These grounds had been built for a generation of fans that didn’t drive, or even rely on public transport overly much, and so they were placed carefully in the middle of residential areas full of narrow streets and terraced houses. Twenty or thirty years after the catchment areas began to expand dramatically, and people started travelling from ten or twenty or fifty miles away, nothing has changed. This was the time to build new stadia, out of town, with parking facilities and improved safety provisions; the rest of Europe did, and as a consequence the grounds in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France are bigger, better and safer, but typically, in a country whose infrastructure is finally beginning to fall apart, we didn’t bother. Here, tens of thousands of fans walk up narrow, winding underground tunnels, or double-park their cars in tiny, quiet, local streets, while the relevant football authorities seem content to carry on as if nothing at all—behaviour, the fan base, methods of transport, even the state of the grounds themselves, which like the rest of us start to look a bit tatty after the first half-century or so—had changed. There was so much that could and should have been done, and nothing ever was, and everyone trundled along for year after year after year, for a hundred years, until Hillsborough. Hillsborough was the fourth post-war British football disaster, the third in which large numbers of people were crushed to death following some kind of failure in crowd control; it was the first which was attributed to something more than bad luck. So you can blame the police for opening the wrong gate at the wrong time if you like, but in my opinion to do so would be to miss the point.
The Taylor Report, famously and I think rightly, recommended that every football ground should become all-seater. Of course this brings with it new dangers—a possible repeat of the Bradford fire disaster, for example, where people died because highly flammable rubbish had been allowed to accumulate under the stands. And seats in themselves are not going to eliminate hooliganism, and could, if the clubs are very stupid, exacerbate it. Seats can be used as weapons, and long rows of people can obstruct police intervention if trouble does break out, although all-seaters should give clubs greater control over who occupies which part of the ground. The real point is that the likelihood of dying in the way that people at Ibrox and Hillsborough died will be minimised if the clubs implement Lord Justice Taylor’s recommendations properly, and that, as far as I can see, is all that matters.
At the time of writing, the Taylor Report is prompting noisy dissent among fans and among some clubs. The problems are manifold. Changing the stadia to make them safe will prove expensive, and many clubs haven’t got the money. In order to raise the money, some of them will be charging much higher entrance fees, or introducing schemes like the Arsenal and West Ham Bonds, which may mean that many young working-class males, the traditional core of support, will be excluded. Some fans want to continue standing. (Not, I think, because standing is an inherently superior way of watching a game—it isn’t. It’s uncomfortable, and anyone under six feet two has a restricted view. Fans worry that the end of terrace culture will mean the end of noise and atmosphere and all the things that make football memorable, but the all-seated ends at Ibrox make more noise than the Clock End and the North Bank put together; seats in themselves do not turn football grounds into churches.) All ground capacities will be reduced, some to below current average attendance figures. And some clubs will have to close down altogether.
I have listened to and read the arguments of hundreds of fans who disagree with the Taylor Report, and who see the future of football as a modified version of the past, with safer terraces and better facilities, rather than as anything radically different. And what has struck me most is the conservative and almost neurotic sentimental attachments these arguments evince—in a sense, the same kind of neurotic sentimental attachment that informs this book. Every time a club mentions a new stadium, there is an outcry; when Arsenal and Tottenham mooted ground-sharing a few years back, at a projected site near, I think, Alexandra Palace, the protests were loud and long (“Tradition!”), and as a consequence we now find ourselves with an assortment of the tiniest stadia in the world. The Stadium of Light in Lisbon holds 120,000, the Bernabeu in Madrid 95,000, Bayern Munich’s ground 75,000; but Arsenal, the biggest team in the biggest city in Europe, will be able to squeeze in less than forty thousand when their development is completed.
We didn’t want new grounds, and now we don’t want the old ones, not if they have to be modified to ensure our safety and the clubs have to charge more as a consequence. “What if I want to take my kids to a game? I won’t be able to afford it.” But neither can we afford to take our kids to Barbados, or to Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, or to the opera. Come the Revolution, of course, we will be able to do all those things as often as we like, but until then this seems a particularly poor argument, a whinge rather than a cogent objection.
“What about the little clubs who might go to the wall?” It will be very sad for Chester’s couple of thousand fans if their team goes under—I would be devastated if I were one of them—but that in itself is absolutely no reason why clubs should be allowed to endanger the lives of their fans. If clubs have to close down because they do not have the money for the changes deemed necessary to avoid another Hillsborough, then so be it. Tough. If, like Chester and Wimbledon and scores of other teams, they are poor, it is in part because not enough people care whether they survive or go under (Wimbledon, a First Division team in a densely populated area, attracted tiny crowds even before they were forced to move to the other side of London), and that tells a story of its own. However, the converse of this is that there is absolutely no chance of being crushed on a terrace at these grounds; forcing clubs to install seating for fans who have their own back-garden-sized patch of concrete to stand on is ludicrous.
“What about the supporters who have followed the club through thick and thin, paid the players’ wages? How can clubs really contemplate selling them up the river?” This is an argument that goes right to the heart of football consumption. I have explained elsewhere that if clubs erode their traditional fan base, they could find themselves in serious difficulties, and in my opinion they would be misguided to do so. Obviously the ground improvements have to be paid for somehow, and increased admission prices are inevitable; most of us accept that we will have to pay another couple of quid to watch our team. The bond schemes at Arsenal and West Ham go way beyond that, however: using these price increases to swap one crowd for another, to get rid of the old set of fans and to bring in a new, more affluent group, is a mistake.
Even so, it is a mistake that clubs are perfectly at liberty to make. Football clubs are not hospitals or schools, with a duty to admit us regardless of our financial wherewithal. It is interesting and revealing that opposition to these bond schemes has taken on the tone of a crusade, as if the clubs had a moral obligation to their supporters. What do the clubs owe us, any of us, really? I have stumped up thousands of pounds to watch Arsenal over the last twenty years; but each time money has changed hands, I have received something in return: admission to a game, a train ticket, a programme. Why is football any different from the cinema, say, or a record shop? The difference is that all of us feel these astonishingly deep allegiances, and that until recently we had all anticipated being able to go to watch every game that our team plays for the rest of our lives; now it is beginning to appear as though that will not be possible for some of us. But that won’t be the end of the world. It could even be that increased admission prices will improve the quality of the football we watch; perhaps clubs will be able to play fewer games, the players will become injured less frequently, and there will be no need to play in rubbishy tournaments like the ZDS Cup in order simply to earn a few quid. Again, one must look to Europe: the Italians, the Portuguese and the Spanish have high ticket prices, but they can afford to pay for the best players in Europe and South America. (They are also less obsessed with lower league football than we are. There are third and fourth division clubs, but they are semi-professional, and do not influence the way the game is structured. The First Division takes precedence and the football climate is all the healthier for it.)