Hibbyradge
22-02-2016, 09:12 PM
Sadly, I have to agree with what Matthew Syed has put forward in this article in today's edition of 'The Times'; there really are a huge number of vile football fans!
In my experience, they are there at all clubs; whilst overt racism has been pretty much stamped out, there is still anti-Semitism, homophobic abuse, crude references to ISIS, terrorists and 'Jihadi John', comparisons with accused and convicted paedophiles e.g. to Leeds supporters "Jimmy Saville - he's one of your own" etc.
Such behaviour is more prevalent amongst away fans, presumably, because individuals persistently engaging in such anti-social behaviour in their regular seats would be identified and shown the door; however, this problem is not exclusively confined to away supporters! Part of the package for my away trips to Liverpool, Manchester City, Everton and Manchester United is to be greeted with chants of 'Chelsea Rent Boys' and, whilst a minority, there are still too many Chelsea supporters too happy to throw around the insult of 'Yids' to Tottenham fans!
Clubs need to face up to the newer disgusting forms of discriminatory behaviour amongst fans and not just sit back on their laurels from the success of the great 'Kick Out Racism' campaigns!
"On a weekend when coin throwing tarnished two matches, it is naive to blame a few people
It is noteworthy that when Peter Coates compared modern football to the church recently, nobody gave a hollow laugh. The Stoke City chairman was implying that football is a unifying force, a way of bringing communities together, an uplifting social ritual.
This romanticised notion of fandom rarely gets challenged these days. For the likes of Coates, the throwing of a coin by a West Bromwich Albion fan into the face of Chris Brunt on Saturday was a one-off. It was the act of a single person rather than a reflection of football’s culture.
Likewise, when Micah Richards was recently confronted by Aston Villa fans after a 1-1 draw with Wycombe Wanderers, it was just a few troublemakers. The fans waited by the team bus to threaten violence and hurl insults — but it was presumably “just a minority”. And when Randy Lerner, the owner of Villa, was met with vile chants stating “we’re all having a party when Randy Lerner dies”, well, that was doubtless a minority too.
All these examples (I could have picked dozens more) are of fans turning on their own. But let us look at how fans treat the opposition, for this cuts to the heart of the matter. We have all watched aghast as vast sections of supporters have chanted about the tragedy of Munich, poured scorn over the victims of the Bradford fire, scoffed at the Hillsborough disaster and made fun of the victims of the Holocaust.
We know, too, about how fans made the most sexualised and graphic taunts at Eva Carneiro, the former Chelsea doctor; about the constant insinuation that Arsène Wenger is a paedophile; about how Aaron Ramsey, who suffered a terrible leg injury at the Britannia Stadium in 2010, was mocked by Stoke fans. “Aaron Ramsey, he walks with a limp,” they jeered. What did Coates, who was at the ground that afternoon, say? You guessed it: “It’s a minority.”
Yesterday, Chelsea fans threw coins at Manchester City’s young players as they celebrated an equaliser. When Andre Marriner went to pick up the coins, he was subjected to jeering and vile gestures.
If such grotesque behaviour is limited to a tiny minority, why did Nottinghamshire police place undercover officers in the stands for the match between Nottingham Forest and Derby County in November, worried about public disorder? Why did Scottish MPs pass an act of parliament in 2011 to clamp down on the sectarianism that flares every time Rangers face Celtic? As one academic put it: “What may have started as a progressive desire to overcome divisions in society and reduce animosity between people has resulted in the opposite occurring.”
A tiny minority? In that case, Mohamed, a Sheffield United fan, must have been seeing things when he reported the gratuitous chants that rained down at a recent match against Bradford City. “It was more than five or ten fans it was more like a few hundred”, he said. “I could make out they were singing ‘you’re just a town full of Isis’ towards the Bradford fans. I was disgusted, you cannot compare a whole town to a murderous fanatical cult.”
The next time you watch a big match on television, press the pause button when an opposition throw-in is about to be taken. You will notice a backdrop of hundreds of fans, a large section of whom are giving crude hand signals, shouting expletives, faces distorted with synthetic hatred. Coates may have been there more recently than me, but I have rarely seen that behaviour at All Souls, Langham Place, even after the communion wine.
A tiny minority? The problem with this excuse, as shameful as it is ubiquitous, is that it destroys the impetus to do anything (after that Arsenal game, Coates, true to form, said: “How do you control these things? You can’t.”). It spares us from analysing why adults and, in many cases, children, who wouldn’t dream of insulting people outside the stadium, transmogrify into foul-mouthed yobs as soon as the opening whistle has sounded. It stops us from asking why at football, almost uniquely among mass entertainment events, vitriol has such currency.
The truth, of course, is that football has a serious problem. It is not a majority but for a significant section of fans, the sense of tribalism, so central to the game’s meaning, has become grotesquely distorted. It isn’t enough to celebrate one’s own team, and to have good-humoured fun at the expense of one’s rivals. The real buzz of a Saturday afternoon isn’t complete without impugning and maligning the opposition.
Any vehicle for this hatred will do. Glasgow, for example, is a modern city where tribal divisions have all but disappeared. As Paul Davis, a sociologist at the University of Sunderland, put it: “The vast majority of modern-day Scots, including a decisive majority in the west, do not care or pretend to care about Catholics and Protestants, or Loyalists and Rebels, any more than they care about the Great Pumpkin.”
Only at football are these grievances resurrected, to justify and perpetuate the spite that has become, for many, a key part of the “experience”. As Lawrence MacIntyre, head of safety for Rangers, put it: “It is called a 90-minute bigot, someone who has got a friend of an opposite religion living next door. But for that 90 minutes they shout foul religious abuse at each other.”
That this tendency is now being inflicted upon one’s own players, as was the case with Brunt on Saturday, and in many other examples, including the spat between Joleon Lescott and Villa fans, exemplifies how deep it has become. Like a narcotic, you need ever larger quantities of spite to get the same rush. If the opposition are not good enough targets, go after your own. Hell, throw a few coins too.
It is worth stating, here, that many fans behave impeccably, and that one would never wish to eradicate the witty and satirical chants that make the game so vivid. Nobody wishes to sanitise the game. But neither should we tire of challenging the hatred that so often disfigures football, or querying the naivety and inaction of people like Coates.
A “tiny minority”? If only."
In my experience, they are there at all clubs; whilst overt racism has been pretty much stamped out, there is still anti-Semitism, homophobic abuse, crude references to ISIS, terrorists and 'Jihadi John', comparisons with accused and convicted paedophiles e.g. to Leeds supporters "Jimmy Saville - he's one of your own" etc.
Such behaviour is more prevalent amongst away fans, presumably, because individuals persistently engaging in such anti-social behaviour in their regular seats would be identified and shown the door; however, this problem is not exclusively confined to away supporters! Part of the package for my away trips to Liverpool, Manchester City, Everton and Manchester United is to be greeted with chants of 'Chelsea Rent Boys' and, whilst a minority, there are still too many Chelsea supporters too happy to throw around the insult of 'Yids' to Tottenham fans!
Clubs need to face up to the newer disgusting forms of discriminatory behaviour amongst fans and not just sit back on their laurels from the success of the great 'Kick Out Racism' campaigns!
"On a weekend when coin throwing tarnished two matches, it is naive to blame a few people
It is noteworthy that when Peter Coates compared modern football to the church recently, nobody gave a hollow laugh. The Stoke City chairman was implying that football is a unifying force, a way of bringing communities together, an uplifting social ritual.
This romanticised notion of fandom rarely gets challenged these days. For the likes of Coates, the throwing of a coin by a West Bromwich Albion fan into the face of Chris Brunt on Saturday was a one-off. It was the act of a single person rather than a reflection of football’s culture.
Likewise, when Micah Richards was recently confronted by Aston Villa fans after a 1-1 draw with Wycombe Wanderers, it was just a few troublemakers. The fans waited by the team bus to threaten violence and hurl insults — but it was presumably “just a minority”. And when Randy Lerner, the owner of Villa, was met with vile chants stating “we’re all having a party when Randy Lerner dies”, well, that was doubtless a minority too.
All these examples (I could have picked dozens more) are of fans turning on their own. But let us look at how fans treat the opposition, for this cuts to the heart of the matter. We have all watched aghast as vast sections of supporters have chanted about the tragedy of Munich, poured scorn over the victims of the Bradford fire, scoffed at the Hillsborough disaster and made fun of the victims of the Holocaust.
We know, too, about how fans made the most sexualised and graphic taunts at Eva Carneiro, the former Chelsea doctor; about the constant insinuation that Arsène Wenger is a paedophile; about how Aaron Ramsey, who suffered a terrible leg injury at the Britannia Stadium in 2010, was mocked by Stoke fans. “Aaron Ramsey, he walks with a limp,” they jeered. What did Coates, who was at the ground that afternoon, say? You guessed it: “It’s a minority.”
Yesterday, Chelsea fans threw coins at Manchester City’s young players as they celebrated an equaliser. When Andre Marriner went to pick up the coins, he was subjected to jeering and vile gestures.
If such grotesque behaviour is limited to a tiny minority, why did Nottinghamshire police place undercover officers in the stands for the match between Nottingham Forest and Derby County in November, worried about public disorder? Why did Scottish MPs pass an act of parliament in 2011 to clamp down on the sectarianism that flares every time Rangers face Celtic? As one academic put it: “What may have started as a progressive desire to overcome divisions in society and reduce animosity between people has resulted in the opposite occurring.”
A tiny minority? In that case, Mohamed, a Sheffield United fan, must have been seeing things when he reported the gratuitous chants that rained down at a recent match against Bradford City. “It was more than five or ten fans it was more like a few hundred”, he said. “I could make out they were singing ‘you’re just a town full of Isis’ towards the Bradford fans. I was disgusted, you cannot compare a whole town to a murderous fanatical cult.”
The next time you watch a big match on television, press the pause button when an opposition throw-in is about to be taken. You will notice a backdrop of hundreds of fans, a large section of whom are giving crude hand signals, shouting expletives, faces distorted with synthetic hatred. Coates may have been there more recently than me, but I have rarely seen that behaviour at All Souls, Langham Place, even after the communion wine.
A tiny minority? The problem with this excuse, as shameful as it is ubiquitous, is that it destroys the impetus to do anything (after that Arsenal game, Coates, true to form, said: “How do you control these things? You can’t.”). It spares us from analysing why adults and, in many cases, children, who wouldn’t dream of insulting people outside the stadium, transmogrify into foul-mouthed yobs as soon as the opening whistle has sounded. It stops us from asking why at football, almost uniquely among mass entertainment events, vitriol has such currency.
The truth, of course, is that football has a serious problem. It is not a majority but for a significant section of fans, the sense of tribalism, so central to the game’s meaning, has become grotesquely distorted. It isn’t enough to celebrate one’s own team, and to have good-humoured fun at the expense of one’s rivals. The real buzz of a Saturday afternoon isn’t complete without impugning and maligning the opposition.
Any vehicle for this hatred will do. Glasgow, for example, is a modern city where tribal divisions have all but disappeared. As Paul Davis, a sociologist at the University of Sunderland, put it: “The vast majority of modern-day Scots, including a decisive majority in the west, do not care or pretend to care about Catholics and Protestants, or Loyalists and Rebels, any more than they care about the Great Pumpkin.”
Only at football are these grievances resurrected, to justify and perpetuate the spite that has become, for many, a key part of the “experience”. As Lawrence MacIntyre, head of safety for Rangers, put it: “It is called a 90-minute bigot, someone who has got a friend of an opposite religion living next door. But for that 90 minutes they shout foul religious abuse at each other.”
That this tendency is now being inflicted upon one’s own players, as was the case with Brunt on Saturday, and in many other examples, including the spat between Joleon Lescott and Villa fans, exemplifies how deep it has become. Like a narcotic, you need ever larger quantities of spite to get the same rush. If the opposition are not good enough targets, go after your own. Hell, throw a few coins too.
It is worth stating, here, that many fans behave impeccably, and that one would never wish to eradicate the witty and satirical chants that make the game so vivid. Nobody wishes to sanitise the game. But neither should we tire of challenging the hatred that so often disfigures football, or querying the naivety and inaction of people like Coates.
A “tiny minority”? If only."