Aston Villa are scheduled to play Maccabi Tel Aviv on the 6th November. Yesterday West Midlands police and the local Safety Advisory Group decide that no visiting fans will be allowed, citing “public-safety concerns.” The decision follows the attacks on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans by local hooligan groups in Amsterdam in November of 2024. The official reasoning is that this is in place to protect the Tel Aviv fans.
There has been widespread criticism of the decision from all parts of the political spectrum and rightly so. This decision punishes the victims rather than the perpetrators of a crime (or a potential crime) and this is a dangerous precedent to set, the intent may have been caution, but the result is moral surrender
Britain has had well-documented problems with football hooliganism in the past and if there is any nation with the expertise to guarantee the safety of the Tel Aviv fans, it should be us.
Britain built a joint policing–stewarding system built on segregation, intelligence-led crowd management, designated “bubble” travel arrangements, coordinated nationally through the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU).
Each club’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) includes police, fire, ambulance, and local council a structure created precisely so matches could go ahead safely even when risks are high. Britain’s crowd-control practice is widely regarded as one of the most mature in Europe — calm, intelligence-driven, and proportionate.
The well-established precedent is clear: we protect the fans. Once we invert that, we cross a moral line, one that transcends sport and gets at the heart of our society and who we are. Britain has, despite some current opinion been a place of tolerance and protecting the weak, we fought two world wars on that principle. Now, either we have lost faith in ourselves, or we are capitulating to the mob, and we are no longer able to guarantee equal protection when ideology or identity enter the frame – or a combination of the two.
So where does this leave us? After every terrorist attack the refrain has been ‘we will not be divided’, ‘we will not let fear win’ but here we are, banning a group from our society because we cannot guarantee their safety. We have let fear win, we capitulated at the first time of asking. At a time when we need unity more than ever, it feels like we’ve never been more divided.