Stopping England's hooligans

The football (or soccer to those of you from across the pond) World Cup is well and truly underway, and while the English national team has so far failed to impress, the actions of Britain's authorities in preventing football hooligans from ruining the tournament have certainly, so far at least, been a success.

Over the years, English hooligans have quite rightly become world renowned for the violence and terror they have wrought both at home and abroad. The recent films 'Football Factory' and 'Green Street' attest to the way of life many English 'fans' led in the past. This hooligan culture was once mostly confined to within Britain's shores, but when it started to cause problems abroad, people really began to take notice. The year 2000 marked a low point for English football when Arsenal fans, in Copenhagen to watch their team play in the UEFA Cup final, went on the rampage, causing serious damage to the city centre. Later that summer, at the European Championships, England fans were again involved in violent and destructive incidents in Belgium and Holland.

Following these events, UEFA and FIFA, the European and world football authorities respectively, threatened the English national team with sanctions should any such acts of hooliganism occur again, including the possibility of being banned from competing in future tournaments. This served as the wake up call that the English authorities needed to stir them into action, and the following six years have seen sustained efforts to prevent these kinds of scenes from being seen again. As well as meting out harsher punishments to hooligans, the main measure was to compile a database of anyone convicted of any football-related misdemeanour, with those on the list being banned from travelling abroad to watch football and, in serious cases, from attending matches in Britain. While the World Cup in 2002 took place in Korea and Japan, destinations too distant for the average working-class football hooligan to reach, the European Championships in Portugal in 2004 were seen as the first real test for Britain's shiny new image. It was passed with flying colours. The only incidents involving English fans took place well away from any matches, usually occurring in holiday resorts where drunken English fans had been watching games in bars. This lack of trouble was also in spite of the fact that England were the best-supported team in the competition. Meanwhile, by and large, club matches involving English teams have passed without any serious clashes between fans or with the police (although there have been some exceptions).

These recent successes have not resulted in any kind of complacency though, and this summer's event in Germany was seen as an even sterner test for England. Germany, for historical reasons, is seen as England's traditional football 'enemy' - sure to fire up the nationalism of any potential hooligans - while fans from Poland, Holland and the Balkans would be also travelling to the tournament with a reputation for violence - not to mention the recent examples of football- and race-related aggression in Germany itself. In the weeks leading up the competition, the English authorities issued letters to all 3,380 people currently with banning orders, obliging them to report to their nearest police station and hand over their passports, thus preventing them from travelling to Germany. By the time of the opening match, 95% of hooligans had done so. Meanwhile, police spotters were deployed at all airports with flights to Germany and neighbouring countries to keep an eye out for those who had not submitted their passports, and also running the rule over any suspicious-looking travellers, who they were permitted to stop, question and run a background check on. For the duration of the tournament 80 British police officers are on the ground in Europe, without the power of arrest but assisting local forces in dealing with British fans.

So far these actions have been largely successful. Following England's opening match with Paraguay in Frankfurt, only nineteen arrests were made out of the 70,000 English fans in the city. Rather than for hooliganism, these arrests were mainly for minor drink-related offences or for a few idiots deciding to sport Nazi insignia, which is illegal in Germany. The only set back has been that 91 hooligans from the government's banned list have not handed in their passports or been located, but police on the ground are familiar with their identities and in any case they seem too few in number to cause major problems.

Meanwhile, the real trouble has been happening elsewhere. On Wednesday night Germany faced Poland in a significant match, both in terms of sporting ambitions and also due to the historical relationship between the two nations. The two countries have also both experienced recent outbreaks of football-related violence, often caused by right-wing nationalist groups. Prior to the match, German police, assisted by some Polish representatives, decided to pre-emptively strike, and cornered a large group of known hooligans in Dortmund's main square. Amid violent scenes, with glass bottles being thrown at police, over 400 arrests were made, of which 119 were Poles and 278 Germans. One police officer and 32 fans were injured during the clashes. Many have criticised the German police's apparently heavy-handed approach in deciding to move in on the potential troublemakers before anything serious had taken place. But judging by previous experiences, it seems like a wise move to attempt to prevent any serious trouble and make the arrests while the hooligans were in one place and before they had had a chance to cause any problems.

It seems that Britain's efforts over the last six years to clean up its act have been a significant success. Violent incidents, both at home and abroad, have hugely decreased. This achievement is all the more impressive when one compares it to the examples of violence and racism amongst football fans in Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. However, it must be remembered that there are still over 3,000 people with banning orders, indicating that although the problem is being contained, the troublemakers are still out there. It certainly seems that things are under control though, and maybe a few other countries could do with taking some lessons from England when it comes to controlling what appears to be a growing problem of hooliganism in European football.