Fearful that threatened protests over the less than expected on-field performances of the English Premier League soccer club Everton for the season, so far, might target them directly, the Club’s Board of Directors, acting on an evaluation that the threat was “real and credible,” complied with a security recommendation that they stay away from last Saturday’s fixture. The entire ‘top brass’ of the club, its Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Finance and Strategy Officer and Non-Executive Director “reluctantly” complied.
To the casual observer this may well have appeared to be a shocking example of mob rule. The behavioral culture among fans of teams in the various English Soccer Leagues suggests that there is considerable substance to that view.
What happened last weekend was by no means the first chilling demonstration of the extent of the ‘leverage’ that English football supporters exert in the overall ‘running’ of the game. It is a leverage that derives, overwhelmingly, from their sheer numbers, their historical, deeply etched loyalty to their ‘home Clubs’ and more directly from their capacity to demonstrate their loyalty through violence.
Fan pressure arising out of the ‘messianic’ and frighteningly assertive partisan Club support, part of an indelible culture that has journeyed through the ages is no less significant a dimension of the sport than the on-field performances of the generously compensated players, the cult-like status that the standout Clubs enjoy and the vast sums of money that the game generates.
If they do not occupy the Boardrooms from whence the critical business and management decisions derive, English football fans have learnt, over time, how to secure their own strategic ‘seats’ on the ‘Boards’ of the Clubs that they support.
If, for example, the Manager of a Club is not, for some reason, ‘liked’ by the Club’s supporters, there are ways in which they can make their feelings sufficiently strongly felt to threaten the hapless Manager’s position. Beyond that, the force that Clubs’ supporters represent can make or break the game itself. Truth be told, over time, English soccer fans have become highly skilled in the art of exerting pressure on the administration of the game itself, including the business and operational decisions made by the Clubs.
Fan pressure, all too often, derives from a loutish force, a historically well-rehearsed and ingrained capacity to distract and to become devastatingly uproarious. It is, unmistakably, the capacity for English soccer fans to disrupt that keeps them ‘in the game.’
When vast armies of ‘supporters’ of the various Clubs are on the move during the country-wide in-season fixtures they compellingly ‘collar’ the attention of the rest of the society. ‘En-counters’ between travelling football fans and run-of-the mill commuters on public transport, for example, can become frightening experiences for the latter. ‘On the move,’ the chanting, often well-liquor-ed mobs can ‘take control’ of the streets in a manner that often pushes the police into frenetic ‘overdrive.’
The spectacles that are the games themselves are performed on ‘stages’ occupied not just by the opposing teams but by the opposing fans, whom, through their separate chants and roars have become, over time, an integral part of the overall theatre.
Then there are those events that take things down corridors of mayhem…like the on-field decisions that are taken up by the ‘referees’ among the supporting fans and which, on occasion, metamorphose into frenetic, often lethal in-stadium confrontations that know no limits, a fact to which well-documented chronicles of stadium tragedies attest.
Nor does the theatre of violence always end there. All too frequently the respective passions that derive from the outcomes of the games are exported beyond the playing venues and into streets and neighbourhoods where rival fans give frighteningly violent vent to the feelings that derive from victory or from defeat. Those clashes, all too frequently, envelop wider often neutral by-standing communities in theatres of terror that can sometimes extend into long nights of lawlessness and extended duties for the police.
Football-related violence in the UK has been, for many years, the subject of serious academic studies. Much of the violence, some of the studies suggest, is driven by a historical momentum that has been unable, over the years, the decades, to find a better way of celebrating what the late ‘King Pele’ termed The Beautiful Game. Other studies have painted darker scenarios of what one English University Professor reportedly described as “committed hooligans,” a segment of the game’s ‘fan base’ that have little if any substantive interest in football, per se, but are driven by powerful ‘turn-ons’ deriving from the passion and the high-spiritedness which the game generates. That is simply another way of saying that the ‘beautiful game’ itself has, over time, been adopted as the host for some of our most dangerous and unpalatable passions.
When a point is reached where the top executives of an English football club can be physically bullied by the Club’s ‘supporters’ into staying away from games, apparently through threat of likely physical harm, then it is not just football but English society, as a whole, that, surely, must stand up and take notice.
