On
Monday, Merseyside Police announced that they planned to go
to court
the following day, to force a change in the kick off time of
Saturday's game between Everton and Liverpool at Goodison Park. In
the case of high profile games such as this one, kick off times are
sometimes changed, or supporter
travel arrangements are restricted,
at the behest of the police. Saturday's 5.30pm kick off time had been
agreed by Liverpool Council's licensing committee.
The sole reason for the late kick off this Saturday – indeed, the
reason for pretty much all weekend late kick offs – was the
scheduling requirements of satellite TV channels. A 3pm kick off
would clash with Athelico Madrid-Real Madrid, and a lunchtime kick
off with Tottenham-Arsenal. The channels, the clubs, and the Premier
League all have a significant financial interest in a 5.30 kick off.
When
police attempt to disrupt football matches over safety they are
rarely able to cite evidence for their concerns. When arrangements
for a match between Huddersfield
and Hull last season were questioned by fans, a senior West Yorkshire
Police officer told a colleague to search “open source channels”
- to trawl the internet in other words – in search of information
that could retrospectively
justify
the decision police had already made. In a private email, a police
solicitor admitted that the force appeared to have behaved
“irrationally.” In the case of Saturday's match, Merseyside
police publically admitted that they had no specific information
indicating increased risk, other than the fact that a late kick off
gives fans more time to drink.
In the end the hearing was a farce. The police solicitor immediately
asked for an adjournment, returning to the court a short while later
to announce that the force had come to an agreement with Everton: the
club would take unspecified steps to improve security and
“segregation”. The case was dropped.
The
point of the challenge was not really to force a change in Saturday's
kick off time, so much as to offer the police an opportunity to throw
their weight around. At the moment, football clubs are only eligible
to pay police costs incurred inside stadia and on immediately
surrounding streets. The Association
of Chief Police Officers
has argued that effective policing has displaced football-related
crime away from stadia, making clubs responsible for a much larger
footprint. This is a classic bait and switch from the police – crime is down
so you need to pay us more – which would conveniently offload part
of the cost of policing many city centres onto football clubs every Saturday.
Football
also offers police chiefs an easy way to complain about their budgets
and staffing numbers in a context in which – even though crime
rates around football have been falling for decades –
scaremongering about fans is politically easy and rarely subject to
serious scrutiny. The Merseyside Police statement confirms this
reading: “Going
forward cognisance needs to be taken in relation to the timings of
these games and the extra burden on police resources and the public
purse when forces are seeing unprecedented cuts to their budgets.”
Besides being an
example of increasing police assertiveness, the abortive court case
exposed the tension between the two dominant themes in the
development of English football since the 1980s. On the one hand, the
transformation of the game into a globally marketed product has
required the erasure of its commercially unappealing (though
exaggerated) connotations of violence. This has been effected by a
regime of football policing which the police themselves boast
is unlike anything seen elsewhere in Europe. As long as fans' culture
can be domesticated and safely repackaged as “passion”, for sale
around the world, the interests of security and branding are
perfectly in line. Here though, the political and financial interests of the police
were at odds with the brand's need for a night match, and a stadium
full of loud (maybe even drunk?) fans, paying to leverage their own
enthusiasm into profits for the Premier League and its sponsors –
which include Carslberg.
