Twas a good weekend in the world of football, my world of football. The FA Cup final took me back in time, though not in any way I’d expected beforehand. It was good. My team, Manchester United, unexpectedly won. They beat their cross-town rival, Manchester City, an erstwhile juggernaut, a force like the one United were twenty years ago. United’s victory redeemed a mediocre season marred by injuries, humiliating last-minute collapses; the disgrace of being one of the world’s most famous sporting franchises, comprised of the most expensively assembled squad of players…and not winning. United’s victory on Saturday—a plucky endeavor forged by emergent youth plus a few stalwart veterans—redeemed somewhat something else from the world of football. More on that later. Firstly, back to that trip in time, to 1977 and a similar scenario. Back then, in the mid-seventies, when football, like everything else, was less complicated, less digital, and somehow less exclusive despite the lack of racial diversity, Liverpool FC were the team to beat. Manchester United were what they are today: a mid-table team, playing inconsistently, but finding a way in cup competitions to a final. The biggest and best (and oldest) was the FA Cup competition. If you know soccer, then you’ll know that the FA Cup is the oldest knockout club competition in the world. It’s a domestic competition, featuring hundreds of clubs from across England, some of which will be amateur, participating in the opening rounds.
May 77’ is the oldest final I remember watching. I knew Liverpool were better than United. I knew they had won the English league a week before the final, and were due to play in the European Cup final in another week against I-don’t-remember who. They had players like Kevin Keegan, a prolific, goal-scoring striker, and Ray Clemence, then the goalie for the England national team. Everyone else on their team was English, too, as these were the days before an influx of foreign players had gained a deserved foothold in English football. United’s team was more diverse in the sense that half of their players were either Irish or Scots, with only Scotland’s national team being on a similar level to that of England. That day, at Wembley stadium, under a hot early summer sun, United’s lesser lights were gritty and opportunistic. They fought for every ball, not allowing Liverpool any space to penetrate United’s half of the field. They counter-attacked, hitting their opponents on the break. A second half goal from Stuart Pearson broke a nil-nil deadlock. A forty thousand-deep army of United fans raucously celebrated. They swayed, revealing the density of a standing-room only crowd. No seats back then, only stands. To the naked eye, it looked dangerous, like you’d be trampled on if you were small and not sturdy. Minutes later, the Pool equalized, and given their superior possession skills, it seemed for a moment as though they would complete their imperial march towards a league and cup double.
Then we (United) broke again, and got a bit of luck. A ball over the top of Liverpool’s defenders reached a United forward, who held the ball up, passing back to a striking partner who unleashed a shot that deflected off a defender and then looped over Ray Clemence’s head, into the back of Liverpool’s goal. 2-1! The upset was back on again. The remaining twenty minutes were nervy, but United held on, and what I recall from afterwards were the images of exhausted yet happy United players, lifting the iconic FA cup, parading it around the perimeter of the pitch after the final whistle, celebrating with their spirited yet generally well-behaved sea of fans. Liverpool were soundly beaten that day, though they went on to complete a double success, defeating some foreign club in the European Cup a week later. That was a great era for English clubs. While England’s national team struggled to even qualify for World Cup competitions, our clubs dominated European football, and again, this was during a period when the clubs were exclusively comprised of British players. Weird. Anyway, a year or so later, I emigrated with my family to the United States where soccer was almost an unknown sport at the time, so I didn’t watch an FA Cup final for at least another decade. In the interim years, English soccer and English soccer fans earned a bad reputation for unruly, drunken, violent behavior. By the nineties, that was largely corrected (it took a pair of 80s disasters to spur changes in stadium seating policies); meanwhile, clubs like Liverpool and especially Manchester United were becoming worldwide brands.
All this is past, prologue, and aftermath to an episode from just three years ago, captured in a Netflix documentary entitled Wembley Attack. The setting was a new Wembley Stadium for the 21st century, still the home of English football: the scene of FA Cup finals, plus international matches, often but not always featuring the England national team. It was chosen as the site of the 2020 Euro Nations Cup, with England competing as the host nation, in a tournament that was delayed a year because of the previous year’s Covid lockdown. The England team that made the final of the 2020 Euro Nations Cup final was better than most England teams of the last fifty years. They had made a final of a major tournament for the first time since 1966 (when they won their only World Cup), and had assembled a young, vibrant, and racially diverse squad of players that would contest a more veteran, journeyman squad from Italy in the final match. We were the favorites, but not by much. Italy has a better pedigree in international football, and while its current generation of talent lacks as many stand-out players, the experience, skill and intelligence of its core group would render them formidable.
But as the title of the documentary suggested, the football, as in the game on the field, was not the story of the delayed 2020 Euro Nations Cup final. The fans were, and not in a good way. As the timeline of the film begins, problems began before final day, with many wanting to buy tickets but failing to do so because of exorbitant ticket prices being bid for and sold over the internet. People who were desperate to attend the final, who had never known in their lifetimes an England team that had made a final, made plans to travel to London, to descend upon the area around Wembley Stadium prior to the match; to party until game-time, and then infiltrate the stadium by any means necessary. It was a disaster waiting to happen, as thousands of fans, mostly male, loitered about, taking selfies, drinking, wheezing, dancing in the streets, hopping above buses—obstructing buses. The first half of the film is a record of this massive street party, with footage capturing images of a good time being had by all. That is, until late afternoon, roughly. That’s when fans with tickets started moving towards the stadium, ready to take their seats. They’d have to wade through the mass of fans who were becoming increasingly unruly. At the turnstiles, opportunists would look to skip past a gate and a steward. Others were pushing over fences, running over security guards. Behind the scenes, heads of security were monitoring the crowd through closed circuit TVs, devising stratagems to keep out the miscreants.
They lost that battle, the head of police later said. There were simply too many people gathered, overwhelming the sparse security forces. Extra police were summoned, mostly to contain a large crowd that were kept outside while the match transpired. The game started mid-evening, with some fans, dignitaries like Prince William, plus other VIPs, seemingly unaware of the violent scenes in and around the stadium. I was watching it on TV from California and had no idea what was going on away from the match itself. Watching the documentary, I was aghast. Was I shocked? Not in one sense. English hooligans misbehaving at soccer matches is a worldwide, fifty-year old trope. No, what was shocking was that I didn’t know it was happening. There were fights going on all over the place. People were vandalizing, spraying beer around, turning over vehicles. Fans were running down stadium aisles like it was a cattle-run. It was chaos. Not knowing that this occurred is like living through the 2020 Presidential election and not knowing that January sixth happened. About a hundred people were injured, some police, others were fans, or whatever else you call the people who behaved this way. No one was killed, which given the violence captured by the cameras, was a blessed miracle.
England lost the football match, which might have spelled trouble in the form of more violence but for more commonplace reactions to defeat. The chief of police had called it, watching the tense penalty shoot-out that decided the match in the Italians’ favor. As 19 year old Bukayo Saka missed his fateful kick, signifying England’s defeat, the throngs of fans plus hooligans, both inside and waiting outside the stadium, plunged heads in hands, gazed haplessly, and within minutes, turned and walked away, wholly subdued. Had the final been on foreign soil, many of those fans would have rioted further. Not this time. The police chief breathed an ironic sigh of relief. As an Englishman, he will have wanted as much as anyone for England to win. But he also knew that an elated crowd, a largely drunken crowd, would have been more dangerous. They were already lucky to have avoided fatalities. England losing was the best result for the safety of all.
But there was more to the story. Saka was one of three England players—unfortunately all black– that were pilloried on social media for having missed their kicks during the shoot out. A mural of Marcus Rashford, a Man Utd player who is also celebrated for his social activism, was defaced in Manchester. The racist invective directed at him and the other black players was indeed despicable, and yet not as despicable as a sequence in the documentary that featured interviews with two of the hooligan fans who had attended the event and either rioted outside or infiltrated the stadium without tickets. It’s to their credit that they offered their points of view, from the backdrop of wanting to attend the match but feeling priced out, to their participant/witness accounts of the violence that built up over the hours that day. However, their rationalizations for having behaved so irresponsibly, followed by an audacious critique of the racist messages directed at some players, were frankly sickening: a crapulent belch of proto-thought from the dregs of British society. Their actions contributed to the injury of around a hundred people, and terrorized countless others. I just could not believe it when one of these idiots, whose IQ could likely not be charted and whom I would not trust to sit properly on a toilet, had the nerve to tell racist sore losers to “grow up”. Correct message. Wrong person delivering it.
I’ve been in a daze, in denial that some things haven’t changed much. I’ve been a long-distance fan of English football/soccer for a long time, and will be for as long as I’m alive. I still love its spirited atmosphere, its raucous energy, David v. Goliath moments; the aftermaths wherein goodwill and sportsmanship generally prevail. But an ugly side of its culture still exists, leaving a sour taste, plus some manner of hangover.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 