2005-2006

Stainton Park, Radcliffe. The home of Radcliffe Borough FC. Pictured at Castleton Gabriels v FC United of Manchester.

North West Counties Football League Division Two. New Mills 0-2 FC United of Manchester. Ewen Fields, Hyde, Greater Manchester.

2006-2007

North West Counties Football League Division One. Abbey Hey 1-5 FC United of Manchester. Ewen Fields, Hyde, Greater Manchester.

At Shambles Square on the day of the North West Counties Football League Challenge Cup Final. Curzon Ashton 1-2 FC United of Manchester.

2007-2008

Northern Premier League Division One North. Bridlington Town 0-3 FC United of Manchester. Queensgate, Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire.

Pictured at Fleetwood Town v FC United of Manchester.

2008-2009

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Kendal Town 1-2 FC United of Manchester. Lakeland Radio Stadium, Kendal, Cumbria.

Home of Djurgårdens IF Fotboll, Sweden. Pictured at Djurgårdens IF Fotboll v FC United of Manchester

2009-2010

FC Sankt-Pauli 3- 3 FC United of Manchester. Friendly. Millerntor-Stadion, Hamburg, Germany.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Ossett Town 1-2 FC United of Manchester. Ingfield, Ossett, West Yorkshire.

FA Cup 2nd Qualifying Round. North Ferriby United 0-1 FC United of Manchester. Grange Lane, North Ferriby, East Riding of Yorkshire.

FA Cup 2nd Qualifying Round. North Ferriby United 0-1 FC United of Manchester. Grange Lane, North Ferriby, East Riding of Yorkshire.

FA Cup 1st Qualifying Round. Sheffield FC 1-3 FC United of Manchester. Coach and Horses Ground, Dronfield, Derbyshire.

FA Cup 1st Qualifying Round. Sheffield FC 1-3 FC United of Manchester. Coach and Horses Ground, Dronfield, Derbyshire.

FA Cup 1st Qualifying Round. Sheffield FC 1-3 FC United of Manchester. Coach and Horses Ground, Dronfield, Derbyshire.

2010-2011

Friendly. Bala Town 1-6 FC United of Manchester. Maes Tegid, Bala, Gwynedd, Wales

FA Cup Second Round. Brighton and Hove Albion 1-1 FC United of Manchester. Withdean Stadium, Brighton, East Sussex.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Matlock Town 1-2 FC United of Manchester. Causeway Lane, Matlock, Derbyshire.

FA Cup First Round. Rochdale 2-3 FC United of Manchester. Spotland, Rochdale, Greater Manchester.

Friendly. Oldham Borough FC 0-0 FC United of Manchester. Whitebank Stadium, Oldham, Greater Manchester.

Northern Premier League. Mickleover Sports 2-0 FC United of Manchester. Mickleover Sports Ground, Mickleover, Derbyshire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Matlock Town 1-2 FC United of Manchester. Causeway Lane, Matlock, Derbyshire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Matlock Town 1-2 FC United of Manchester. Causeway Lane, Matlock, Derbyshire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Chasetown 2-0 FC United of Manchester. The Scholars Ground, Chasetown, Staffordshire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Matlock Town 1-2 FC United of Manchester. Causeway Lane, Matlock, Derbyshire.

Northern Premier League. FC Halifax Town 4-1 FC United of Manchester. The Shay, Halifax, West Yorkshire.

2011-2012

Pre match gossip. Bradford Park Avenue 2-5 FC United of Manchester. Horsfall Stadium, Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Burscough 3-5 FC United of Manchester. Skelmersdale & Ormskirk College Stadium, Skelmersdale, Lancashire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Chorley FC 2-0 FC United of Manchester. Victory Park, Chorley, Lancashire.

FA Trophy Second Round Qualifying. Durham City FC 1-1 FC United of Manchester. Arnott Stadium, Durham, County Durham.

Friendly. Leek Town 0-2 FC United of Manchester. Harrison Park, Leek, Staffordshire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. FC United of Manchester 1-1 Marine AFC. Bower Fold, Stalybridge, Greater Manchester.

Friendly. Winsford United 1-0 FC United of Manchester. Barton Stadium, Winsford, Cheshire.

Northern Premier League Premier Division. Worksop Town 2-3 FC United of Manchester. Sandy Lane, Worksop, Nottinghamshire.

See more photos by Matthew Wilkinson on his Flickr page

Photo credit: Cybermyth13 on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

The question, though, is whether that vision of the England national football team as representative of multicultural patriotic English identity is anything more than a very effective piece of marketing by England’s sponsor, Umbro. For what is England, aside from a football team?

The problem with England, of course, is it doesn’t really exist: now, we might say that about most nation-states (invented traditions, imagined communities), but England’s problem is more acute than that shared by its fellow constituent parts of Great Britain. Scotland and Wales at least boast a national parliament and a national assembly respectively since devolution in the 1990s. England lacks even these devolved powers, let alone the status of a sovereign state, even if the ultimate authority for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland lies in London.

Britishness and Englishness are overlapping cultural identities that don’t make sense either together or apart; Englishness is bordered by Welsh and Scottish identities more clearly separated from Britishness; England is tied ever closer to continental Europe and the world, yet is still in a post-imperial haze struggling to process the mass migration patterns it’s necessarily a part of; what England is remains unclear, as is who the English are.

Perhaps, though, the national English football team is part of solving that riddle. In the past fifteen years, England’s football team has come to be overwhelmingly represented by the St George’s Cross, the flag of England, rather than the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom. It, of course, makes more literal sense for England fans to fly the St George’s flag, as it represents England alone. But it also speaks to a new meaning that has been attached to supporting England and to the St George’s Cross as a symbol of Englishness, one that just might be providing a more inclusiveness meaning to the identity of England than we might ever have expected from the England football team, one long tied to nastier currents of racism, nationalism and violence.

In many ways, this starts with the commercialisation of English identity that comes from football, itself now almost entirely commercialised: Team England is Brand England, as this Carlsberg ad shows:

11 Englishmen against the rest of the world . . . Men of England . . . If Carlsberg did team talks.

As Laurie Penny recently wrote, this branding of English identity to the England football team is a convenient money-maker from a marketing standpoint.

Britain itself is a shuffling, gloriously dissipated nation that also includes many people from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. By contrast, the kitsch, horn-honking vision of English identity associated with World Cup-England^TM is too easily co-opted by big business in an effort to get us to spend money on booze, branded sportswear and chocolate bars emblazoned with the England flag. B&Q, which expects to make a loss over the season, has even released a range of garden gnomes wearing the England strip, which rather sums up the twee consumer desperation of World Cup season.

Figures aren’t in yet for the 2010 World Cup, but we are talking seriously big business here: according to this Guardian article by David Conn shortly after the 2006 World Cup, “27% of adults bought a flag in June, equating to 10.5m crosses of St George flying at the high point of expectation.”

But does this commercialised Brand England run close to the nastier side of nationalism, as Penny goes on to say?

Marketing strategists clearly envision the people of England drinking and shopping the summer away, safe in the knowledge that national pride is being guarded by a regiment of xenophobic pottery goblins. This cheery commoditised nationalism runs unnervingly close to the uglier face of engineered “English pride”.

That idea of “English pride” has certainly long had seriously ugly overtones tied closely to the flag of St George. In that 2006 Guardian piece from Conn mentioned above, there’s a pertinent explanation of the ambiguity that still surrounds the concept of multicultural patriotism and the uniquitious flag of St George around the England team:

That ubiquity might appear to seal the process of reclaiming the flag from where it was before Euro ’96: tied round the wrist of the British National Party or borne by England football followers looking for trouble. “The flag of St George has lost all racist connotations,” concludes Kevin Miles, the Football Supporters’ Federation’s international coordinator. “It is now seen as the England flag.”

There are, though, reasons still to be cautious about what vision of England flies with the flag. Angela Foster, a journalist with New Nation, wrote in this newspaper about being racially abused when she went to support England at the Greenwich big screening of the group match against Trinidad & Tobago. She feels she had become complacent, seduced by the idea that supporting England now embraces everybody in our rainbow nation.

She is at pains not to generalise; support for England did attract black and Asian fans and, clearly, more women and girls than ever before. In New Nation’s poll before the World Cup only 50% of the paper’s black readers said they would be supporting England, but this was mostly because they were backing T&T or an African team representing their country of origin rather than because they felt excluded from supporting England.

About the flag, though, Foster and the poll tell a different story. Most black people interviewed said they felt alienated by the flag of St George and still associated it with the BNP. “It doesn’t really show unity, does it?” said one respondent, a woman aged 17. “It’s a bit white.”

This association of the flag with whiteness hasn’t entirely gone away. The violent, racist far right English Defense League, founded in 2009, notably uses the St George’s cross at the centre of its identity.

Yet one could argue that the commercialisation of the flag, its very mass-market status, makes it increasingly useless as an identifying symbol of the far right with each passing major tournament. The St George’s flag is now indelibly linked with the England team; no longer is it associated in the mass media’s eye with hooliganism and the far right; the more the flag is flown, the more it is juxtaposed to a more positive reality.

A brilliant essay from a few weeks ago by Gary Younge at the New Statesman illustrates this change on a personal level. Growing up black in 1970s England, an antipathy to the country’s national team came naturally toYounge:

When I was growing up in Stevenage in Hertfordshire during the 1970s, the question of who to support in the World Cup never posed much of a dilemma for my family. We backed Brazil. Nearby Hitchin may have been where I was born and, with the exception of a six-week family trip to Barbados to see relatives, England may have been the only country I knew. But when it came to my footballing allegiance, I got my kicks from a country I knew nothing about and with which I had absolutely no connection. At the time, this seemed entirely logical.

First of all, Brazil were an exciting team to watch. They played with flair and an elegant conviction. They were also brilliant. At the time of the first World Cup that I can vaguely remember, in 1974 – my mother bought our first colour TV for the occasion – Brazil had won three of the previous four tournaments. England, on the other hand, did not qualify in 1974 and would not qualify again until 1982. My elder brother, a talented footballer, was nicknamed Pelé. The notion that he might be imagined as a great English footballer never occurred to anyone, and that included us.

In those early and not so early years, this relationship to English football was not merely ambivalent, it was antagonistic. It wasn’t just that I did not support the national team, I actively wanted it to lose. And not just in football either. In everything from It’s a Knockout to the Eurovision Song Contest, England’s loss perversely became my gain.

This propensity to apostasy in sporting matters had much more to do with what was going on off the field than on it. It was about flags, anthems, war, migration, race, racism, colonialism, patriotism, nationalism, fascism and family – to name but a few things. But the nature in which these different forces interact is in constant flux. I am not the person I was in the 1970s and Britain is not the country it was, either.

Younge explains the changes to Britain, to football and to himself since then that has allowed him to cheer for England.

Most importantly, to begin with, has been the eradication of the pervasive racism on the terraces he found in the 1970s:

The racial exclusion I experienced as a child found its most complete expression on the English football terraces, which hosted some of the most nihilistic violence in the country. That was where the National Front would recruit. So if you were looking to try on your English identity, a bit like trying on a suit gifted to you by an elderly relative, a football stadium would not be the fitting room of choice.

In the past thirty years, though, these terraces changed, just as England changed that eventually found benign reflection in Fat Les’s Vindaloo.

The fault lines of our national identity shifted from colour to culture – from race to religion, language and ethnicity. For anyone under the age of 30, it is impossible to imagine Britain as an exclusively white country.

The English relationship to football became more playful and inclusive rather than desperate and melancholic. For me, this was summed up in Fat Les’s “Vindaloo” song and video for the 1998 World Cup in France. Marching through London in fancy dress and chanting with, among others, a black pearly king and queen in tow, singing: “Me and me mum and me dad and me gran/We’re off to Waterloo/ Me and me mum and me dad and me gran/And a bucket of vindaloo.” It’s difficult to think of another country that could celebrate its hybridity like that. The French had to win the World Cup in 1998 before they would acknowledge, let alone embrace, the diversity of their squad.

This transformation in the connotations of supporting England, and of flying the St George’s Cross, first became evident en masse at the 1996 European Championship held in England. Drawn with Scotland in the group stage, and with “Britain” no longer as interchangeable with “England” in a post-imperial era that saw the other constitutive parts of the country closing in on devolution, Wembley Stadium was suddenly flooded by the flag of St George during the tournament.

By the 2002 World Cup, the Guardian (like many newspapers, but more tongue-in-cheek) handily provided a” cut-out-and-keep new improved flag of St. George with no ugly connotations.”

As noted in an excellent academic article on the flag’s newfound pervasiveness, the Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey rooted the repositioning of the meaning attached to the St George’s Cross with a new inclusiveness that fits Younge’s schema:

Every country has its crosses to bear and England’s is St. George’s. Never in the field of English history, or at least not since the Crusades or Agincourt, have so many red-crossed flags been waved by so many for so many. The revival of the English Cross of St. George might have something to do with devolution, the English taking a leaf from the book of patriotism as practised by an increasingly proud and defiant Celtic fringe. It might simply be a striking and memorable pattern or logo that, unlike the union flag, even an idiot can paint across their face. . . . This red-cross flag of In-ger-land has, by happy accident, been saved from being tarred with a blunt nationalist brush this summer because, almost unimaginably, it has become an emblem that embraces fans of every class, creed and colour.

The England football team and the identity now attached to it through the St George’s Cross is perhaps such a mass-market success simply because it has become the one arena that defines Englishness so sharply, as opposed to Britishness, yet one that has become attached to inclusiveness — unlike the uglier rise of the exclusivist and violent far-right embodied by the English Defense League. It is England against the world, but it is not an England tied to racism and violence as the country’s football support was in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, England’s travelling support is channeled in more positive fashions for English identity.

In 2004, Amelia Hill wrote a long, thoughtful essay on what Englishness meant, one of the dozens of such efforts in recent years. Again, the England team appeared as a rare cultural marker of a positive development in defining English identity. She talked to Mark Perryman, head of an England fan’s gorup, in Portugal for Euro 2004:

Today in Portugal, Mark Perryman is doing his best to create his own definition of Englishness by handing out postcards to local people of the St George’s flag with words ‘Friendly Fans’ translated into Portuguese written across it. ‘We want to reclaim the flag and the associations of Englishness; make them into symbols and bywords for friendliness,’ he says.

Such an act is, according to Julian Baggini, editor of the Philosophers’ Magazine, a sign that the English might finally be ready to stand on their own: ‘The craving for certainty in any part of life is childish and misguided. We have to get over that need if we are to mature as an English nation, comfortable with its own uncertainty and ambiguity’

Handing out postcards in Portugal, Perryman believes the English are in a position of unique power and opportunity. ‘There is a great deal of clear space on the flag of St George. It’s all bare for us to write our identity on it as we stand today and wish to stand in the future.’

The vast whiteness present on the flag of St George now ever-present at England games is perhaps, then, a space in which English identity is being partially written: one anything but simply white, whatever it exactly is.

Photo credits: markhassize11feet, Stephen Iliffe and evissa via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

A lone German flag flying in Bunhill Row, London.

Photo credit: Stephen Iliffe on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

The Times, published in London, UK

BILD, published in Berlin, Germany

Note: The Times‘ front page is the cover of their football pullout section. Images courtesy of newseum.org.

England pulled a goal back in the 37th minute when a short Lampard corner from the right was played to Gerrard who crossed into the box. Upson, atoning for his earlier error, rose highest above the Germany defence and with Neuer stranded, powered a header into the net. Meetings between these two sides often provide talking points and this one’s came 60 seconds later when Lampard’s shot from the edge of the box struck the underside of the crossbar and bounced down, with the referee ruling the ball had not crossed the goalline.

There is no mention that the ball clearly crossed the line, with the reader left to ponder on precisely where it bounced down and why the referee might have made such a ruling.

Then we have FIFA’s report on the Mexico-Argentina game, with a notable absence in the description of Tevez’s first goal:

Maradona’s side were hardly lacking in attacking menace themselves, however, and Lionel Messi soon embarked on one of his trademark elusive runs before attempting a chip over Oscar Perez that the Mexico keeper judged well. Messi’s hunt for a goal at South Africa 2010 continues, but it was not long before the Barcelona talisman played a key role as another of Argentina’s star forwards opened his tournament account.

Tevez might have thought his chance had gone when Perez raced out to block bravely at his feet, but Messi was quick-witted enough to return the ball towards goal, where the Manchester City striker was waiting to head home. Breaking the deadlock enabled Argentina to take a firm grip on proceedings, and within seven minutes that hold was strengthened as Mexico reached for the self-destruct button.

No mention that “where the Manchester City striker was waiting to head home” was in a clearly offside position, or the bizarre scenes that followed which might just have played into Mexico reaching for that “self-destruct button”.

What’s interesting isn’t so much the banal and blatant official spin here, but that due to a growing suspicion of FIFA, whitewashing accounts like these may only make matters worse for Sepp Blatter and company.

It’s fairly obvious that when referees make mistakes, the finger is going to be pointed at FIFA — and, of course, they are responsible for maintaining high standards of refereeing at the World Cup and in the world’s game. FIFA’s stubborn resistance to even adequately explore goal-line technology is only the most glaring example of failure in this regard.

Many, though, sniff corruption rather than incompetence. The second largest number of visitors that arrived at this site through entering keywords into a search engine today did so by typing “FIFA corruption” into Google (the first was “Pitch Invasion”). The last time that same search term spiked so high was on Friday, June 18th, the day the US played Slovenia: and, pace Henry Winter, that game also had a high-profile refereeing controversy that had many searching for answers via Google. I’m guessing this was indicative of a global trend.

FIFA’s footprint is more obvious to casual viewers of the World Cup than it ever has been, as part of their self-promotional branding of the tournament. Their name is splashed on the screen at the start of every instant replay on television: FIFA, right before we see the ball cross the line by half a mile, or Tevez standing two yards offside, or Dempsey standing onside.

And so we have FIFA trying to keep the lid on these mistakes by cutting out comments on its website mentioning such unfortunate incidents and clamping down especially hard on YouTube videos featuring those particular incidents, as well as the obvious spin in the match report examples above. As Robin Goldstein at Blind Taste detailed right after the U.S-Slovenia game:

As of this writing, of the 343 comments to have been approved by the moderators on FIFA.com’s “Have Your Say” discussion board about today’s controversial US-Slovenia 2-2 draw in World Cup competition, not one of them contains even a passing mention of the main topic of discussion of every article that has been written about the game: the fact that referee Koman Coulibaly disallowed the third US goal for reasons that weren’t (and still aren’t) clear to players, fans, or television announcers.

Other soccer discussion boards, like the Washington Post’s Soccer Insider, were flooded with debate and discussion about the questionable call, which began almost immediately after it happened at about 16:40 GMT (the time zone used by FIFA.com). So were Twitter feeds (although at some point Twitter crashed, as it frequently has during the World Cup). The discussion over the controversy really exploded around the internet after the game ended at 16:51, and before long, USA’s tie with Slovenia already had more Google News blog hits (850) than Serbia’s upset of Germany (701).

But on FIFA.com, the silence about USA-Slovenia has been deafening. The latest comment to appear on the discussion board has a timestamp of 20:04. In the 193-minute span between the game’s end and the latest comment’s time stamp, only 24 squeaky-clean comments have been approved. For instance: “great fightback by the USA”; “this is the right result on the balance of play”; “way to go USA”; “the match was really exciting!”; “slovenia is the best team”; “USA are becoming a real nice team!”; and “Slovenia had a great chance to qualify in the next round!! But in the second half we were too defensive.”

By comparison, in that same span of time—193 minutes—after the end of Germany-Serbia (which ended today at 14:20), there were already 175 comments posted. That’s more than seven times as many.

FIFA’s efforts at massaging the conversation about the games will only drive people from using their official sources, erode their trust in them as an organisation, and feed conspiracy theories. As Goldstein puts it: “This doesn’t just undermine fans’ trust in FIFA; it also squanders an easy opportunity for the body that administers the world’s favorite sporting event to become a place where fans can share, discuss, and debate the things that they care most deeply about—thus engendering goodwill and helping to spread the good word about soccer.”

Even though we don’t have any inkling of any actual corruption in South Africa, FIFA is surely only engendering unnecessary further suspicion by such heavy-handed attempts to control the storylines.

We all saw the ball cross the line, Sepp, and we’re going to talk about it whether you like it or not.

The British press have done their best to roll out the tired old rhetoric, but in reality the match described as a “Klassiker” in Germany is not based on hatred. The truth is, both England and Germany know their histories are so intertwined that we’re part of the same narrative. It’s too much to hate each other, when as much of what makes us who we are today is as a result of what we’ve done in the past together.

Put simply: Holland are Germany’s nuisance neighbours. England, however, are Germany’s distant cousin that they actually really rather like, but family history means they have to put on a show of disliking each other. Both cousins are considered successful: Germany has the better car, England earns more money. England works in a more prestigious company, Germany has more qualifications. Every few years the cousins meet up again and start comparing lives to work out who is doing better. Inevitably the discussions become heated, insults exchanged, and afterwards they both make up over a stunningly better beer Germany brought with him. They end up forgetting what they were even fighting about in the first place.

Abstract metaphors aside, English and German football cultures are so similar that they have come full circle. German fan culture fell in love with all the trimmings of the English game during the 80s: the songs, the violence, the unfaltering support. Fanzines and magazines such as When Saturday Comes inspired similar German upstarts to the point where today 11Freunde is better than anything offered in England. Then Premiership (as was) and Sky TV came along in the 90s and everything got a bit more serious.

Fast forward to today, and you’ll see English football fans wondering why it is they can’t replicate the Bundesliga. Beer on the terraces, safe standing and cheap ticket prices. English fans take trips to Dortmund or St Pauli’s Millerntor for a taste of terrace culture. A game at Munich’s Allianz Arena is more procession that sport. English fans marvel watching FC Bayern prance to victory whilst drinking Weissbier and an oversized pretzel, standing all the while. Dipping back into the family metaphor, it’s as if Germany has turned up to the party with England’s ex-girlfriend in tow, only she’s gone and got prettier.

And so to Sunday. If the Germany-Holland rivalry is based on hatred, and England-Argentina is all about revenge, then England-Germany is mutual, begrudging admiration. The fact that so many column inches on both sides of the Channel have been dedicated to penalties shows that the so-called rivalry is a close-run thing. When I first read Marina Hyde’s article on the Guardian website suggesting the rivalry was one-sided, I wasn’t willing to believe it. Living in Munich, there is absolutely an excitement at playing the English. Like any other occasion the two play each other, it’s a barometer of how well we’re all doing. That 60,000 people are expected in Munich’s Olympiastadion and the Berlin Fan Mile will empty the streets of the capital, shows that this isn’t just any second round game. It could never be.

This was supposed to be an article about how in fact Germany does indeed bear a grudge towards England, but there wasn’t a compelling argument to be made. Instead, it’s excitement for a spectacle, for the next chapter in this swaying history. England and Germany get excited about playing each other in a way that no other fixture can match,

It’s all the bad blood, bleak times and good humour bundled into 90 minutes. Probably followed by penalties.

Joe Westhead is an occasional Pitch Invasion contributor. Read his World Cup blog at joewesthead.com/worldcup

Neue Westfälische, published in Bielefeld, Germany

The Times, published in London, UK

In the wake of England’s qualification for the second round, they said today that there had been no football-related arrests in South Africa at all – save for the fan who confronted David Beckham in the dressing room following the draw in Cape Town, who will appear in court again tomorrow.

“It’s absolutely unheard of. There has been nothing untoward at all. The English fans have been ambassadors for their country. We’re delighted,” said Andy Holt, the assistant chief constable in charge of a group of 12 British police officers liaising with South African colleagues.

He said the stereotype of the travelling England fan as a beer-swilling, tattooed oaf with a penchant for hurling plastic furniture had been consigned to history, with measures taken in the last 10 years to ban known hooligans and a shift in demographics boosting the number of families, women and children following the team.

What I found interesting about this piece was its focus: it mentioned a “a cultural shift around England support”, but this was solely presented as being a result of very strong action taken by the authorities in banning those identified as potential trouble-makers from travelling, quoting again Andy Holt:

“What we’re seeing is that those that pose a risk of disorder are kept at home through the imposition of football banning orders,” he added, referring to the 3,143 people banned from travelling for the duration of the tournament.

The piece doesn’t mention the self-organisation of fans to help facilitate that “cultural shift” over the past decade, one we went to some length to explain.

Instead, the banning orders are presented as the key development in sanitising England’s support, and are presented uncritically. We mentioned the banning orders uncritically in our piece, too, but in the comments, Micah raised an issue we should have addressed in the post:

Hey Tom, what do you think [of] England forcing it’s citizens to hand over passports? What is the criteria in classifying someone a hooligan in England? Does that mean the 3,000+ forced to hand over passports were actually convicted of hooligan related violent crime?

This is a very, very good question. And unfortunately, the answer is not necessarily a very happy one for defenders of civil liberties, as another Guardian piece by lawyer Rupert Myers a few weeks ago explained:

Without necessarily ever having been found to have committed a crime, you’re put on a secret list that the police keep of people who pose a “risk”. Your activities are monitored along with those of others on the list; you’re never notified that you’re on the list, or told what it means; then you come to court for something relatively minor, maybe swearing in a particular sort of public place, or pushing someone in a crowd, and your life changes.

The police apply for an order curtailing your movements, you are forced to surrender your passport at certain times, and to report to the police. The application is made on the basis of reports of you associating with other people on the list, the very fact that you have been placed on this list is itself a reason for the police to get their order, and you have to defend yourself against allegations of being complicit in the activities of others who pose a “risk” even when those people can go unnamed, and the officers who have reported incidents go unidentified in the Crown’s case against you.

You therefore cannot challenge directly the witnesses to these incidents, and the aspersion is cast without any clear criteria ever having been given as to what being a “risk” means, or warnings that you may be associating with others who are themselves a “risk”. Given this, you would hope that the test for the court in deciding if the police can have their order is a severe one, but the court “must make such an order if it is shown that the person has previously caused or contributed to any violence or disorder in the UK or elsewhere … and if it is satisfied that there are reasonable grounds for believing that a banning order would help prevent [activity-] related violence or disorder in England and Wales or elsewhere”. This is, in short, the punishment of future crime.

You might be forgiven for thinking that I describe in the above paragraph members of a fundamentalist cell, and that the [activity] mentioned above was terrorism, but this is the position that you can find yourself in if you regularly attend football matches.

Myers then goes on to cite in full a concrete, real example of the kind of justice this metes out:

This law came into sharp focus for me this week when before a court came a man who drives a bus as part of the logistical support for away game fixtures. He has been a fan of his club for three decades, and he was never found guilty of any violent crime or disorder until he was prosecuted for public disorder for pushing a member of the public and a steward, causing no injuries and resulting in a fine of several hundred pounds.

At this point the police told him that he was a “risk” fan, and brought out a large police report of all the times he has facilitated “risk” groups. This man has driven men, women, young, old – anyone who wanted to come and be a part of the away game support for his club. The police report also disclosed that he attended a pub frequented by “risk” supporters of another team, as if to suggest that anybody in the pub knows that they are on these watchlists, or that the pub is advertised as such. On another occasion a bottle is said to have been thrown from the bus by another “risk” fan, who is unnamed in the police report.

Indeed, nobody else is named in the report, so when this man has the misfortune to be on the same train platform waiting for a to go home from an away match, and an unnamed “risk” fan is alleged to have smashed a bottle on the platform, this is argued to be an act of public disorder somehow connected to this man simply because he is there.

Ironically, the very same organisation we highlighted as having been central to changing the culture around England’s travelling support through creative measures to develop a more positive and welcoming atmosphere in host cities for visiting fans through “Fan Embassies“, the Football Supporters’ Federation, has also been at the forefront of raising the alarm about the special legal treatment football supporters are given merely because they are football supporters, with their campaign, “watching football is not a crime“:

Watching football is not a crime! is part of the FSF’s ongoing drive to monitor the police in their dealings with football supporters and work with them to ensure that all fans are treated fairly, within the law and in exactly the same way as other social groups.

This has included expressions of serious concern of how the police are using powers ill-defined, and applied with broad strokes that criminalise innocent football fans, as proven in one recent case.

Essentially, I just wanted to present here an alternative account of the type of crackdown mentioned in both our earlier post and the Guardian’s piece presented uncritically, though I’d add I’ll be dropping a line to the FSF to find out more about their position on the banning orders with regard to England’s travelling support.  Thanks to Micah for raising the issue in the comments.