England’s Football War

They were in Belgium for the England-Germany fixture last Friday, whichEngland won 1-0, beating Germany for the first time in 34 years. Celebrationsthat should have followed this victory were marred by violence which is nowan expected end to England’s football matches abroad. Two years ago, afterEngland’s first match in the World Cup in France, England supporters attackedFrench businesses and destroyed cafes and bars in which they had, only a fewhours before, been drinking.

And last month, supporters of Leeds United Football club clashed with Turkish supporters of Galatasaray in Istanbul, where two English fans were killed, and later in Copenhagen, supporters of London’s Arsenal Football Club clashed with Galatasaray fans.

Lennart Johansson, the President of UEfA, said: "If it happens again …it is over for England. This cannot go on any longer, it is killing football… We cannot afford a repetition of what happened in Heysel, or what we have seen in Istanbul and Copenhagen or indeed Charleroi and Brussels " he said.

English clubs were banned from European football for five years in 1985 after 39 fans of the Italian club Juventus died when a wall collapsed at Heysel stadium in Brussels during clashes with Liverpool Football Club supporters at the European Cup final.

The UK government came in for sharp criticism for not doing enough to prevent the problem. UEFA is furious that the UK, unlike Germany, failed toconfiscate the passports of known `football hooligans’. Tony Blair isexpected to apologise to his Belgian counterpart in a bid to contain thepolitical fall out of English football hooliganism.

The English Football Association and the British government have longmaintained that the trouble makers are a minority and that all efforts aremade to stop them travelling abroad. A writer in the Times newspaper saidtoday the argument that it is only a minority that cause trouble "has becomean irrelevance. The minority appears to be growing all the time."

There also seems to be a growing view that although football does attract and provoke the most extreme thuggery there is a specifically English cultural context – with a tolerance for such behaviour – that this stems from. The Guardian newspaper in an editorial said that there was ".. deep within England’s social structure and popular attitudes an exceptional tendency to condone excess off the [football] field".

David Davies, the English Football Association’s chief believes "The problem is not just football-related, it is cultural." Even the Home Secretary Jack Straw speaking on BBC television appeared to suggest that England had a "cultural" problem which made respectable people "including barristers and engineers, who in the UK lead apparently law-abiding and respectable lives, … go abroad and cause this kind of mayhem."

One identifiable fragment of this very English context is the degree to which it glorifies its role in the World War II and constantly uses it as a reference point for English greatness. One journalist said that travelling abroad to England matches "is like being on the march with a rampaging army as they lay waste to large tracts of other countries". In the absence of serious political antagonism it appears football has become the substitute for war — at least for the army of supporters.