Policing Passion

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.