Football Violence in the UK

That's the thing, football violence hasn't gone away, and it probably won't. It just stopped getting repoted all the time. Luton town center aftr a match can be quite an intimidating place. I've seen several large(ish) scale incidents. And I know a few of the "Migs" (Lutons "firm") and they're always banging on about what firms they've been rucking with.

Personally i think they're idiots, but whilst they're just rucking umung themselves, they're only hurting themselves. If they kept it like that, I reckon we could telivise it and the bbc could make a mint. But unfortunatly, they haven' the brains to remember that fighting in residential areas is naughty, and innocent people often get hurt becasue some selfish W****** want to kick lumps out of each other.

Right, well, i'm bored so i thought i'd do some research into arrest figures for football violence in this decade.

2000-2001 - 3,391 arrests (worth noting that this was the year 945 english fans were nicked during the Euro 2000 riots)
2001-2002 - 4,035 arrests
2002-2003 - 4,413 arrests
2003-2004 - 3,982 arrests
2004-2005 - 3,628 arrests
2005-2006 - 3,462 arrests
2006-2007 - 3,788 arrests
2007-2008 - 3,842 arrests

All these statistics are taken off the home office website, with the exception of the figures for 2000-2001 which are from news.bbc.co.uk...

What does this say? Well to me, it looks that whilst the visible threat of football violence has disipated over the last 20 years, the arrest figures are still pretty consistent. We must remember that not ALL the arrests here are for hooliganism. Racist chanting, drink/drug related offences are also included in the final figure.

It would not surprise me if the figures were up again for the 2008-2009 season.

I may get round to doing the statistics for banning orders as well if i can be bothered. I'm fairly sure there would be a large rise in banning orders as the decade progresses, but at the moment that is mere conjecture.

I used to work in a shop on Saturdays opposite Reading train station, every single football match you'd be guaranteed to see some sort of violent incident... some very minimal, others worse, always an arrest though.

Football violence has always been with us - and I'm not digging at football, it would no doubt happen anyway, just shift it's focus to something else. Historically in the UK it has always been associated with violence (we actually got taught this in school) Medieval Football as always football has been a game for the working class, as we see (yet again) the working class being more under pressure economically, socially etc it's going to rear its head again.