The Real Cost of Football

Football is a fun game. A kick around in the park is not only enjoyable, it is good for you. Watching football on television can be engaging and a form of socialising. What people choose to watch on their television in the privacy of their own homes is ultimately up to them. On the other hand, I would imagine that there are a great number of wives and girlfriends out there who believe that their spouses spend a disproportionate amount of their time watching football matches, reading about football, talking about football (often at the pub) and playing the game (usually on a console of some description). Painful though this might be for them, this is not the real cost of football.

Football matches cost the British taxpayer millions and millions of pounds each year. A game that is enjoyed by relatively few in the stadiums, costs everyone else huge amounts of money. It seems an unfashionable thing to identify as a problem. The British seem unwilling to condemn negative aspects of ‘the Beautiful Game’. We hear endlessly about the skill of football players, yet we haven’t been able to secure an international victory in decades and decades. Footballers are paid obscene amounts of money, totally out of proportion with their actual level of skill and importance. This tiny number of wealthy sportsmen then in turn feed the false hopes of hundreds of thousands of schoolboys, for whom football becomes more important than achieving good grades in school or securing a decent job. News relating to football dominates Sports News on television and can almost take the same amount of time on the programme as all other news from around the rest of the world – let alone the country. The same pattern can be seen in the number of column inches it dominates in tabloid newspapers. The weather presenter even makes a special report at the end for football fans of specific games! As recent news coverage regarding referees has indicated, football can also be instrumental in developing misogynistic and violent attitudes in the people who attend football matches at all levels (parents and children attending after-school club matches right up to hordes of men travelling to Premier League events).

These aspects of football matches seem a high cost already to pay for a nation’s interest in football – although I believe whenever this phrase is used it is not really a ‘nation’s’ interest. A large number of people aren’t interested in football at all. Many have a passing interest and might watch a game on the television but won’t travel hundreds of miles to watch their team play in a distant stadium against another team in the same league. Essentially, football’s importance is overstated and nobody ever seems to challenge the stranglehold largely working-class young males have on our actual nation’s interests.

These are all negative aspects of football – but they are not its true cost. Every time a football match takes place in a stadium in a city centre, football clubs have to pay for policing costs within the stadium and in their car parks. This runs to thousands of pounds. This is also a relatively recent arrangement: a limited concession to the impact football matches have on our cities and society. There are two true costs to the average citizen in this country. The first is that the football clubs do not pay for the large numbers of police officers required to form lines that separate fans at train stations or police the often residential areas around stadiums into which fans spill following matches. If the recent coverage is to be believed then that is a lot of misogyny and violence being released into our communities. Football fans, of course, do not often just go home. Pubs and city centres are often venues for discussing disagreements and airing grievances with fellow supporters or opposing fans. Adding alcohol to the situation creates further consequences: violence and anti-social behaviour are subsequently maximised. These are all problems that the police have to deal with, on a weekly blank cheque written by the British tax-payer. The football clubs do not pay for the extra police officers that have to be deployed to secure the safety of citizens in these areas. They also don’t pay for the many hours of police overtime (charged at a premium, of course) required to investigate match-related crimes and gather evidence in the days following an event. The difference between the small concession the football clubs make to policing and the cost to the taxpayer for policing football matches in their entirety is millions and millions of pounds every year. This cannot be right. Why should the many pay through the nose for the luxury of the relative few?

There is one further heinous cost of football matches which is often overlooked. Most people can stomach the problems identified above, given that the football clubs have taken a token amount of responsibility and paid for the policing inside the stadiums. The real cost of football is that police forces do not magically grow extra officers to regularly police football matches – whether those police officers are operating inside the stadium, forming lines in train stations or splitting up fan-brawls in the city centre. These are the constables investigating your burglaries, trying to locate your stolen cars, attempting to prosecute child abusers and hunting for rapists. They are pulled off their cases for the evening - the essential workload of which simply has to wait – in order to police a ‘game’. A game in which fully grown men cannot be trusted to behave themselves or to adhere to the laws of the land. All of this so that a group of young men can experience the ‘atmosphere’ of the football match in a stadium: this seems far too high a cost for the rest of us to pay.