Book Review

The themes of policing, security, and safety management in football have, throughout the last 3 years, continually ignited public debate and received much media attention. Particularly two incidents stand out as catalysts for these renewed debates on the policing of football supporters and crowds. First, the Wembley security breach at the Euro 2020 final in July 2021 where ticketless fans managed to pass the security parameters at Wembley as disorder ensued. In the aftermath, this was dubbed a day of “national shame” in the United Kingdom (UK) (The Guardian, 2021). Second, less than 1 year after this, in May 2022 outside Stade de France in Paris, crowd troubles developed at the 2021/22 Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid following the organizational mismanagement that resulted in large crowds being held back at entry to the stadia and other fans being teargassed by French police (Scraton et al., 2022).

Indeed, the former incident – referred to as the “Euro Sunday” – provides one of the backdrops for Chapter 1 of Geoff Pearson and Clifford Stott's timely and important book, A New Agenda For Football Crowd Management. The book is published at a time where, increasingly, critical questions are being asked about the treatment of football fans and the general organization of major sporting events. And, as the authors submit, “[t]he incidents of disorder seen at Euro2020 and during the 2021/22 season demonstrate once again that the issue of managing football crowd disorder is still pressing” (p. 20).

Simultaneously, the book must not be read as responsive “solely” to the crowd issues at the “Euro Sunday” in 2021 or even more recently. The book draws from the authors’ extensive, decades-long fieldwork using ethnographic and participant-action research in the context of football policing. Though, the new data – introduced for the first time in this text – comes from observations conducted for two inter-connected projects (which the authors refer to as “ENABLE”) examining the organization and operations of football policing in England and Wales throughout the 2017/18, 2018/19, and 2019/20 seasons of English football. However, whilst this data makes up the baseline for the book's empirical part, there are also significant theoretical and literature-driven dimensions that are central to the book which, at its core, aims to investigate the “regulation and policing of football crowd disorder and violence in England and Wales” (p. 9). It does so by reconsidering the laws and policing that football crowds are subjected to in England and Wales.

The book's first seven chapters can be read as a gradually assembled theoretical and legal framework. In Chapter 1, which sets out the book's parameters, the study's methodology, rationale, and contributions are laid out early. Sharply and directly, Pearson and Stott elaborate on what the book argues and how it, beyond academia, seeks to propose a reform to football policing – that is, the new agenda for an improved football crowd management. In part, this is backed up by the text's many practical lessons that should inform the reform situated within the wider policing of crowds in British society. Notwithstanding, here it is also highlighted that, while many of their recommendations are specific to the English and Welsh contexts, the “location of [their] research within the broader context of football policing and crowd regulation across Europe means that they also have value for those responsible for the management of football crowds more internationally” (p. 15).

Chapter 2 contextualizes historically the policing of football crowds in the UK. State responses to “hooliganism”, safety issues, and stadium disasters – from the 1970s and onwards – are unpacked, in addition to the growing explanations of the academic community that have tried to theoretically explain football-related violence or disorder in the UK and beyond. Here, the authors acknowledge how “hooliganism” lacks a universally agreed-upon definition and, consequently, one must exercise caution “when trying to identify national trends in football-related ‘public disorder’” (p. 45) such as increases in violence or football-related offences. The two next chapters also contribute toward the authors’ framework as they outline the legal underpinnings informing football policing in the UK (Chapter 3), as well as the football-specific and more general policing structures and philosophies that lie beneath present-day football policing operations (Chapter 4).

Chapter 5 positions football policing within Beck's (1992) idea of a “risk society.” Interestingly, Pearson and Stott highlight the risk-informed language that follows football fans through, for example, the classification of individuals and fixtures in terms of the “risk” they allegedly pose. This is complemented by a discussion of the fluid (sub)cultures of fandom that these static risk classifications seldom account for. Hence, one major departure point is how a language and mindset of precautionary risk assessments is embedded in the policing of football crowds; and how the police's attempts to classify fans or games according to “non-risk” or “risk,” much like the term “hooliganism,” are marked by an ambiguity as they do not “adequately consider the contextual complexities or interactional dynamics of a football crowd event and is therefore often not helpful in predicting when, where, or why conflicts will occur” (p. 158).

Chapters 6 and 7 complete the authors’ theoretical and legal framework. Here, they unpack the crowd psychology, based on social interactions between the police and communities, that often directly impact whether disorder will occur or not (Chapter 6), and the human rights protections that apply at football events (Chapter 7). Overall, the book's first part provides a strong and inter-disciplinary breakdown of the legal, social psychological, methodological, and sociological insights that assist the authors’ subsequent observations of the policing of crowds in the UK. In many ways, the first part represents a tour d’horizon of the responses to disorder and violence in the most popular sport worldwide.

The rich empirical part of the book (Chapters 8–11) contains a number of case examples that empirically demonstrate the mentioned and contested nature of “risk” in football policing and how there are often mismatches between the actual risk posed and the pre-match categorization of a fixture as “high” or “low” risk (Chapter 8). Crucially, in advocating for a dialogue-based approach to football policing, Chapter 9 then discusses the evidence of successful interaction and communication with crowds, thereby documenting the social aspect of football policing as shown in, for example, good practice exemplars from Swedish football and the use of Police Liaison Teams in the UK. The authors also argue that principles from protest policing are yet to reach the realm of football, writing that: “a route to efficient and effective football crowd policing, even in high-risk scenarios, is through implementing a graded, facilitation, and dialogue-based policing approach” (p. 299), alongside the pillars of preventing crime, disorder and anti-social behavior, protecting the legitimacy of the police and human rights, and finally, creating a safe and welcoming environment for members of the public.

Building on this, Chapter 10 is divided into two parts that systematically expand on the authors’ recommendations for a combined legal and policing reform in football crowd management in the UK. In the concluding chapter, Pearson and Stott propose their new agenda for football crowd management which requires an increasingly joined-up approach from legislators, the police, and the criminal justice system to the management of crowds. Some of the key points on this agenda include: (1) A greater understanding of fan culture by policing actors; (2) to reconsider the static idea of “risk” and approach “risk” as interactional; (3) to emphasize dialogue and de-escalation in the policing of crowds; (4) legal reform; (5) emphasis on knowledge exchange between academics, stakeholders and police organizations. The new and progressive agenda is backed up strongly by the empirical evidence presented across the separate chapters, yet it could also have been interesting to see how, or to what extent, this agenda could relate to the Council of Europe's 2016 convention on an integrated safety, security, and service approach to football matches and sport events, which emphasizes, inter alia, multi-agency partnership and the creation of welcoming event atmospheres at events across Europe.

Overall, this book – and its rich material – provides an exceptional insight into the complexity of football fan cultures and, indeed, the legal, social psychological and policing-related issues that continue to surround the present-day football world in the UK and beyond. Whilst the text provides a number of tangible lessons for those tasked with the regulation and policing of football fans, it also extends the academic literature on football fans, policing and security in a myriad of ways. Specifically, it significantly extends the authors’ earlier work (Stott and Pearson, 2007) and other scholarship from other European contexts that captures the importance of social interactions between the police and fans (O’Neill, 2005) or the ramifications of binary risk classifications or definitional ambiguities on fans’ civil liberties and rights (Tsoukala, 2009). Indeed, given the extensive empirical base the book relies upon, it could have been interesting, within the global frame, to read some further reflections on the extent to which (or why) the good models of football policing, identified by the authors, remain applicable to the different football and policing cultures located across, for example, Asian, South American and North American contexts. This is a minor point, and the book will still be useful for readers, researchers, and stakeholders across these contexts, perhaps particularly against the backdrop of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and as the United States, Mexico, and Canada get ready to host its 2026 edition, as these occasions are likely to draw more attention – from academics, media, and stakeholders – to how fans were, and are policed in these football contexts. Considering that this type of football events often represents circuits of “knowledge” or “policy-transfer”, this underpins why the book's findings can be valuable for those managing football crowds more internationally, as the authors suggest (p. 15).

More widely, beyond sport, the book showcases the contested and occasionally paradoxical nature and meaning of “risk” as a concept. Indeed, it empirically documents exactly why sport remains such a relevant site for understanding risk aversion, categorizations, and management in contemporary risk societies (cf. Beck, 1992). Altogether, this renders this book a valuable, important, and significant resource for academics spanning the fields of social psychology, law, sociology, criminology, policing studies, and sports management and a welcome addition for those with a general interest in football's fans and governance, crowds, policing or risk.