48 The last word

Pitch battle: the heyday

of the football hooligan
Forty years ago, football hooliganism was at its peak, causing outrage, fear and fatalities. How did the sport recover
from its darkest days, and what happened to the men who belonged to the “firms”? Rosa Silverman reports

It was obvious something with black and white

big was going to kick off. members reflecting the
In their final match of the culture of their city. Neville
season, Leeds United were Edmead, an Aston Villa
taking on Birmingham City fan who attended the game
(the Blues) away and this with Blues-supporting
meant war. The same was friends, sees Birmingham’s
true of so many games hostility to Leeds that day
during the mid-1980s, in this context. Some Leeds
the nadir of football fans, he says, “were going
hooliganism; but 11 May through the town giving
1985 would turn out to be Nazi salutes all over the
a particularly dark day. In place. They were far-right,
Birmingham, it started with National Front men…
minor skirmishes and ended They wanted to
with hundreds of injuries cause havoc everywhere
and the death of a child. they went, and because
“More like the Battle of of what Birmingham
Agincourt than a football represented as a city,
match,” Lord Justice people said, ‘We’re not
Popplewell said later. going to stand for it.’”
The two armies of rival
Hooliganism, which had supporters were separated
taken root in the 1960s and by an alleyway, each
1970s and was known as meshed in to prevent them
“the English disease”, was reaching each other. Police
common back then, but The pitch invasion at the Birmingham City-Leeds United game on 11 May 1985
took the flak instead.
some hooligan “firms” “They were trying to get
had especially fearsome reputations. One was the Leeds United to each other but didn’t mind that they would have to go over
Service Crew. Another was Birmingham City’s Zulu Warriors. us,” says Stephen Burrows, then a young West Midlands Police
“Sometimes it’s like a tinderbox atmosphere, and you could tell officer on duty at the game that day.
it was going to go off,” says Roy Durn, then a 23-year-old visiting
Leeds fan. “There were a few fights on the way up to the ground.” When Birmingham City scored in the first half, it served as
Durn, now 62, had travelled to Birmingham from Leeds with a “catalyst” for the eruption that followed, says Piper. A pitch
the Service Crew, although he was not a member. Theirs was invasion – which fans recall came from the away supporters –
a convoluted journey via Manchester to avoid the police. The brought the game to a temporary halt. A second pitch invasion
Service Crew were so called since they eschewed the special trains followed at the end of the game, involving large numbers of
that were chartered to transport Blues supporters. Seats were
fans to away games (the torn out and hurled. Concrete
“specials”), favouring instead “There were bricks flying and some had been ripped out and thrown.
the regular service trains. of the Leeds fans were wearing Nazi So, bizarrely, had a kettle. Police
Their trip on that spring day in riot gear were drafted in to
included a 20-minute walk emblems on their armbands” try and control the disorder.
across Manchester, between But Burrows and his colleagues
the city’s Victoria and Piccadilly stations. Even that did not pass were in standard helmets and carrying no shields. “We were
without incident. “There was loads of trouble, shops got smashed clearly losing the battle, heavily outnumbered and in possession
in,” recalls Durn. “It wasn’t until we’d got to Piccadilly that the of no riot gear,” he writes in his memoir Reporting For Duty.
police got their act together and started to round us up.” They were saved by the mounted police, he says, likening the
scene to the Charge of the Light Brigade. But the mounted
The trouble escalated further when the fans reached Birmingham, police came under attack as well. “There were people carrying
starting with tussles in the streets and ramping up into something the signage that was around the stadium, using it to poke the
more dangerous inside St Andrew’s stadium – a ground that had policemen off the horses,” says Dan Curtis, a Blues fan. “This,”
been built almost 80 years earlier to accommodate more than Durn heard one lad say, “is payback for the miners’ strike.”
70,000 spectators. “Once you got in, you could sense something
was going to happen,” says Birmingham City fan Ian Piper, Ian Hambridge was 15 years old and attending his first football
then a 21-year-old IT programmer. By the time Durn reached match that day. The Northampton schoolboy was a “happy-go-
St Andrew’s, the turnstile had been pulled down, fans were piling lucky lad”, his father said later. When he failed to return home
in without tickets and anarchy was in the air. “Absolute chaos,” that Saturday, his parents called the police. In the final act of the
he says. “There were bricks flying and some of the Leeds fans drama at St Andrew’s, as Leeds fans tried to leave the ground,
were wearing Nazi emblems on their armbands.” Although not all a 12-foot wall collapsed onto Ian. He died at Smethwick
Leeds hooligans were racists, there was certainly a racist element Neurological Hospital the next day. A plaque at the ground
within their ranks. The Zulus, meanwhile, were a mixed group, now commemorates the “tragic accident”.

THE WEEK 24 May 2025

 The last word 49
More than 120 people were arrested, up In his report on the events of that year, Lord
to 400 fans and 145 police officers injured. Justice Popplewell quoted from a Sports
One of them was PC Michael Corrigan of Council report that put hooliganism in
the Operational Support Unit, then in his late the context of previous male violence
20s. He was standing near Ian before the wall perpetrated by alienated youths: the riots of
fell and he too was crushed by the bricks. the teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the
“When I realised [Ian] was a young man who skinheads. “They are pressed into it by a
was no trouble, I turned my back on him,” society whose structure does not offer them
he says. “Then the wall comes over and he’s much in the way of alternative affiliations,”
killed, and I always think if I’d told him to go it said. The football match offered “an
away, would he still be here today?” Corrigan acknowledged meeting place, a carnival
believes his riot helmet saved his own life. But atmosphere and exciting contrast to the
the wall smashed his left ankle and damaged drabness of the workaday week”.
a vertebra. Ian’s death still haunts him today.
He thinks of him as “the forgotten victim”. We don’t hear so much about football
hooligans today. A succession of measures were
On a normal day, the carnage in Birmingham taken to stamp out the problem. Out went the
might have dominated the headlines. In fact, terraces and in came all-seater stadiums.
it was overshadowed by what happened at Dave Panniers: “We liked a bit of trouble” Alcohol was banned from the stands.
another game that same afternoon. While CCTV surveillance was introduced and clubs
Leeds and Blues fans rioted in the Midlands, a fire broke out in increasingly employed stewards to keep the grounds safe. Stiffer
a wooden stand at the Bradford City stadium. The blaze claimed penalties were handed to offenders, known hooligans banned
56 lives and injured more than 260 people. The catastrophe was from matches. “The police are so much more prepared,” says
believed to have resulted from a discarded cigarette. Panniers. “You can’t get away with anything. It’s so much safer, so
much better.” But some fans fear something has been lost; that this
Less than three weeks later, on a warm evening in Brussels, process of sanitisation tore the soul from the game. In the Premier
another disaster occurred: 39 people died and 600 were injured League era of expensive tickets and wealthy foreign businessmen
at the European Cup final game between Liverpool and Italian buying up English clubs, it’s certainly different.
side Juventus at Heysel Stadium. This time, crowd trouble was to
blame, with Liverpool fans charging at Juventus fans, resulting in And what of the hooligans themselves? In the popular version
the collapse of another wall. Most of the dead were Italians. All of the hooligan story, the arrival of acid house in the late 1980s
English clubs were banned from playing in Europe for the next offered an alternative outlet. Ecstasy, the “love drug”, famously
five years. It is hard to comprehend the hooligans’ willingness to doesn’t make people look for a punch-up. “A lot of [the Service
risk prison, severe injury or Crew] got into acid house
worse, for a bit of fun. and that had a big effect,”
“We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t says Durn. But the dance music
The rise of the football hooligan enjoyed it. It wasn’t done out of desperation scene did not absorb everyone.
coincided with Britain’s Many, including Panniers, got
deindustrialisation. Traditional
or poverty… I just liked being involved” married, settled down and
manufacturing jobs on which had children. “Others got
working-class men once relied were disappearing, along with the into drugs and ruined their lives,” he says. “Some are dead.
communities around them. Football and its accompanying rituals Some are still on the dole.”
were “the highlight of our week”, says Dave Panniers, who was
a 23-year-old Leeds fan in 1985. He was “probably” a hooligan As for whether “the English disease” has been cured, the answer
himself, he says, but was “not a massive fighter”, preferring is no, not exactly. A downward trend in football-related arrests
to linger on the outskirts and watch, maybe throwing the odd in England and Wales up to the 2018-19 season (which saw
punch. “We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t enjoyed it. It 1,381) was reversed by the 2022-23 season, when the number
wasn’t done out of desperation or poverty… I just liked being rose back up to similar levels to 2013-14, at 2,264. Cocaine
involved.” As with other subcultures, the firms had their own use helps drive disorder at matches, according to police. In 2023,
fashion. The “football-casual” look took off in the late 1970s, research by University of Stirling experts suggested drug-taking
and by the mid-1980s the terraces were awash with designer at games had superseded alcohol as a safety concern. While the
and sports labels: Sergio Tacchini, Pringle, Burberry, Aquascutum, atmosphere is less volatile, it can still turn, says Durn. “It goes
Fred Perry, Adidas and Fila. As Dr Ben Jones, a University of East back to that basic, animal sort of instinct, hostility,” he says.
Anglia historian, has written, “At a time of mass unemployment, “I still see it now. You can get a lot of boys out looking for
football casuals were displaying all the accoutrements of affluence, trouble.” The racism hasn’t been stamped out either. The
which would have been lauded by Thatcherites in other contexts.” charity Kick It Out received 1,332 reports of racism, sexism
and faith-based abuse in the 2023-24 season, the highest
But Thatcherites, unsurprisingly, did not laud the hooligans, who number logged in its 30-year history.
to them were a nuisance on a par with striking trade unionists.
The response in society at large was akin to moral panic. These, Where violence is concerned, fans seem to agree it is nothing like
after all, were men who would smash up town centres, trains, it was. But there’s a touch of nostalgia among those who were
stadiums and each other for a laugh. For Panniers, now 63, it once involved; a wistful sense of having been part of something
was more about the spectacle than any actual desire for a fight. that has passed. The Service Crew and Zulu Warriors still exist
“We liked a bit of trouble [once] we’d had a few beers,” he says. in some form, as do other firms. Social media provides a virtual
“There were the nutters, but most of the lads were like me, there meeting place, with the Hooligans Culture page on Facebook
for the show.” Yet the numbers of those injured owing to football boasting 131,000 followers. While many of the pictures posted
© JOSH ADAM JONES/THE TELEGRAPH

violence in that period are not small. Durn, a self-employed show older men clinging to pints and the good old days, there
builder from West Yorkshire, describes being punched, kicked and are plenty of young lads too. Panniers looks back with mixed
even cut by a razor blade. Attending an away game in Liverpool, feelings. “I won’t say I’m ashamed, but I suppose it did spoil it
he was kicked unconscious by Everton fans in the street. for the ordinary fan,” he says.

All told, it was an annus horribilis for football. But perhaps A longer version of this article originally appeared in The Daily
the country wasn’t quite facing an unprecedented phenomenon. Telegraph © Telegraph Media Group Holdings Limited

24 May 2025 THE WEEK