We Stoke City fans came out of our stadium joyous. My home team had just beaten Leeds United 3-2. Suddenly we were hit by a storm of bricks and bottles. They were thrown by Leeds fans who were known to be ‘hard’ and always ready to fight, but we Stoke fans also had a reputation to defend. There was a roar and hundreds of Stoke and Leeds fans poured into each other fists and feet flying. A Stoke fan went down. Leeds fans surrounded him kicking and stamping at his head. Stoke fans charged to rescue their comrade. Fighting spilled into the streets. A small group of Leeds supporters taunted Stoke fans and ran away down an alley. Stoke fans chased them and ran straight into an ambush.Dozens of Leeds fans were waiting. They hit the Stoke fans from all sides. Stoke reinforcements arrived, their red and white scarves flying, grabbing, pulling, jumping, kicking and punching to the ground the Leeds enemy wearing white, blue and gold.Shouts, screams and grunts from fans mixed with the wail of police sirens and barking dogs. It was a Saturday afternoon. It was English football in 1974. It was what we did.
These memories came back to melast February after the senseless death of Alkis Kabanos, an Aris fan allegedly murdered by PAOK supporters, in Thessaloniki. English football grounds are much safer now. People of all ages go with little fear of violence. The anniversary of Alki’s death brought those memories back again and prompted me to think why English football fans’ attitude to violence has changed so profoundly over the last decades.
Dangerous times
In the 1970s and 1980s violence was entrenched in English football culture. The dangerous brawl with Leeds was not rare. There were many similar incidents between Stoke supporters and fans from Arsenal, Birmingham, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Spurs and West Ham, just to name some. The dress code of English ‘football hooligans’ included Doc Martens,heavy-duty boots, often blood red. They were so iconic of the violencethat the phrase ‘put the boot in’became a literal and metaphorical expression for beating up opposing fans.
The attraction of the violence, apart from the pureadrenaline, was that it brought prestige, even admiration. At that time, living close to me were two brothers who were famed for their involvement in football related violence. Theyhad spent time in prison for it. One had a raised, round blue scar beneath one of his eyes, the result of a knife wound. We called him ‘Pimple-eye’, but not to his face. Despite the very real physical danger, involvement in football violence brought excitement, daring and a sense of belonging.
So, what changed? Three terrible events made English football fansrealise how vulnerable they were and how the sheer randomness of, like Alki, being in the wrong place at the wrong time could not just change lives forever but end them. Three events where football fans experienced the wretched emptiness of loss -Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough.
Fire, fury and failure
The Bradford City fire, in 1985, killed 56 people. The big wooden stand at the ground burned down in less than ten minutes. Years of accumulated rubbish underneath the stand caught fire after someone dropped a lighted cigarette. The dead were mostly children and elderly people who were crushed to death trying to escape the fire. Two weeks later in May 1985, at the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus,39 fans died when a wall collapsed following trouble between the fans at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. Liverpool fans were blamed, and English football clubs were banned from European competition for five years. Then on 15 April 1989, 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at Hillsborough stadium, where Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final.
The reaction of almost everyone to Hillsborough, including Prime Minister Margret Thatcher’s Conservative government, was to blame ‘drunken’ Liverpool fans. Her government introduced compulsory identity cards for football fans attending matches, but fans resisted. The scheme was never implemented. But fans were shocked and moved. Football was not war. Why did so many people die going to watch it?
Investigations into Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough found that dangerous conditions at the stadiums,bad organisation and poor policing had contributed to the disasters. Confirming these findings, the Heysel Stadium, was demolished in 1994 and replaced by the King Baudouin stadium.After Hillsborough, safety standards at football grounds in the UK were dramatically improved. Fencing, that had caged fansin and caused many deaths, came down. Clubs, including Bradford City, rebuilttheir stadiumsand many became all-seater.
Shamefully, it took 27 years to prove that Liverpool fans were not responsible for Hillsborough.In 2016, the courts found that those who died were unlawfully killed with police failings contributed to their deaths. But soon after Hillsborough, policing improved. Instead of reacting to trouble with arrestsand occasional beatings,the police worked to protect football fans. Police, local authorities and football clubs worked together to prevent violence by finding ways to keep opposing fans apart.
Football fans could point to circumstances beyond their control that had led to the deaths of other supporters but placing blame elsewhere would do no good. It was time to change. Football fans cooperated with every sensible proposal to make watching football safer. And they went further. Once a badge of honour, the ‘boot’ became a mark of shame.Those who went to football grounds looking for trouble were no longer welcome. Fans began to regulate their own behaviour. They still do. English football fans are not angels. Occasionally trouble erupts, but this is the exception not the rule. No one wants to return to the days when watching football was dangerous, not least because the relative peace at English football grounds has come at too high a price.
There are many things that football fans have little control over,such as who owns their club, World Cup venues, super leagues and the cost of tickets and TV subscriptions. But football fans do control and are responsible for how we treat each other. Ihave passed, many times, the small memorial to Alkis Kabanos in Harilaou where it says ‘Ποτέ ξανά’, ‘Never again’. If anything good can come from the chilling loss of Alki, it must be ‘Never again’. Thewry smile on Alki’s face, in pictures and murals of him, is a reminder thatfootball fans must see each other as rivals, not enemies.