I had an interesting chat this morning on ‘Lovesport’ Radio Channel about the current state of football-related hooliganism in the UK. As I have done in the past I acknowledged that most football fans are genuine, decent people who just want to watch a game that they love. That said there is a significant minority who spoil it with violent, and anti social,
behaviour and they need to be tackled. Whilst this is not the 1970s or 1980s I said that in my personal opinion the problem was on the rise again, with many incidents of violence, racism and sectarianism being reported in the last couple of years. I also highlighted the new challenges the police service faces namely there are significantly fewer police resources available to deal with such issues, its not currently on the ‘political’ radar, there is less news coverage, and new norms of violent crime to some extent ‘normalise’ some of the crimes that we now see happening in cities and towns around the UK. I hope that I am proved to be wrong!
