1960s and 1970s, was a regular match-day fixture by this point. It was known as 'the English Disease', though it spread like a virus to the continent as well. The background on this occasion was that Birmingham City (the Blues) had already secured promotion to Division One (then the highest league) but needed a win to finish top of the table. Leeds only stood a chance of promotion if they won and four matches elsewhere went their way. In the event, the result – 1-0 to Birmingham City – was eclipsed by the behaviour of some of the fans, which was said to be among the worst ever seen at a British football ground.
Disorder at matches was common back then, but some hooligan 'firms' had especially fearsome reputations. One was the Leeds United Service Crew. Another was Birmingham City's Zulu Warriors. The stage was set for an era-defining clash, and not between the players themselves. 'Sometimes it's like a tinderbox atmosphere, and you could tell it was going to go off,' says Roy Durn, then a 23-year-old visiting Leeds fan. 'There were a few fights on the way up to the ground. Then we got [in] and it was mayhem.'
Durn, now 62, had travelled to Birmingham from Leeds with the Service Crew, although he was not a member. Theirs was a convoluted journey via Manchester to avoid the police.
The Service Crew were so-called since they eschewed the special trains that were chartered to transport fans to away games (the 'specials'), favouring instead the regular service trains. Their trip on that spring day included a 20-minute walk across Manchester, between the city's Victoria and Piccadilly stations. Even that did not pass without incident.
'There was loads of trouble, shops got smashed in and all sorts of stuff went on,' recalls Durn. 'It wasn't until we'd got to Piccadilly that the police got their act together and started to round us up. They were searching people and all sorts of things got dropped on the floor: hammers, jewellery, weapons. There were always some idiots who would bring an iron bar or something.'
The trouble escalated further when the fans reached Birmingham, starting with tussles in the streets and ramping up into something more dangerous inside St Andrew's stadium – a ground that had been built almost 80 years earlier to accommodate more than 70,000 spectators. 'Once you got in, you could sense something was going to happen,' says Birmingham City fan Ian Piper, then a 21-year-old IT programmer.
By the time Durn reached St Andrew's, the turnstile had been pulled down, fans were piling in without tickets and anarchy was in the air. 'Absolute chaos,' he says. 'You could see the fighting going off, there were bricks flying and some of the Leeds fans were wearing Nazi emblems on their armbands.' Though not all Leeds hooligans were racists, there was certainly a racist element within their ranks. The Zulus, meanwhile, were a mixed group, with black and white members reflecting the culture of the city they came from.
Neville Edmead, an Aston Villa fan who attended the game with Blues-supporting friends, sees Birmingham's hostility to Leeds that day in this context. Some Leeds fans, he says, 'were going through the town giving Nazi salutes all over the place. They were far-Right, National Front men…They wanted to cause havoc everywhere they went and because of what Birmingham represented as a city, people…said, 'We're not going to stand for it.''
The Leeds lot had their own agenda. It has been suggested they sought to disrupt the game to deny the Blues their victory. But really they never seemed to need that kind of excuse. 'Leeds fans were looking for trouble, I've got to admit,' says Dave Panniers, then a 23-year-old away fan, who had travelled from his home in Hereford.
They had turned out in vast numbers, exceeding what was expected, and the police presence looked a little thin to contain what was clearly a volatile situation.
The first notable incident some fans remember is when Leeds hooligans tore up the refreshment stand at their end. 'They dismantled the tea hut at the top of the Tilton Road stand and were passing it over their heads in pieces down to the front of the ground,' says Dave Curtis, a Blues fan who was in his early 20s at the time. 'That caused a furore among the Birmingham City fans.'
The two armies of rival supporters were separated by an alleyway, each meshed in to prevent them reaching each other. 'The Birmingham fans were going mad, but there was no way they could get to each other at this point,' says Curtis. Police took the flak instead, sustaining punches from both sides of the mesh. 'We were stuck between two sets of fans, so we were sort of the meat in the sandwich,' says Stephen Burrows, then a young West Midlands Police officer on duty at the game that day. 'They were trying to get to each other but didn't mind that they would have to go over us.'
When Birmingham City scored in the first half, it served as a 'catalyst' for the eruption that followed, says Piper. A pitch invasion – which fans recall came from the away supporters – brought the game to a temporary halt.
A second pitch invasion followed at the end of the game, involving large numbers of Blues supporters. Seats were torn out and hurled, one striking Burrows on the arm. Concrete had been ripped out and thrown. So, bizarrely, had a kettle. There were coins, small pieces of wood and smoke bombs flying through the air.
Police in riot gear were drafted in to try and control the disorder. But Burrows and his colleagues were in standard helmets and carrying no shields.
'We were clearly losing the battle, heavily outnumbered and in possession of no riot gear,' he writes in his co-authored memoir Reporting For Duty. They were saved by the mounted police, he says, likening the scene to the Charge of the Light Brigade.
But the mounted police came under attack as well.
'It was just surreal,' says Curtis. 'There were people carrying the signage that was around the stadium, using it to poke the policemen off the horses. It was absolute pandemonium. The place was in uproar.' There must have been around a thousand fans on the pitch, Piper reckons. 'I remember when [fans] started to trash the gates, get over the fences, attack the police,' says Durn. 'This,' he heard one lad say, 'is payback for the miners' strike.'
Ian Hambridge was 15 years old and attending his first football match that day with four of his friends. The Northampton schoolboy was a 'happy-go-lucky lad', his father said later. He was excited about going to the game, an experience he looked forward to telling his classmates about on Monday. When he failed to return home that Saturday, his parents called the police. The reason he hadn't reappeared changed their lives for ever.
In the final act of the drama at St Andrew's, as Leeds fans tried to leave the ground, a 12-foot wall collapsed on to Ian, fatally injuring him. He died at Smethwick Neurological Hospital the next day. A plaque at the ground now commemorates the 'tragic accident'. It made for a sobering end to the afternoon's shocking events. 'Nobody should go to a football match and not come home,' reflects Piper.
More than 120 people were arrested, up to 400 fans and 145 police officers injured. One of them was PC Michael Corrigan of the Operational Support Unit, then in his late 20s. He was standing near Ian before the wall fell and he too was crushed by the bricks. 'When I realised [Ian] was a young man who was no trouble, I turned my back on him,' he says. 'Then the wall comes over and he's killed, and I always think if I'd told him to go away, would he still be here today?'
Corrigan believes his riot helmet saved his own life. But the wall smashed his left ankle and damaged a vertebra. 'When they got me to hospital and got my boot off, my foot collapsed because it was shattered,' he says. 'The panic set in and I started screaming because I thought I was paralysed.' He remained in hospital for almost three weeks and off work for about two months. Ian's death still haunts him today. He thinks of him as 'the forgotten victim'.
On a normal day, the carnage in Birmingham might have dominated the headlines. In fact it was overshadowed by what happened at a football game 100 miles to the north that same afternoon. While Leeds and Blues fans rioted in the Midlands, a fire broke out in a wooden stand at the Bradford City stadium. The blaze claimed 56 lives and injured more than 260 people.
The catastrophe was not caused by hooligans: it was believed to have resulted from a discarded cigarette. 'It was upsetting news,' says Durn, who learnt of the fire during the train ride home. 'Normally when there's trouble at a football match, when you come away from it everyone's bouncing, but it really flattened it that day.'
Less than three weeks later, on a warm evening in Brussels, another disaster occurred: 39 people died and 600 were injured at the European Cup final game between Liverpool and Italian side Juventus at Heysel Stadium. This time crowd trouble was to blame, with Liverpool fans charging at Juventus fans, resulting in the collapse of another wall. Most of the dead were Italians. All English clubs were banned from playing in Europe for the next five years.
It is hard to comprehend the hooligans' willingness to risk prison, severe injury or worse, for a bit of fun. But for those involved, it not only brought a rush that some describe as addictive, but also a sense of belonging.
The rise of the football hooligan coincided with Britain's deindustrialisation. The traditional manufacturing jobs on which working-class men once relied were disappearing, along with the communities around them.
Football and its accompanying rituals were 'the highlight of our week', says Panniers, who has always worked as a self-employed plumbing and heating engineer. He was 'probably' a hooligan himself, he says, but was 'not a massive fighter', preferring to linger on the outskirts and watch, maybe throwing the odd punch here or there. 'We wouldn't have done it if we hadn't enjoyed it. It wasn't done out of desperation or poverty…I just like being involved.'
As with other subcultures, the firms had their own fashion. The 'football casual' look took off in the late 1970s, and by the mid-1980s the terraces were awash with designer and sports labels: Sergio Tacchini, Pringle, Burberry, Aquascutum, Fred Perry, Adidas and Fila. Hooligans didn't tend to wear their club's colours, they left that to the regular fans.
As Dr Ben Jones, a University of East Anglia historian, has written, 'At a time of deindustrialisation and mass unemployment then, football casuals were displaying all the accoutrements of affluence of the sort which would have been lauded by Thatcherites in other contexts.'
But Thatcherites, unsurprisingly, did not laud the hooligans, who to them were a nuisance on a par with striking trade unionists. The response in society at large was akin to moral panic. These, after all, were men who would smash up town centres, trains, stadiums and each other for a laugh.
For Panniers, now 63, it was more about the spectacle than any actual desire for a fight. 'Don't get me wrong, we liked a bit of trouble [once] we'd had a few beers,' he says. Some of his mates could put away 10 pints before a game. 'We were typical football fans. [The rival fans] would chase us, we'd chase them and hope we wouldn't catch them and they wouldn't catch us. There was the odd mad one going around, there were the nutters, but most of the lads were like me, there for the show.'
Yet the numbers of those injured due to football violence in that period are not small. Durn, a self-employed builder from West Yorkshire, describes being punched, kicked and even cut by a razor blade on one occasion. Attending an away game in Liverpool, he was kicked unconscious by Everton fans in the street.
Less than two months before the St Andrew's disorder, 47 were injured, 33 of whom were police, in the Kenilworth Road riot, when Luton Town played Millwall at home. The stadium suffered £15,000 of damage, with another £45,000 of damage done to a train returning to London.
All told, it was an annus horribilis for football. But perhaps the country wasn't quite facing an unprecedented phenomenon. In his report on the events of that year, Lord Justice Popplewell quoted from a Sports Council report that put hooliganism in the context of previous male violence perpetrated by alienated youths: the riots of the Teddy Boys, the Mods and Rockers, the Skinheads. 'They not only seek each other's company, but are pressed into it by a society whose structure does not offer them much in the way of alternative affiliations,' it said. The football match offered 'an acknowledged meeting place, a carnival atmosphere and exciting contrast to the drabness of the workaday week'.
We don't hear so much about football hooligans today. A succession of measures were taken to stamp out the problem. Out went the terraces and in came all-seater stadiums. Alcohol was banned from the stands. CCTV surveillance was introduced and clubs increasingly employed stewards to keep the grounds safe. Stiffer penalties were handed to offenders, known hooligans banned from matches. 'We won,' says Burrows. 'The hooligans would disagree with that but we did.' He's referring to the policing tactics used to tackle hooligans in the raucous 1980s, but arguably the same could be said of the subsequent clampdown.
Policing has changed, and so too has football. 'The police are so much more prepared,' says Panniers. 'You can't get away with anything. It's so much safer, so much better.' But some fans fear something has been lost; that this process of sanitisation tore the soul from the game. In the Premier League era of expensive tickets and wealthy foreign businessmen buying up English clubs, it's certainly different.
And what of the hooligans themselves? Did they all simply grow up and leave the violence and destruction behind? In the popular version of the hooligan story, the arrival of acid house in the late 1980s offered an alternative outlet. Ecstasy, the 'love drug', famously doesn't make people look for a punch-up.
'A lot of [the Service Crew] got into acid house and that had a big effect on [the firm],' says Durn. 'A lot of them got into the music. Some worked on the door at venues.' But the dance music scene did not absorb everyone. Many, including Panniers, got married, settled down and had children. 'Others got into drugs and ruined their lives,' he says. 'Some are dead. Some are still on the dole.'
As for whether the 'English disease' has been cured, the answer is no, not exactly. A downward trend in football-related arrests in England and Wales up to the 2018-19 season (which saw 1,381) was reversed by the 2022-23 season, when the number rose back up to similar levels to 2013-14, at 2,264. Cocaine use helps drive disorder at matches, according to police. In 2023, research by University of Stirling experts suggested drug-taking at games had superseded alcohol as a safety concern.
' There's a massive cocaine problem now,' agrees Panniers, who first noticed this in the early 2000s, when at 'any game you went to there were people sniffing coke'.
While the atmosphere is less volatile, it can still turn, says Durn. 'It goes back to that basic, animal sort of instinct, hostility,' he says. 'I still see it now. You can get a lot of boys out looking for trouble.'
The racism evidently hasn't been stamped out either. The charity Kick It Out received 1,332 reports of racism, sexism and faith-based abuse in the 2023-24 season, the highest number ever logged in its 30-year history. Where violence is concerned, fans seem to agree it is nothing like it was. But there's a touch of nostalgia among those who were once involved. A fond and wistful sense of having been part of something that has passed.
The Service Crew and Zulu Warriors still exist in some form, as do other firms. Social media provides a virtual meeting place for fellow travellers, with the Hooligans Culture page on Facebook boasting 131,000 followers. While many of the pictures posted show older men clinging to pints and the good old days, there are plenty of young lads too. Panniers looks back with mixed feelings. 'I won't say I'm ashamed, but I suppose it did spoil it for the ordinary fan,' he says.
Piper admits that people could get carried away. But, he says, 'It was like they were part of a family.' One whose members gained a respect among each other they may have lacked in everyday life. For all that, there can't be many who miss the bloodshed, damage and chaos that was once routinely caused by the football lads.