Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Few subjects provoked so much debate in the early 1980s as football hooliganism. If you went to watch Millwall, people joked, you were more likely to find yourself standing next to a group of sociology lecturers on a field trip than a mob of working-class hooligans on the rampage. Yet there were as many competing explanations as there were hooligans. The right often blamed permissive morality and progressive education: the Daily Express, for instance, thought hooliganism merely ‘an extension of an ugly thread that runs through modern society, which so fashionably spurns the virtues of restraint and self-discipline and glamorises aggression and selfishness’. The Times, too, thought ‘society has created the football hooligan’, since ‘football violence is only a part of the much wider problem of growing juvenile crime’. And the game’s authorities were often quick to deflect blame on to society at large. The problem, explained the new FA chairman Bert Millichip in the autumn of 1981, was that football had been infiltrated by ‘skinheads and bovver boys’. And when, after the Heysel disaster four years later, Mrs Thatcher summoned football’s top brass and demanded to know what they were going to do about their hooligans, the FA secretary Ted Croker immediately hit back. ‘These people are society’s problems’, he allegedly replied, ‘and we don’t want your hooligans in our sport, Prime Minister.’23

  The words ‘your hooligans’ went down very well with Mrs Thatcher’s critics, many of whom saw football violence as a reaction to her supposedly brutal assault on the working class. But if so, why did hooliganism first become a serious problem in the mid-1960s, when wages were high and unemployment was virtually unknown? If the young men who rampaged across Europe in the 1980s were Mrs Thatcher’s hooligans, does that mean the Leeds fans who rioted at the 1975 European Cup final were Harold Wilson’s hooligans? As for the argument that hooliganism reflected systemic poverty, this too was very dubious. When Thames Television interviewed 140 members of West Ham’s ‘Inter City Firm’ in the mid-1980s, they found four chefs, three electricians, three clothes-makers, six motor mechanics, two solicitors’ clerks, a landscape gardener and an insurance underwriter. The idea that they were venting their anger at Thatcherite economics is patently ridiculous. In any case, as Lincoln Allison wondered in 1981, ‘why didn’t it happen in more deprived times? Why doesn’t it happen in more deprived places? Anyway, how come the deprived masses show up in places like Madrid and Turin, more belligerent than before when faced with the sight of foreigners and inflamed by cheap booze?’24

  Perhaps surprisingly, very few football writers associated hooliganism with unemployment or economic deprivation. Even in the left-leaning broadsheets, most thought ultimate responsibility lay with football itself, not the government. The Guardian’s Patrick Barclay, for example, lambasted the ‘bleating chairmen who seek to opt out of their social responsibility’, and insisted that hooliganism was ‘a problem for football to solve rather than “society”’.fn2 Chairmen and officials, agreed the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney, had spent far too long blaming football’s ills on society in general instead of taking responsibility for their own game. They should be ‘obliged to take direct responsibility for offenders attracted to their colours, and, if necessary, should be punished with closures until there is definite improvement’.25

  The truth is that, as a spectator sport attracting tens of thousands of young men, football had always carried the germ of hooliganism. There had been hooligans as long as there had been crowds: as the historian Geoffrey Pearson wrote in 1983, the ‘modern football rowdy’ was simply ‘a reincarnation of the unruly apprentice, or the late Victorian “Hooligan”’. Even in the supposedly law-abiding 1950s, as Arthur Hopcraft noted in his classic The Football Man (1968), ‘trains, carrying rampaging young fans, would end their journeys with windows broken, upholstery smashed, lavatory fittings broken, the carriages running with beer and crunching underfoot with broken glass like gravel’. Back then, though, teenage vandals had been vastly outnumbered by older men. Later, fans remembered that if they stepped out of line, their fathers had given them ‘a bloody good hiding’. But as working-class supporters began to share in the fruits of affluence, the crowds changed. Instead of taking the bus to watch their local team, married men stayed at home, took their wives shopping or went out for drives and day-trips. As crowds dwindled, the fans misbehaved and gate receipts fell, clubs stopped investing in their grounds. And so football violence became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fans behaved badly; the authorities treated them badly. The authorities treated them like animals; they behaved like animals.26

  But what did they get out of it? What demons, what resentments, drove them on? The most persuasive answers came from, of all people, an American student. One cold Saturday evening in 1982 a young man called Bill Buford was waiting for a train in a village station outside Cardiff. Buford had lived in England for almost five years, having moved from California after winning a postgraduate scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. He had never been to a football match. On the platform, he sipped his tea, while beside him a man leafed through his newspaper. It was a ‘misty, sleepy, Welsh winter evening’. All was quiet. And then, suddenly, a train roared in.

  One moment, Buford had been lost in a melancholic reverie. The next, he was staring at a scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch:

  The train was a football special, and it had been taken over by supporters. They were from Liverpool, and there were hundreds of them – I had never seen a train with so many people inside – and they were singing in unison: ‘Liverpool, la-la-la, Liverpool, la-la-la’ … pounded out with increasing ferocity, echoing off the walls of the station. A guard had been injured, and as the train stopped he was rushed off, holding his face. Someone inside was trying to smash a window with a table leg, but the window wouldn’t break. A fat man with a red face stumbled out of one of the carriages, and six policemen rushed up to him, wrestled him to the ground and bent his arm violently behind his back …

  The train left. It was silent.fn3

  At the time, Buford was convinced that ‘the violence was a protest … a rebellion of some kind – social rebellion, class rebellion, something’, which was what his Cambridge friends believed. To his surprise, though, none of them regarded his story as particularly shocking. ‘It was one of the things you put up with,’ he wrote: ‘that every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centres.’ This, after all, was England.27

  For Buford, whose experience of American sporting events was utterly different, all this seemed at first horrifying, then weirdly fascinating and at last exhilarating. He went to one match, then another. He joined a group of hard-core Manchester United fans and travelled to Turin for the European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final. He joined them in fighting fans from Chelsea, Tottenham and West Ham; he went away with England; he even went to the World Cup. As he wrote in his memoir Among the Thugs (1991), the experience of the terraces was like ‘alcohol or tobacco: disgusting, at first; pleasurable, with effort; addictive, over time’. And because he was the last person you would expect to be interested in football violence, his account of life among the hooligans was all the more gripping.

  The people he met were not the kind of people he had expected. His first real contact, for example, was a man called Mick, a Manchester United fan with a ‘fat, flat bulldog face’, his arms stained with tattoos of a Red Devil and the Union Jack. Here was a classic hooligan, steeped in alcohol and simmering with aggression. But to Buford’s surprise, ‘he was not unemployed or, it seemed, in any way disenfranchised’. Quite the reverse: Mick was a ‘perfectly happy, skilled electrician from Blackpool’, who paid for his drinks with a large wad of £20 notes. On a typical Saturday following Manchester United, he might spend around £60, more than most unskilled manual workers earned in a week. When Buford met him, he had just spent £155 on a package tour to follow United to Turin, the equivalent of at least £500 today. Whatever else he was, Mick was not a man protesting against
social deprivation.28

  In Buford’s experience, Mick turned out to be pretty typical. Many hard-core supporters ‘had their lives remarkably well sorted out – at least financially’. Travelling to Turin, Buford found himself alongside a lawyer and another electrician, this time from Cambridgeshire. Later, collecting articles about men convicted of football-related offences, he found himself reading about a successful self-employed decorator, a man who ran his own courier business, a solicitor’s clerk, a chef, a builder and a former Royal Navy submariner. In a Yates’s Wine Lodge, Buford met another electrician, Steve, who lived in the suburban south-east, was married to a hairdresser and was about to buy his first house. Steve owned a ‘colour television, an expensive camera, a video player, a car, a van, CD and stereo equipment’. In many ways he was the self-reliant, entrepreneurial young man of Mrs Thatcher’s dreams. Buford thought that ‘if the Daily Mail had been asked to create a twenty-two-year-old working-class lad with his life sorted out, it could have presented Steve’. The only problem was that Steve was addicted to football violence. But whenever Buford asked him about it, he merely shrugged and said, ‘It’s human nature, I guess,’ or ‘I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it.’29

  But Buford did think about it. One of the things people missed about football hooliganism, he thought, was that it was fun. Pounding through the streets of Turin, he felt ‘an excitement that verged on being something greater, an emotion more transcendent – joy at the very least, but more like ecstasy. There was an intense energy about it; it was impossible not to feel some of the thrill.’ Some of it was the pleasure of feeling part of ‘something exclusive – a club, cult, firm, cultural phenomenon … whatever it might be called’. But it was also the violence itself. In Manchester a factory worker told him that he couldn’t ‘wait to get out on a Saturday afternoon’, not because he felt disenfranchised, but because ‘we’ve all got it in us. It just needs a cause … Everyone’s got it in them.’ Even Buford, the Cambridge postgraduate, had it in him. And in contrast to academics who were always looking for economic explanations, Buford thought there was sometimes ‘no “reason” for it at all’. Most of the young men he met had jobs, money, even wives and girlfriends. Why did they do it? Because they enjoyed it.30

  But it was not quite as simple as that. Football violence had not come out of nowhere, and Buford thought it was also part of a bigger story: the disintegration of the old working-class landscape, which was gathering momentum in the recession of the early 1980s. The hooligan subculture, he suggested, had emerged amid the ruins of a more authentic culture of masculinity, rooted in the rituals of work and place. In other words, it was a product as much of affluence as of deprivation, reflecting what Buford saw as the hollow decadence of suburban ‘video players, computer games, portable telephones and electronic kitchens’, as well as ‘central “invisible” heating’. Deprived of community, he thought, young men had turned to ‘a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits’. Perhaps he was right, though there was something a bit predictable about a Cambridge postgraduate dismissing other people’s lives as alienated and meaningless. Most working-class men coped with electronic kitchens without becoming football hooligans. Incredible as it may seem, there had even been plenty of boors and bruisers before the invention of invisible heating.31

  What is true, though, is that the erosion of industrial Britain left at least some young men, who might once have followed their fathers to the factory on Saturday morning and the match on Saturday afternoon, bereft of allegiance. It was this sense of abandonment that fuelled groups like the skinheads, who wore ostentatiously nostalgic working-class clothes such as checked shirts, braces and Dr Martens boots. Skinhead culture had first originated in areas like the Isle of Dogs in east London in the late 1960s, and it became particularly associated with the hooligan firms following teams such as Millwall and West Ham – in other words, teams from declining areas going through wrenching social and economic change.

  By and large, skinheads got a very bad press, since they were often dismissed as football hooligans with Nazi tattoos. There was some truth in this, though in a society awash with male eyeliner and mascara, the nostalgic celebration of working-class masculinity was never going to be the height of fashion. Most unfashionable of all was the aggressive punk offshoot known as Oi!, which was typically seen as the music of the far right. Yet its most prominent champion, the Sounds critic Garry Bushell, who described himself as ‘a socialist, a trade unionist, and a patriot’, insisted that it was not music for neo-Nazis but simply music for working-class men. Indeed, as the historian Matthew Worley points out, many Oi! bands came from traditional working-class, Labour-voting backgrounds, while their lyrics celebrated a vision of working-class culture – ‘pubs, football, boxing, the bank holiday beano, Butlin’s, the betting shop’ – that seemed like something from the 1940s. Like skinheads, Oi! bands were effectively acting out a masculine working-class fantasy, a dream of paradise before middle-class hippies, suburban shopping centres, factory-closing accountants, dark-skinned immigrants and hectoring Conservative women came along and ruined it. And in many ways that was what football hooliganism was, too.32

  But there was a difference between football hooliganism and Oi! music. Football hooliganism travelled; indeed, some of the most notorious incidents happened abroad. Supporters had been travelling to Europe in large numbers since the early 1970s, and by the time Buford followed Manchester United to Italy, the rituals had become all too familiar. This was not just a proletarian performance; it was a self-consciously patriotic one. As soon as the fans touched foreign soil, something changed. They ‘were no longer supporters of Manchester United; they were now defenders of the English cause’. Even as the plane was taxiing towards the terminal, they started putting on Union Jack T-shirts. Their songs were not just about Manchester United; they were about ‘being English and what a fine thing that was’. Somebody even started singing ‘Rule, Britannia’.

  They hit the centre of Turin like a conquering army. Arriving in a central square, Buford found hundreds of Englishmen already there, ‘singing and drinking and urinating into a fountain … an island race who, sweltering under the warm Italian sun, had taken off their shirts, a great, fatty manifestation of the history of pub opening hours, of gallons and gallons of lager and incalculable quantities of bacon-flavoured crisps’. They looted shops with impunity, while the Italians looked on in horror. They urinated through the doors of cafés, while ‘uncomprehending Italians jumped out of their seats to avoid getting wet’. After the match, they rampaged through the streets, attacking random passers-by, beating and kicking a man who was trying to get his children into his car, frenziedly attacking an 11-year-old boy who had fallen to the ground.

  To Buford, all this made for an incomprehensible scene. No other people in Europe, he thought, would have conducted themselves in such a way:

  It was inconceivable that an Italian, visiting a foreign city, would spend hours in one of its principal squares, drinking and barking and peeing and shouting and sweating and slapping his belly. Could you imagine a busload from Milan parading round Trafalgar Square showing off their tattoos? ‘Why do you English behave like this?’ one Italian asked me, believing that I was of the same nationality. ‘Is it something to do with being an island race? Is it because you don’t feel European?’ He looked confused; he looked like he wanted to help. ‘Is it because you lost the Empire?’

  Buford did not know what to say. But one thought did strike him. It was natural, he thought, to assume that the supporters were ‘performing for the benefit of the Italians’, putting on ‘the war dance of the invading barbarians’ to terrify the locals. In reality, the visiting Englishmen were not interested in the locals: ‘they were performing solely for themselves’. Most had brought cameras, to record what they saw as a holiday. But they did not take photos of the city, still less its inhabitants. They took pict
ures of themselves: the English abroad.33

  As Buford observed, one of the defining characteristics of the English hooligans was that ‘they did not like people’. He made a list of the things they did like, including lager, the Queen, the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher, sausages, ‘lots of money’ and themselves. ‘That was the most important item,’ he thought: ‘they liked themselves; them and their mates.’ They hated the rest of the world and its ‘essential inhabitant’, the stranger; and above all they hated that strangest of all strangers, the foreigner. But in their eyes, foreigners were no longer safely confined to cities like Turin. They were wandering around the streets of England itself – and worse, they were actually playing for English teams.

  In one of Buford’s early expeditions, he took an American friend to watch Queen’s Park Rangers. As soon as a black player touched the ball, a ‘deep, low rumbling’ went up from the crowd. ‘It’s because a black player has the ball,’ Buford explained. ‘They are making an ape sound because a black player has the ball.’ As his friend stared in disbelieving horror, the grunting got louder, coming from ‘everyone on the terraces – old, young, fathers, whole families’. Eventually the player passed the ball on to somebody else, and the grunting stopped. But then ‘another black player got the ball and the grunt resumed’. Stricken with embarrassment, Buford struggled to explain it. ‘It’s England,’ he said at last.34

  Of all the stains on football’s record in the early 1980s, racism was one of the worst. By this point, aggressive racial abuse had become so common that many fans simply took it for granted. Behind it, paradoxically, lay a story of assimilation: one reason so many fans roared abuse at ‘wogs’ and ‘niggers’ was that most opposing clubs now had prominent black players, from West Bromwich’s Cyrille Regis and Nottingham Forest’s Viv Anderson to Tottenham’s Garth Crooks and Watford’s Luther Blissett. Yet that did not make it any the less shocking. And like the violence itself, racism seeped from the terraces into the surrounding streets.