Racist fans are everyone’s problem – not just football’s

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/20/racist-football-fans-chelsea-paris-metro

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‘What is football doing to keep its hooligans out of society?” demanded Margaret Thatcher of an FA executive in 1985. “On the contrary,” came the reply, “what is society doing to keep its hooligans out of football?”

Once you’ve got over the shock of a 1980s sporting administrator actually putting his finger on something, let us spool forward to this week.

Imagine for a moment that the men filmed singing racist chants after pushing a black passenger off a Paris Métro train had not been on their way to a football match, in this case Chelsea’s Champions League tie with PSG. Imagine they had been a party of British men on a stag weekend, or of course British women on a hen weekend, occasions that share some of the characteristics of the European football jolly: alcohol-fuelled packs of people abroad for a short time, which they may be keen to “make the most of”, with whatever elastic definition we wish to ascribe to that.

I assume no one could be so naive as to think similar chanting would be unthinkable on plenty of such occasions. But then, perhaps there are those who still nurse delusions that the image of the Englishman abroad is embodied in the exquisite figure of David Niven. In which case, I do envy them their travel arrangements.

If you’ve managed to avoid the spectacle of Brits behaving in a manner we might tactfully describe as un-Nivenish, then you’re lucky. There are some late-night budget airline flights I will never be able to unsee, and chanting easily as vile as that indulged in by the Chelsea supporters that I won’t be able to unhear, drifting across squares in various European city centres of a Saturday night.

Would a video of a British stag party behaving like this have got the same coverage without the catnip of its football angle? Possibly. But the most significant difference, I can only hope, would be the reaction, which would ideally be far more universally soul-searching than the one that has played out since the film from the Paris Métro emerged.

I don’t imagine that even David Cameron, Zen master of the facile soundbite, would have felt quite so tempted to comment on something less easy to compartmentalise, as the prime minister did on the clip of the Chelsea supporters, describing it as “very, very serious”.

It’s not that Cameron doesn’t know these things go on; and occasionally they may even seem like his problem. After all, one of his own MPs, Aidan Burley, was found to have attended a stag weekend in France four years ago for which the member for Cannock Chase jointly procured the Nazi costumes, and at which there was also chanting “Hitler! Hitler! Himmler! Himmler!”, the reports said.

But we know that anything connected to football serves as the bat-signal to politicians keen to get their soundbites on the airwaves. Last week, the living wage was expediently commuted down to a Premier League problem; this week, exported racism has become football’s problem, or even Chelsea’s.

Thank God for the football angle, because we know exactly how to go through these motions. It’s now a matter of banning orders, calls for some FA taskforce or other, and the gradual diminuendo of phone-ins allowing callers to debate whose fans are more racist than theirs.

And yet, unpalatable though it may be to people to whom racist behaviour is total anathema, it ought to be bigger than that. The actions of those men on the Paris Métro said something about the society in which all British people have a stake. Making it football’s problem is a cop-out. Football has the power to influence society, we know, but more often it reflects it – and while it undoubtedly left football with a headache, the spectacle on the Paris Métro said far more about a Britain in which we all live than the deficiencies of the Kick It Out campaign.

Certain clubs have drawn more than their fair share of horrors, and any clear-eyed Chelsea supporter would acknowledge that that has been the case with their club. But this hasn’t been the case with all clubs – and anyway, let’s not get diverted by turf wars. There are plenty of perfectly understandable reasons for these ignoble traditions, not least the fact that such things are self-perpetuating, tribalism being in part a search for what we might describe – with absurd daintiness, in the circumstances – as one’s spiritual brethren. You seek out your own.

And the overwhelmingly vast majority of supporters have absolutely nothing to do with it, and actively despise it, as is perhaps evidenced by the rush by other Chelsea fans to assist their club in efforts to identify the men they will regard as having brought shame on them.

But ought that vicarious sense of shame really to be limited to other Chelsea fans – or even other football fans? One or two days a week, people like those in the video are football’s responsibility; and even then, arguably, only truly for the hours in which they are within a stadium.

But what of the rest of the week? They’re not kept in some orc pen, released baying for blood at midday on Saturday. For the rest of the week, they walk among us – and obviously the attitudes that underpin behaviour such as that on the Paris Métro remain precisely the same. They are members of society. They are everyone’s problem.

That is a more complicated feeling than many would like to give way to. How much more preferable to insulate ourselves against uncomfortable truths about our society if we compartmentalise the behaviour of some British men on a Paris Métro as solely the problem of Chelsea football club, or of one footballing authority or another.

Certainly, these latter entities should be doing as much as they can to deal with such problems – and Chelsea’s clearly mortified leap to action in this week’s case may be contrasted favourably with, for example, Uefa’s serial uselessness on issues of racism. But I am not sure that football is really responsible for what happened in that Métro station.

Still, it’s certainly easier to make it so. The timeworn pattern of this latest story serves as yet another reminder of how often we look the wrong way in this country. Think of it as the other English disease.