Football Fans in an Age of Intolerance

Abstract

There is a strange obsession with football today. If someone had told us in the 1980s that fans would be being imprisoned for singing unpleasant songs and players would be dragged through the courts for insulting one another on the pitch, we would most likely have laughed. Back then the over-policing of football fans took the form of mass policing, the intim- idation of away fans to and from games and the caging of spectators — a development that ultimately led to the Hillsborough ‘disaster’. Today, in contrast, the policing of games, where there is almost no violence, has taken a peculiar turn, with language, and the presumed politically incor- rect attitudes of fans, being continuously targeted by both the football authorities and by politicians and the law. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how and why this has happened.