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The Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Forty years on from Heysel: The lessons football still needs to learn
The Heysel disaster embodied what were the darkest days of football. Four decades on, there are still lessons to be learned. The catastrophe took place on the game's biggest stage: the 1985 European Cup final, contested between Liverpool and Juventus. On that tragic day in Brussels, 39 fans lost their lives while 600 were left injured after fans were crushed against a wall that collapsed. Abject failures in crowd management and poor stadium design were at the heart of the disaster, as they were for the calamities of Hillsborough and the Valley Parade fire that same decade. Among the three, Heysel is somewhat the forgotten tragedy, despite its seismic short and long-term impact. There was a widespread perception that Liverpool fans were solely responsible, with the crush culminating from crowd disorder sparked by Reds supporters crossing a fence separating them and a neutral stand which contained mostly Juventus fans. Fourteen were later found guilty of manslaughter and jailed. It resulted in English clubs being banned from Europe for five years and fuelled a reputation of English hooliganism that still stands to this day on the continent. Four years later at Hillsborough, where poor crowd management once again devolved into disaster, costing the lives of 97, the fans were blamed once more, almost habitually given the precedent of Heysel. However, the systemic causes of these incidents were yet to be addressed - a problem in fan safety that was being brushed over by simply laying blame at the feet of 'unruly' supporters. After first Heysel and then Hillsborough, learning finally began to flow from catastrophe. 'You get a major disaster like Hillsborough or Bradford, and off the back of that, inquiries get developed - Taylor or Popplewell, for example - and those inquiries then highlight the broader system failure,' said Professor Clifford Stott of Keele University, a specialist in crowds and policing and the co-author of the independent report that delved into the chaotic scenes at the 2022 Champions League final in Paris. 'It was very much about unsafe stadia. Those [inquiries] have created an environment where stadium safety has advanced exponentially over the last 40 odd years.' Post-Heysel, there was a recognition that the failings of the authorities and crumbling state of the Heysel stadium were also key factors at play. However, popular understandings continued to point the finger solely at fans - with hooliganism the far more eye-catching topic to both the public and the media. As such, it was crucial that the narrative moved away from simply citing hooliganism as the overarching cause for such tragedies. 'It is completely useless as a narrative to help us to understand the nature of the problem,' Stott adds. 'What we're dealing with isn't hooligans, it's crowd management, crowd dynamics and crowd psychology.' And as the powers at be finally addressed the core issues, what evolved in the decades after were undeniable improvements in fan safety protocols - which were primarily represented in the Saint-Denis Convention. Adopted by the Council of Europe in 2016 before being officially ratified by the UK government seven years later, this effectively set the framework for how major sporting events should be managed. On paper, this was the solution to years of toil over how to make football universally safe, preventing any future disaster or case of crowd mismanagement. A continent-wide legal instrument, it set out to ensure an integrated, multi-agency approach to sporting events that prevents security from ever overruling safety and service, with no single stakeholder - such as the police - able to address an issue by itself. However, this requirement of international police co-operation for each and every event that goes beyond country lines was - and still is - aspirational, idealistic and massively difficult to implement. 'The ideal situation is the policy agreements that were reached in 2016, and they're still not being realised,' Stott said. And as we've seen across the past few years, there have been numerous shortcomings that have not only led to fan safety being put at serious risk, but also the narrative to regress back to blaming supporters. The 2022 Champions League final was the key case failing, which demonstrated that 37 years on from Heysel, the same problems still existed. Poor communication between stakeholders - something that the Saint-Denis Convention acts to weed out - was rife as the Paris police started acting by themselves, leading to Liverpool supporters being funelled into a bottleneck towards an entrance at the Stade de France that was not fit for purpose. Crowds inevitably begun to overwhelm the police as a result, culminating in fans being tear gassed. Ticketless supporters were then blamed for the ordeal by French authorities. 'There was a focus on public order at the expense of public safety,' Stott said, whose independent report found fans were not responsible for crowd problems in Paris. 'There were a lot of parallels between what went wrong at Heysel and what went wrong in Paris. So despite all of that policy development and learning, ironically, we find ourselves in 2022 in a situation that wasn't that distant from 1985.' Paris 2022 was hardly an anomaly, especially in regard to the prioritisation of order over safety, or indeed the blaming of fans. Just this week, unfounded social media speculation over the Liverpool parade crash spiralled out of control, with some baselessly accusing the fans of enraging the driver who ploughed into the crowd, injuring 79. In Wroclaw ahead of the Europa Conference League final, Chelsea fans were blasted with a water cannon by police after disorder broke out. And earlier this season, ahead of Manchester United's Europa League quarter-final first leg with Lyon, the French police once again resorted to tear gas, claiming it was 'proportionate' to restore calm. Of course, these incidents of rogue, excessive policing do not adhere to the Saint-Denis Convention. Part of the problem remains the reputation around English supporters. After all, many of the key case studies detailing recent failings of the Saint-Denis Convention involve Premier League clubs. A stereotype of dangerous hooligans that come across the channel - something that was hugely exacerbated by the events of Heysel - still exists among fans and foreign police. This is despite, as Stott insists, football culture having vastly changed in this country: 'We don't really have the risk groups operating in the way they did in the past - the legislation has gone a long way to removing that threat.' However, there is still a reflex among European states to load up increased force to prepare for the arrival of English fans, which often devolves into a harsh, unjustified and overblown police response which puts supporters at risk. 'The key problem in the European context is risk assessment,' Stott adds. 'That risk assessment is often not very sophisticated. Say you've got a host police force in somewhere like Italy, Greece or Spain. They'll say: 'Are these fans English?' If the answer is yes, they'd see it as a high risk, and then throw loads of policing resources around it that weren't necessary. The English fans travelling weren't actually going there for disorder, but they get treated as if they were. That dynamic would actually precipitate disorder.' This does not reflect the regulated, 'one approach for all' ideal that the Saint-Denis Convention, a ratified piece of legislation that is meant to tick all the boxes when it comes to fan safety, sets out. That's because at the end of the day, seven years on from the agreement, 'aspirational' is still the way the convention is described. 'The policy is there, everybody knows that policy is the way to go,' Stott asserted. 'The problem is delivery - not in its entirety because many events do deliver that. The problem is you get is these sporadic events where that policy isn't adhere to, and there doesn't appear to be any kind of regulatory mechanism to say if you don't deliver, then what's the consequence? If there's no consequence, then these deviations are just going to continue to happen.' For Stott, a huge step towards making the Saint-Denis Convention the norm regards the involvement and control of Uefa. While he notes that the governing body's adoption of the agreement has been the 'driving force' in 'shifting the agenda', the situation could be vastly improved if Uefa took a more hands-on approach to regulating match policing in its competitions. 'Uefa doesn't really control policing,' he said. 'Policing is controlled by the nation states, and those police forces and nation states will at times completely vary away from that agreement. And this is where we have argued, certainly in our report around the handling of the Champions League final in Paris, that Uefa should take more responsibility and more control over the policing of their events. It's their failure to do that which is one of the primary issues that needs to be confronted. 'It's really their failure to oversee the delivery of the safety and security operations in these locations that lies at the heart of the problem. If they took a more proactive role in overseeing that these events were going to be policed in line with these agreements, then we would have safer events. That's what went wrong in Paris, and it continues to go wrong. 'When Manchester United fans ended up getting tear gassed again, Uefa could have stepped into the fray and said 'if this continues to happen in France, your teams aren't going into the Champions League anymore'. It could take this much more assertive position, but it doesn't. We really need a much stronger and more robust regulatory framework to ensure more systematic and coherent delivery of the existing policy.' Football is obviously in a better place than it was 40 years ago. Heysel was one of a handful of tragedies that shook the game and forced change to be made. And while legislation proves that, we are still seeing shortfalls in practice when it comes to the policing of events, especially on the international stage. There is still vast work to be done to ensure the safety of travelling supporters, preventing disorder from once again unravelling into disaster.
Associated Press
5 days ago
- Politics
- Associated Press
Heysel remembered: A look at the 1985 stadium disaster and how soccer recovered
On May 29, 1985, 39 people went to the biggest club game in soccer and never returned home. Heysel Stadium in Brussels was staging the European Cup final between Juventus and Liverpool exactly 40 years ago. Crowd disorder culminated in a surge by Liverpool fans into an adjacent stand containing mostly Juventus supporters. In the ensuing chaos, some were trampled or suffocated to death as they tried to flee and others died when a retaining wall collapsed. A total of 39 people — 32 from Italy, four from Belgium, two from France and one from Northern Ireland — died and around 600 were injured in events that took place in real time on international television. On the 40th anniversary of the Heysel disaster, here's a look at what exactly happened and the consequences of one of soccer's darkest days. The background English soccer was in a bad place in the mid-1980s, with racism and hooliganism damaging the reputation of fans in the game's birthplace. Just two weeks before Heysel, a 15-year-old boy died during fighting at a game between Birmingham and Leeds, and a fire that ripped through a wooden stand at Bradford killed 56 people. Two months earlier, some of the worst ever rioting occurred at an FA Cup game between Luton and Millwall. 'A slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people' was how an editorial by The Sunday Times summed up the state of English soccer ahead of Heysel. Liverpool fans might therefore have been viewed with suspicion as they poured into Brussels for the match against Juventus, but they were also suspicious themselves. A year earlier, at the 1984 European Cup final in Rome, Liverpool supporters were attacked by their Roma counterparts after the game. 'It wasn't a case of revenge,' Tony Evans, a Liverpool fan who was at Heysel at age 24, told The Associated Press, 'but rather no ultra will ever do this to me again.' Adding to the potential for catastrophe at the 1985 final was the condition of Heysel, a 55,000-capacity structure with outdated standing-room only stands, flimsy chicken-wire fences and crumbling walls inside and outside the stadium. There were too few police officers present, and organizers arranged for there to be a section for 'neutral' fans beside one of the two stands holding Liverpool supporters at one end of the ground. Many Juve fans ended up getting tickets in the 'neutral' section — and that's where the tragedy occurred. 'People were out of control' Evans attended the match with family and friends and remembers the level of drunkenness among Liverpool fans was unlike anything he'd seen. 'People were out of control everywhere,' he told the AP. 'When you got to the ground, people were kicking holes in the wall to climb in. By then, the atmosphere had deteriorated and there were wild rumors going round that Liverpool fans had been stabbed and one had been hung.' Evans, who has written about Heysel in two books, 'Far Foreign Land' and 'Two Tribes,' recalls the Liverpool section being so overcrowded that fans were already spilling through a collapsed barrier into the 'neutral' section. Fans were seen throwing beer cans and chunks of concrete torn from the stands. What ultimately set off a fatal surge by Liverpool fans, Evans said, was flares being set off. 'That seemed to spark a huge panic, a charge down the front,' he said. Those fleeing the panic were crushed in the corner of the neutral section next to an old wall, which collapsed. Despite the chaos, organizers decided the final should be played, believing it would prevent further disorder between fans outside the stadium. Juventus won 1-0. The aftermath Some 26 Liverpool fans were arrested and charged with manslaughter, 14 of whom were found guilty and given three-year prison sentences. Suspended prison sentences were handed to a Belgian Football Association official and a police chief. Heysel never hosted another major game. It was torn down in 1994 and replaced with King Baudouin Stadium. In terms of sporting sanctions, English clubs were banned from playing in European competition for five years. Liverpool received an indefinite suspension that ultimately lasted for six years. Long-term consequences Heysel was 'the low point for the English game' that was hated by the British government 'for its internationally shaming events,' according to John Williams, an expert in the sociology of football at the University of Leicester. Fans voted with their feet, with crowds in the English league in the 1985-86 season plummeting to around 16 million — a post-war low — when they had once been two and a half times that, Williams said. Yet Williams said Heysel started the process of reflection among English soccer fans that something needed to change. Within a decade — and turbo-charged by another stadium tragedy when Liverpool fans were crushed at an FA Cup match at Hillsborough, leading to the death of 97 people — the English game would have all-seater stadiums, CCTV, stronger powers for the police, an alcohol ban inside grounds, a national organization of fans, the Premier League and be the envy of the rest of Europe. 'Ironically, in many ways it was England that benefitted most from Heysel in the long run, more than for the Italians and others in Europe,' Williams said. He referred to what authorities abroad call the 'English miracle — the managing of fans competently with stewards rather than police and the generally very low levels of disorder in new elite modern stadia.' For Evans, fans took a deep breath and stepped away from 'the abyss.' 'It was a natural development by the people who watched the game and realized if this sort of behavior that had characterized the first half of the 1980s continued, football would be dead within a decade,' Evans said. 'Everyone says Hillsborough was the determining factor, but the reality is the tides of history had changed four years before.' A day of remembrance Liverpool and Juventus were unveiling memorials on Thursday in honor of the Heysel victims to mark the 40th anniversary. For Liverpool, the occasion would be even more poignant coming just days after a minivan plowed into dozens of fans during the team's latest Premier League victory parade. Liverpool said its newly designed memorial at Anfield will feature 'two scarves knotted together and gently tied — symbolizing the unity and solidarity between the two clubs and the bond formed through shared grief and mutual respect in the aftermath of the disaster.' It will include the names of the 39 people who died. Juventus ' memorial will be near its stadium and training complex. ___ AP soccer:
CNA
5 days ago
- General
- CNA
Tackling youth brawls in Indonesia
Youth brawls and hooliganism are hardly unique to Indonesia and are complex problems that have persisted for generations. A recent brawl involving primary students in Depok, West Java and another incident in Manggarai, Jakarta have sparked renewed concerns about the problem. CNA takes a look at the root causes of such brawls in Indonesia and what can be done to prevent them.
CNA
5 days ago
- Health
- CNA
Deadly youth brawls spark concerns in Indonesia, but can such violence be stopped?
MARGINALISED COMMUNITIES = MORE BRAWLS, SAY EXPERTS Youth brawls and hooliganism are hardly unique to Indonesia and are complex problems that have persisted for generations, experts told CNA. Ichsan Malik, a lecturer on peace and conflict resolution from the Indonesia Defense University in Bogor, West Java, said the first brawl reported by a national newspaper was one involving high school students in Jakarta in 1968. He said a brawl in Indonesia is commonly understood to involve the use of weapons. If no weapon is used, in Indonesia, it is usually labelled a fight. Brawls are more common among high school students because it is during adolescence when one is forming one's identity, which may manifest in the teenagers being 'more easily frustrated and aggressive', said Ichsan. The brawl in Depok involving primary school students could have happened because children nowadays are exposed to many things from an early age with the rise of social media, said Ichsan. Educational expert Doni Koesoema from Multimedia Nusantara University in Tangerang, Banten, said that brawls also took place when he was in junior high school in Surabaya in 1986. However, the brawls in those days were not so violent, he said. In the past, brawls tended to happen between students from different schools in Indonesia but, these days, they also happen between groups of young adults from different neighbourhoods, said sociologist Bagong Suyanto from Surabaya's Airlangga University. He shared Ichsan's view that brawls tend to happen more in marginalised or poor, homogeneous neighbourhoods with unemployment or poor employment prospects. Parts of Manggarai sub-district in Jakarta, for instance, are notorious for brawls between residents from different neighbourhoods, which have taken place for decades. According to informal parking attendant Muhammad Lutfi, 24, who is a resident there, the brawls have become more frequent since the area became busier with the revamp of Manggarai train station in recent years. Fights these days are usually due to tussles over who gets to work informally at a particular commercial space or the quest for domination in a certain area, he said. The rise of online shopping has also made weapons such as machetes and knives more accessible, said Lutfi. Lutfi himself became caught in a tussle earlier this month. He was taking a nap at a parking lot on the evening of May 4 when more than a dozen young people came storming towards him and hit his head with a sickle. 'I think the brawl here happened because they want to work as a parking attendant or earn money,' said Lutfi, who was rescued by others at the parking lot who intervened and took him to the hospital. He was left with a scar on his head from the attack. POLICE PATROLS AND OTHER MEASURES Brawls among youths or students escalate when enforcement is lax, said Ichsan. For years, no real solution has been introduced to eradicate the violence, but several authorities have recently vowed to tackle the problem. Minister of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection Arifah Fauzi said the brawling children in Depok were victims of an inadequate system, and her ministry would ensure they undergo mentoring. 'All Indonesian children are our children who should be in a safe environment … We all certainly agree that brawls involving elementary school-aged children are a violation of the basic principles of child protection,' said Arifah on May 12. Following the incident, the students, their parents, teachers and the police met at one of the schools on May 15. The students signed a statement saying they would not take part in brawls again. Taking a religious and cultural approach is Jakarta Governor Pramono Anung, who wants to introduce a programme called Manggarai Bershalawat, which means 'Manggarai praying for blessings'. "People who are fighting, having disagreements, must have a reason. What is the main cause? The main cause must be sought,' said Pramono last Friday (May 23) during a prayer session where he also launched the programme in Manggarai. 'One of them is that the youth's energy here is not being channelled properly. There are no sports facilities,' he said, handing out badminton and futsal equipment for the sub-district's residents' use. NO SINGLE SOLUTION Experts said more needs to be done to tackle the complex problem, with Donie of Multimedia Nusantara University saying students should undergo character-building programmes. Schools can also take a clear stance against hooliganism. A Jakarta high school counselling teacher, Citra Septiya, said students at her school have not been involved in brawls since 2019 because the school is firm: Those caught will be expelled. 'Brawls can result in physical injuries to death, create trauma for victims and people around them who are affected, and tarnish the image of the school,' said Citra. Schools must thus be strict and monitor their students closely, she said. Under Indonesia's laws, especially on the use of weapons against civilians, perpetrators of brawls should also be punished, said experts. Most of the time, the law is not enforced consistently enough to create a deterrent effect, said Ichsan, the lecturer on peace and conflict resolution. A genuine commitment is needed at all levels to implement and monitor the programmes seeking to address youth brawls, he said. 'There needs to be a strong political will involving all stakeholders: The government, the police, the students, young adults, families involved and even the media.
Telegraph
11-05-2025
- Sport
- Telegraph
The day Birmingham and Leeds hooligans caused ‘absolute chaos'
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.
