Crowd segregation enables barbaric behaviour to thrive
HE sat down opposite me with his girlfriend on the underground train heading from Wembley after last season’s FA Cup Final between Chelsea and Manchester United. He was wearing blue colours, he had been drinking and he began to bellow the words of the vile chant sung by football supporters about the Munich air crash of 1958.
He did it once and then started again, and restrained, outraged silence was not enough.
“Would you stop singing that?” I said.
“Why? What’s it to you?” he barked back with a hint of menace.
“I’ll tell you why. Several friends of my father died in that tragedy,” I said, which is true.
His face dropped. He went quiet. He was suddenly alone with his contemptible conduct.
“See, I told you so,” said his girlfriend, relieved, happy to have a normal chap back at her side. “I told you so.”
Would I have done the same if there had been 10 football louts chanting together in the carriage?
Would I have challenged revolting behaviour?
It is more than doubtful; there are times for everyone in life when safety-first discretion is the wise course to take.
Discretion rather than valour is mostly what happens inside football grounds when people are appalled by abuse, racial, homophobic or viciously personal, that is shouted by someone nearby in the crowd.
It’s sensible. There is clear danger in confrontation, even though we understand that tolerating such abuse allows it to flourish.
And, as we have learned in the past few days, vile crowd abuse remains a cancer in the heart of football.
Last weekend Raheem Sterling was the subject of an alleged racial slur from a Chelsea fan in the crowd at Stamford Bridge. The man denies using a racist term but admitted his general conduct was offensive and wrong.
Former Scotland captain Darren Fletcher, now a player at Stoke, spoke of his disgust at receiving verbal abuse from crowds about his ulcerative colitis.
“I’ve had away fans singing about my illness,” said Fletcher.
“Derogatory and chanting stuff, whole sections of away fans to do with an illness I had.”
On Thursday evening, Chelsea fans were heard chanting an anti-semitic song at an away match in Hungary in the Europa League.
The club issued condemnation even as the match was being played. All these incidents are revolting – and revealing.
English and British football has been trying hard to fight against racism in the game. It tries to deter other forms of offensive abuse.
Yet, an uncomfortable reality is that football does not tolerate the basic civility of allowing supporters of two teams to sit together at a match. Crowds are for ever segregated to avoid trouble.
There are so many instances of paying spectators being verbally and physically attacked for sitting in the wrong area or being removed for their own safety.
In such circumstances, how can it be surprising that supporters feel free to behave badly in a football crowd?
The crowd allows them relative anonymity to shout their abuse or vile chants. And are they not emboldened when segregation encourages the idea that opposition club fans and players are the enemy?
We encounter the same anonymity now in social media, which has resulted in the online world becoming such a vicious forum.
Revolting threats are communicated because the perpetrators feel they can remain unidentified. England international Karen Carney, who plays for the Chelsea women’s team, spoke last week of how she receives vile abuse online just because she works as a TV pundit on men’s matches for BT Sport.
One social media post wished her ‘cancer, leukaemia and rape’. That is being investigated by the police, as is the incident involving Sterling.
It will help with football’s battle against abuse but only to an extent.
CCTV cameras at grounds can help to pick out individual culprits and computer experts will trace the worst online offenders.
The admirable challenge made by Sterling against the subliminal and institutional racism he senses in the sporting media is also a step in the right direction.
But how can the crowd culture that exists be altered? Can the prevailing aggressive tribal nature of football be modified by moving towards desegregation?
Other sports show it’s possible. The fierce intensity of Ashes sporting rivalry is not diminished because supporters sit together in the stands.
This doesn’t prevent hostile comments aimed at cricketers on the field but they are less prevalent, less likely, less extreme in nature.
The atmosphere at the grounds, for this observer at least, is far superior to football.
Many football people will feel uncomfortable about the thought of changing the tribal context of crowds. But are they not equally or even more uncomfortable with endless episodes of racist or homophobic abuse and vicious personal insults and threats?
At the end of a troubling week the question is plain enough: what kind of sporting culture do we want in the 21st century?
For me, certainly, it is not one in which a young man on the underground still believes it is acceptable to bellow the vile chant about the Munich air crash.