MAYBE Liverpool do have the worst-behaved fans in Europe. UEFA says so, and its findings at least seem to be based on some sort of scientific, unemotive criteria. But there’s been a predictable outcry from all with even the remotest stake in English football.
Had the same findings been published 20 years ago, politicians and media pundits would have rallied round UEFA and got stuck into what was an easy target. The prevailing narrative of the day when football hit the news was that of the football thug; something for England to be ashamed of.
In 2007, the narrative has changed. Now, the English game has been buffed up by Sky to produce the shiny “best league in the world”, the bigger teams have become lifestyle choices for the chattering classes, and football gets in the news because players have famous girlfriends. The thug has no place in the sanitised rebranding of English football.
The change is crystallised in Michael Howard, that ersatz Koppite, who this week sees fit to decry UEFA’s findings. Two decades ago he was part of a government hellbent on introducing identity cards at football grounds, his leader, Margaret Thatcher, having dismissed fans as a loutish rabble to be herded away from polite society.
And yet the football thug exists, just as he did 20 years ago; less frequently to be found inside stadia, but still a persistent, influential presence. The accompanying, uncomfortable truth is that others are drawn to his seedy glamour. The dividing line between the “true” fans and the undesirable “minority” – so beloved by those in the public eye who find society’s shades of grey too complex to convey – is a fiction. But so long as it preserves the English football's squeaky-clean branding, it will continue to be peddled.