1970s badge, featuring the
British Rail symbol. Many organised hooligan firms emerged in the 1970s, associating themselves with clubs such as
Arsenal (
The Herd),
Aston Villa (
Villa Hardcore),
Birmingham City (
Zulu Warriors),
Blackpool (
The Muckers),
Burnley (
Suicide Squad),
Chesterfield (Chesterfield Bastard Squad),
Derby County (Derby Lunatic Fringe),
Cardiff City (
Soul Crew),
Charlton Athletic, (
B Mob),
Chelsea (
Chelsea Headhunters),
Everton (
County Road Cutters),
Hull City (
Hull City Psychos),
Leeds United (
Leeds Service Crew),
Leicester City (
Baby Squad),
Middlesbrough (
Middlesbrough Frontline),
Millwall (
Millwall Bushwackers),
Newcastle United (
Gremlins),
Nottingham Forest (Forest Executive Crew),
Manchester United (
Red Army),
Portsmouth (
6.57 Crew),
Queen's Park Rangers (Bushbabies),
Tottenham Hotspur (
Yid Army),
Sheffield United (
Blades Business Crew),
Sheffield Wednesday (Owls Crime Squad), Shrewsbury Town (
English Border Front),
Stoke City (
Naughty Forty),
Sunderland A.F.C. (The Vauxies,
Seaburn Casuals),
West Bromwich Albion (
Section 5),
West Ham United (
Inter City Firm) and
Wolverhampton Wanderers (
Subway Army). In 1974, when Manchester United were relegated to the
Second Division, the Red Army hooligan firm caused mayhem at grounds up and down the country, and in the same year a
Bolton Wanderers fan stabbed a young Blackpool fan to death behind
the Kop at
Bloomfield Road during a Second Division match. These two events led to introduction of crowd segregation and the erection of fences at football grounds in England. A bad-tempered
FA Cup quarter-final tie between
Newcastle United and
Nottingham Forest on 9 March 1974 was halted mid-match when "hundreds of fans" invaded the pitch, one of whom attacked Forest midfielder
Dave Serella. The so-called "relegation battle", when Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea fans fought on the pitch before Spurs relegated Chelsea in the return fixture in 1975, made national news when shown on the BBC television programme ''
John Craven's Newsround''. Leeds United were banned from Europe soon after, when their fans rioted after the
1975 European Cup Final against
Bayern Munich in Paris. Manchester United were banned in 1977 after rioting before, during and after their Cup Winners Cup game with
Saint-Étienne, also in France. In March 1978, a full-scale riot broke out at
The Den during an FA Cup quarter-final between Millwall and
Ipswich Town. Fighting began on the terraces and spilled out on to the pitch and into the narrow streets around the ground. Dozens of people were injured. During the 1970s,
black footballers became an increasingly frequent presence in English football, mostly born to
Afro-Caribbean immigrants who settled in Britain from 1948. With racial tension high in many parts of Britain and the far-right
National Front peaking in popularity at the same time, many of these players were subjected to regular racial abuse from fans of rival teams, whose fans often pelted them with
banana skins, as well as making
monkey chants or shouting racist obscenities. Perhaps the most notable player to suffer this type of racial abuse during the 1970s was
Viv Anderson, the Nottingham Forest full-back who became England's first black senior international player in 1978. Black players became an increasingly frequent feature in the English game during the 1980s, and with hooliganism still widespread, incidents of racial abuse continued on a large scale.
John Barnes, who made his
Football League debut for
Watford in 1981, was soon targeted with racial abuse by rival fans, which continued after he joined
Liverpool in 1987, soon after which he suffered severe racist abuse. In 1984, soon after breaking into the
England national football team, Barnes was racially abused during a friendly match in
Brazil by a section of England supporters identifying themselves as supporters or members of the National Front.
1980s During the 1980s, clubs which had rarely experienced hooliganism feared hooliganism coming to their towns, with
Swansea City supporters anticipating violence after their promotion to the
Football League First Division in 1981, at a time when most of the clubs most notorious for hooliganism were playing in the First Division, while those living in
Milton Keynes were concerned when
Luton Town announced plans to
relocate to the town, although this relocation ultimately never happened. On 1 May 1982, after a
London derby between Arsenal and West Ham United, a supporter was killed in a riot between fans of the two teams. On 13 March 1985, Millwall supporters were responsible in
large-scale rioting in Luton when Millwall played Luton Town in the quarter-final of the FA Cup, although a number of Luton fans were also involved in the violence. In response,
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government set up a "war cabinet" to combat football hooliganism. This was the first of several high-profile incidents of hooliganism in 1985. On 11 May 1985 (the same day as the
Bradford City stadium fire) a 14-year-old boy died at
St Andrew's stadium when fans were pushed by police onto a wall which subsequently collapsed following crowd violence at a match between Birmingham City and Leeds United. The fighting that day was described by
Justice Popplewell, during the Popplewell Committee investigation into football in 1985, as more like "the
Battle of Agincourt than a football match". Because of the other events in 1986 and the growing rise in football hooliganism during the early 1980s, an interim report from the committee stated that "football may not be able to continue in its present form much longer" unless hooliganism was reduced, perhaps by excluding "away" fans. On 8 August 1986 rival gangs of Manchester United and West Ham United hooligans were involved in violence on a
Sealink ferry bound for
Hook of Holland. Eight football hooligans, all either Manchester United or West Ham United supporters, received prison sentences totalling 51 years 16 months later. Another incident was soon forthcoming: on 20 September 1986 Leeds United hooligans overturned and immolated a fish and chip van at
Odsal Stadium, the temporary home of
Bradford City following the fire at
Valley Parade the previous year. On 15 August 1987, thousands of
Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters invaded the seaside town of
Scarborough for their opening game of their Fourth Division campaign. Fifty-six people were arrested and thousands of pounds' worth of damage was caused in some of the worst violence the town has ever seen. Millwall hooligans were involved in their third high-profile incident of the decade on 9 January 1988, when in an
FA Cup tie against Arsenal at
Highbury, 41 people were arrested for rioting after the Herd and the Millwall Bushwackers clashed. Football hooliganism has also featured prominently with relation to the
Hillsborough disaster, with barristers representing the officers policing the ground where 97 people died saying they had a duty to prevent "hooliganism and unruly behaviour" from Liverpool supporters, following the Heysel Stadium disaster.
UEFA President
Jacques Georges caused controversy by describing the Liverpool supporters as "beasts", suggesting that hooliganism was the cause of the Hillsborough disaster. His remarks led to Liverpool F.C. calling for his resignation. Many newspapers also reported that football hooliganism was a major factor in the tragedy, most notably
The Sun, whose
article entitled "The Truth" sparked a sharp fall in sales of the tabloid on
Merseyside, with many newsagents refusing to stock it. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a high-profile public call during 1985 for the country's football hooligans to be given "stiff" prison sentences to act as a deterrent to others in a bid to clamp down on hooliganism. Her minister for sport,
Colin Moynihan, attempted to bring in an ID card scheme for football supporters. This scheme, set out in Part I of the Football Spectators Act 1989, was never implemented following criticism by the
Taylor Report following the Hillsborough disaster. Documents released in 2014 revealed that the Conservative government of the 1980s crafted a number of schemes to combat hooliganism: these included an initiative to be titled "Goalies against Hoolies", consisting of getting "the more articulate goalkeepers, who are often first in line of hooligan fire" to speak out against the violence. Daniel Taylor, writing in
The Guardian in 2015, described the revelations as "a reminder about how hopelessly out of touch the establishment were when it came to football". Racial abuse of black players was a common feature of hooliganism during the 1970s and even more so in the 1980s, when they were first prominent in the English leagues. Before the early 1970s, only a small number of black players had ever played in English football, but the arrival of Commonwealth immigrants in Britain from 1948 saw many black players born in Britain to Afro-Caribbean parents breaking onto the scene a generation later. The first wave of black players mostly appeared for clubs who were based in areas which now had significant black communities—including
Birmingham,
Luton,
Nottingham and
West Bromwich.
John Barnes, capped 79 times for
England, was first racially abused by rival fans, from Luton Town, when he began his professional career at
Watford in the early 1980s, regularly being targeted with racist chants and having banana skins hurled at him. Soon after his transfer to Liverpool in 1987, Barnes was racially abused by Everton fans in the
Merseyside derby. Everton chairman
Philip Carter then denounced the racist Everton fans as "scum". Barnes was only the second black player to appear for Liverpool (the first being
Howard Gayle, who had played a few games for the club at the beginning of the 1980s) while Everton had still yet to field their first black player at this stage. Also in the 1980s,
Paul Canoville became Chelsea's first black footballer and as well as being racially abused by fans of rival clubs, he was even abused by some of his own team's fans—who had a reputation for being some of the worst hooligans in the English game at the time.
Viv Anderson, who had become England's first black full international in 1978, was also subjected to regular racist abuse during the 1980s when playing for Nottingham Forest and, later, Arsenal.
1990s In 1990,
UEFA lifted its ban on English clubs in European competitions. In 1994, a few days before a
Sunderland A.F.C. vs
Nottingham Forest game, police snatched a pile of weapons, drugs worth thousands of pounds from
Seaburn Casuals (firm from Sunderland) who were preparing for a showdown with Nottingham hooligans. After England's defeat to
Germany in the
Euro 96 semi-finals, a large-scale riot took place in
Trafalgar Square, with a number of injuries, and a Russian youth was stabbed in Brighton after his attackers mistook him for a German. However, by 1997, it was said by
Reuters that the English game had "virtually rid itself of the hooligan scourge". Before the
1998 FIFA World Cup, 26 hooligans from
Seaburn Casuals (a
Sunderland A.F.C. firm) were arrested in a police raid after a military-issue smoke bomb was let out at a local pub after a fight with bouncers. By the end of the operation, over 60 were facing charges. Some of the Seaburn Casuals hooligans picked up in the raid were also involved with neo-Nazi groups like
Combat 18. The operation failed when judge ruled CCTV footage from the pub inadmissible. At the end of the 1999–2000 season, Sunderland topped the hooliganism table in the
Premier League, with 223 fans arrested that season. According to Colin Blaney in
Hotshot: The Story of a Little Red Devil, many of Manchester United's football hooligans turned to serious crime during this period. He states that roughly half of the team's hooligans became involved in selling class A drugs, partly because of the wave of drugs that came with early 1990s
rave culture, a scene that football hooligans were at the centre of.
2000s camera system control station at
Elland Road, used to identify hooligans and rioters. In the 2000s English football hooligans often adopted clothing styles associated with the
casual subculture, such as items made by Shark and
Burberry and Stone Island. Prada and Burberry withdrew some garments over fears that their brands were becoming linked with hooliganism. English hooligans began using Internet forums, mobile phones and text messages to set up fights or provoke rival gangs into brawls. Fight participants sometimes posted live commentaries on the Internet. Football violence in British stadiums declined after the introduction of the
1989 Football Spectators Act, and in the 2000s much of the trouble occurred away from stadiums or abroad at major international tournaments. The
Football (Disorder) Act 2000 was subsequently passed by Parliament to give new powers to the police, including the ability to withhold passports from fans suspected of potential hooliganism before an international fixture. In 2000, the BBC released a “hooligan league”. Wolverhampton Wanderers topped the league with Leicester City, Manchester City, Wigan Athletic, Cardiff City and Stoke City making up the other top spots. In March 2002, the
Seaburn Casuals (a
Sunderland A.F.C. firm) fought with hooligans from the
Newcastle Gremlins in a pre-arranged clash near the North
Shields Ferry terminal, in what was described as "some of the worst football related fighting ever witnessed in the United Kingdom". The leaders of the Gremlins and Casuals were both jailed for four years for conspiracy, with 28 others jailed for various terms, based on evidence gained after police examined the messages sent by
mobile phone between the gang members on the day. By the end of the 2002–03 season, Sunderland topped the football arrests table with 154. The English reputation improved as a result of good behaviour at the
2002 FIFA World Cup and the
2004 UEFA European Football Championship, despite reports of the arrest of 33 England supporters in the latter tournament. At the
2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany there were limited incidences of violence. Over 200 preventative arrests were made in
Stuttgart, although only three people were charged with criminal offences. Another 400 were taken into preventative custody. Police believe that on average each rioter drank or threw of
beer on that day. Swedish referee
Anders Frisk quit his position after receiving death threats from Chelsea fans.
Reading players
Ibrahima Sonko and
Stephen Hunt also received death threats from Chelsea fans in 2006.
Fernando Torres received death threats from
Liverpool fans.
Sol Campbell received death threats from Tottenham fans. A steward died after serious clashes between firms from Aston Villa and
Queens Park Rangers after a
League Cup game in September 2004. On 28 January 2007
Wolverhampton Wanderers hooligans rioted after their sides 3–0 home loss to local rivals
West Bromwich Albion. 11 officers were injured and 9 hooligans arrested as bricks, bollards and road signs were thrown and gas canisters let off. Police fought running battles with hundreds of thugs as chaos descended on the city centre. Drivers were surrounded by violence in Stafford street and bus passengers looked on as the angry mob surged past. Officers used dogs to catch people who tried to flip over a police vehicle near Molineux, a number of pedestrians were injured after being caught up in the violence. In February 2008, eleven men were arrested after up to 100 hooligans were involved in running battles between fans from
Coventry City and
Leicester City outside a pub in
Coventry. Police confiscated knives and one man suffered minor head injuries. The week before the incident, 13 men were arrested after clashes between fans from Leicester and
Norwich in which some men sustained minor injuries. After some 20 years of improved behaviour among English football fans,
extreme scenes of rioting and hooliganism took place at
Upton Park on 25 August 2009 during a Football League Cup second round tie between
London rivals West Ham United and Millwall. The pitch was invaded several times during the game by West Ham fans and rioting in the streets followed. In one incident a Millwall fan suffered stab wounds. The West Ham United-Millwall rivalry has led officials to threaten to hold fixtures between the two sides in private, although the threat has never been executed, save for a November 2014
U21 Premier League Cup tie between the two sides' development squads which was ordered by
Metropolitan Police to be played at
Rush Green with a 12pm kick-off
behind closed doors.
2010s On 1 December 2010, supporters of Aston Villa and Birmingham City clashed at St Andrew's stadium after a
Second City derby match in the League Cup, and 14 people were injured. Missiles were hurled on to the pitch, a rocket flare was released in the stands, and there were scuffles in nearby streets. By this stage, football hooliganism was rising dramatically, with 103 incidents of hooliganism involving under-19s in the 2009–10 season compared to 38 the season before. Use of
bovver boots in football hooliganism was countered in 2012 by warnings to fans that they would have to remove such boots in order to attend football matches. In a match between
Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds United on 19 October 2012, Leeds United hooligan Aaron Cawley attacked Sheffield Wednesday goalkeeper
Chris Kirkland during a pitch invasion to celebrate a goal. The hooligan was identified on social media sites as someone who had previously been banned from every football ground in the UK. At a
semi-final match of the
2012–13 FA Cup between Millwall and
Wigan Athletic at the new
Wembley Stadium on 13 April 2013, Millwall fans fought amongst themselves although it is believed that a group of Wigan supporters got into the Millwall end, 14 arrests were made. The next day, Newcastle United fans rioted when their team lost 3–0 to
Sunderland in their
Tyne–Wear derby match in the Premier League. Bottles were thrown, bins were set on fire and a horse was punched as mounted officers tried to move crowds back to allow visiting fans to be escorted away. Twenty-nine arrests were made during the game itself. On 7 March 2015, during a quarter-final match of the
FA Cup between
rival clubs from the
West Midlands Aston Villa and
West Bromwich Albion, hundreds of Villa fans invaded the pitch whilst the game was still in play. A further invasion took place at full time causing players from both teams to flee the pitch. Despite police officers and stewards best efforts to restrain the fans, it is believed almost a thousand fans entered the pitch. On the same day just 21 miles away a group of
Wolverhampton Wanderers hooligans clashed with
Watford F.C. hooligans, one of who spent three weeks in a coma. Four teenagers were jailed and two more received suspended sentences. In February 2015, before
Chelsea FC played against
Paris Saint-Germain F.C. Four Chelsea football fans were convicted of racist violence and given suspended prison sentences after a black citizen was pushed off a Paris Métro in Paris while fans chanted: "We're racist, we're racist, and that's the way we like it." The four men were ordered to pay €10,000 to the black commuter they pushed off Métro carriage. In December 2018, a
Napoli fan by the name of Mattia, who attended a champions league group stage match between
Liverpool and
Napoli as a gift from his parents, claims to have been attacked by a group of seven
Liverpool hooligans who surrounded him upon leaving the stadium. He was said to have been admitted to Royal Liverpool University Hospital with a fractured cheekbone and trauma to one eye. But it was apparently only after flagging down a car that he and a friend managed to get help. "I thought I was going to die," is the chilling quote attributed to the victim. The reports stress that this was an attack on a lone fan and not a fight between rival groups. In his autobiography 'Undesirables', Colin Blaney, a high-ranking member of Manchester United's Inter City Jibbers firm, claimed that one of the main developments of the 2010s was that football hooligans were no longer involved in acquisitive crimes overseas. Whereas they had once stolen designer clothing from abroad and used international games as an excuse to loot jewelry shops on the continent, the football firms of today solely engage in profit-oriented forms of crime within the UK.
2020s On the day of the
UEFA Euro 2020 final between England and Italy, riots broke out at the entrance to Wembley Stadium, and in Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square. 69 people were arrested. In September 2021,
Leicester City played
Napoli at home in a
UEFA Europa League group stage match. Supporters of both clubs clashed, which resulted in a street fight around a mile away from the stadium, and disorder at the end of the match. On January 28, 2024, the
FA Cup fixture between Black Country rivals West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers was delayed by 38 minutes after violence in the stands between fans of the two sides. Many hooligans of different firms aided right wing protesters and rioters during the
2024 Southport Riots, in a misinformed response to
the stabbing committed at a
Taylor Swift themed dance class, in which 3 young girls died. They helped rioters
loot,
commit arson, march and commit acts of violence against
asylum seekers and people of different ethnic minorities across the country. == Northern Ireland ==