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.

The Politics of Policing

Police officers. They do a difficult job. They are the last person you want around when you’ve edged up to 35 in a 30mph zone; the first when your house is being burgled. They have to walk a line. There is, however, a certain insanity to their actions when ‘policing’ demonstrations against ‘Cuts’. They stand in their black uniforms – dressed in their riot gear, carrying shields and batons and sometimes riding horses. Before they take a step they are already walking symbols of intimidation and oppression. Black is the colour of uncompromising authority at its most extreme: think of the ninja, the SAS, the SS. They wear armour and they carry weapons – the instruments of violence and warfare - yet prohibit others from doing the same. They cover their faces with helmets, but now have fresh legal powers to force others to remove scarves and hats that might hide their features. They employ dogs. They use cavalry and ride down on gatherings and demonstrators who are all on foot. The threat is clear: this large animal will trample and injure you, possibly even kill you if you do not do as instructed. The tactic has been used in warfare since ancient times. To complete the Orwellian depiction, they are guided using cameras: one on every street in London - watching, observing and cataloguing.

This might seem a darkly poetic description but even members of the government characterise the police as such. Conservative MP David Jones describes their appearance as “sinister”. Commenting on their uniforms he said, "I think that the connotations of black shirts are obvious to anybody. They've got a kind of fascist, militaristic appearance."

The problem with the police is their inconsistency. They have a difficult job to do but their approach to different aspects of it seems contradictory. Hundreds of thousands of people may gather to demonstrate against government ‘Cuts’ of one kind or another and the police arrive dressed for battle. In terms of crowd psychology, the police imprint the idea that a demonstration is in fact a clash or struggle. When arriving equipped as they do, now a formalised pattern of behaviour, they signal that the street is a battleground. It is unsurprising then that small pockets of demonstrators within larger demonstrations resort to vandalism or violence. It is even less surprising that some individuals arrive at demonstrations kitted out for some kind of battle, even though their scarves and hoods are little match for helmets, body armour, shields and horses. Their spray cans look pretty puny compared to riot batons and the automatic weapons carried by the armed response vehicles waiting down the street.

Violence cannot be excused and these individuals should be prosecuted for crimes they carry out. We should review how the police are part of that problem. We should look at the way in which situations are handled and how the police conduct themselves – even down to how they dress, the equipment they employ and the psychological impact of these decisions on large crowds. Instead we have this impact manifesting itself in isolated pockets of law-breaking and demonstrators casually dismissed as ‘thugs’ by some senior police spokesperson. When groups of people go down a street indiscriminately smashing the place up, causing as much damage as possible, they are thugs. When damage is done to a shop or a business that uses loopholes to escape paying the tax due to the British public - who are partly responsible for the current shortfall and subsequent cuts to fill that financial shortfall – that damage is targeted and politically motivated. These people have broken the law and should be prosecuted, just like the companies who have broken the law by not paying the appropriate amount of tax. They are not the barbaric ‘thugs’ the police and media often make them out to be. Are they out on the street right now smashing shops up around the corner from you? No.

There are, however, people on your streets that do this: people who do commit violent acts and vandalism indiscriminately. Some of them are teenage criminals, shouting verbal abuse, stealing and terrorising people in their homes. Some are fully-grown adults who are out of their mind drunk: swearing, fighting and driving dangerously on our streets. Look at the way the police handle the true ‘thugs’ of society. Therein lies the contradiction. We have all seen the shows on television, following the police during their normal duties on a Saturday night. No body armour, helmets, shields, batons and horses then. If you are attacked in a city centre on a Saturday night or have your windows put in by a group of wayward teens you are lucky if you get one police officer to assist. Then it is the notebook and pencil that is used. Details are taken but little achieved. When people are prosecuted then the fines are miniscule and the mere warnings abundant. There is no ‘kettling’ of the drunken hordes or teenage gangs on our streets. And in fact there shouldn’t be – but it demonstrates the contradiction at the heart of British policing. Where a demonstration of true force and authority is seen to be required, the police in sufficient numbers are nowhere to be seen. When people are legitimately angry about issues that affect the entire country and demonstrate in the capital then the tactics of terror are employed.

The real insanity behind the entire situation is the fact that the demonstrators are out there in support of the police. They are protesting against cuts that would see police officers’ jobs, wages and entitlements taken from them. They are trying to secure the budgets that buy the helmets, batons and horses upon which the police rely in these circumstances. It could be argued that the lawbreakers are in fact risking the most – fines, physical injury, criminal records and imprisonment – to argue the case for police officers as public servants. What do they get for their sacrifice? A faceless wall of black uniforms and a truncheon in the face for not obeying instructions. It’s not right. The police are not allowed to strike and their off-duty involvement in demonstrations is unlikely to be trusted. Their unions could at least put out messages of support in relation to demonstrators’ intentions, rather than branding them as ‘thugs’ and reinforcing the government line. In Egypt, the Egyptian army would not act against the citizens of Egypt, despite government instruction. Why does our own police force, whose wages we pay and whose armour and weapons we purchase, act against the population without question or seeming conscience?