Euro 2025 has shown the world what football can and should be
If you’re too young to remember going to football in the 1970s, don’t worry, this is no nostalgia trip.
At times it was febrile and you developed a sixth sense for it ‘kicking off’ which, in my case, was honed every school day, when you learned how to avoid getting your head kicked in.
I didn’t think I went to a rough school, but should have realised I did when the French teacher left after being beaten over the head by a pupil with a 12″ dildo and someone burned part of the school down. And a teacher pinning a boy to the grass with a two-pronged garden fork over his neck was considered just normal, as were gym teachers dating fourth year girls.
I mention this to illustrate how we all grew up in a climate of casual and serious violence. It was DNA deep and infected our every waking hour. I walked everywhere. Three miles into town to save bus fare for drinking was typical. There were roads you didn’t go down, pubs you didn’t look at, let alone go in and just ran past as fast as you could. You crossed roads so as not to walk past some people and suffer the inevitable ‘what you looking at, son, eh?’.
We were shown how to make a sort of improvised paper brick from a folded newspaper, to defend ourselves, better to smash people in the face. Of course, we were part of the climate of abuse and violent language, too.
Going to Ayresome Park, we would have our route in and out planned, so as not to get caught in a pincer movement in the back streets of Middlesbrough by the opposition – or even our own – fans. We hated fans from London, who were super aggressive. They always seemed to mistake the game for an extension of the civil war and they had to show the rebellious northerners who was boss.
Of course there were plenty who gladly took on the battle and unless you’ve seen a big steelworker from Redcar with knuckles like bruised potatoes kicking hell out of a Chelsea fan wearing fashionable clothes you haven’t experienced what was once commonplace and which I’m ashamed to say, I sometimes looked on with the positive feeling of territorial defence.
I think Man Utd were regarded as the professionally hardest, most extreme nutters and we never went when they were playing. Stories of their madness were legion and included, real or imagined, having a milk bottle pushed where the sun don’t shine. We were terrified and didn’t want to suffer what we called ‘bottle bottom’.
If it sounds like a war zone, it felt like it. But we just accepted it as our daily reality. It got worse and worse into the ’80s. Who needs it? In common with many, I stopped going and lost the habit of going for years.
The one thing which connected all these years of violence and intimidation was that it was almost exclusively carried out by men. Gangs of men. And perpetrated on men too.
I loved football – and still do, I mean, I watch the German third tier on YouTube – but the atmosphere around it (and Boro was far from the worst) was horrible. That said, some men loved it. In their element booting people in the head with 14-hole DMs. They loved the edginess. But I didn’t need to nearly die to feel alive, as fruity as my pitch-directed rhetoric might have been.
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Zoom forward 50 years and it’s quite different. Almost. Some men are still horrible and life has beaten the frustration at referees or misfiring strikers out of me. It is perhaps less casually violent, but many still enjoy a bit of aggression and intimidation. However, the rise of the commonplace use of cocaine is leading us back down that road; I can see it, it’s like seeing a gakked-up version of my youth. And I find those old instincts of planning to avoid violence are also creeping back in. That sixth sense for trouble starting is rearing its head again (it’s something about the rhythm and angles of how people move away when a fight is about to happen, learned in the schoolyard). Even now, just going to Cappielow Park to see Morton, I’m hyper aware of potential, usually unrealised, violence, especially now that I’m disabled (at least I’ve got a stick!). It’s not like anything or anywhere else.
But now we have an example of a different way to be, in women’s football. For as long as I’ve been alive, there was a grudging acceptance that this was how it was. That you always had to negotiate your life around the violent men.
But now we see 35,000 at a game and everyone is smiling, happy and enjoying themselves. Miraculously doing so without twisting their faces in rage at every decision. I don’t know if they were snorting cocaine but they didn’t display any of the typical signs. Doing without all the behaviour and emotion that it was said would always be with us like a skid mark on the sheets, to be endemic or even necessary.
And on the pitch, what do we see? Unalloyed joy and faces alive with excitement and happiness, or tears of anguish. The Germany v France game was a titanic game of gristle, skill and struggle and ultimately goalkeeping brilliance. And not for one second of it was anyone worried about getting jumped and kicked in the head, or concerned someone was pissing down their leg. It was…civilised. But not tame or dispassionate. It was 35,000 people, including happy little kids, just loving the football and that was it. And though I was only watching on TV, I wished I was there. As with all the Euros games, it was the antidote to all the decades of nastiness, intimidation and violence I’ve endured. A 50+ year struggle with abuse, which had infected me and even made me a worse person, had gone.
Turns out as soon as you remove a certain cohort of men from football or indeed anything, life immediately gets better. This is simply summed up as women = good, men = bad, but it’s more nuanced than that in reality – though if men weren’t allowed to go, lots of problems wouldn’t happen. But we’re not all headbangers, so why do we facilitate them and even indulge in some of their behaviour when we wouldn’t in the more civilised women’s game? Are we all influenced by their toxicity? Why do we feel we can do this at one but not the other? And on one level or another, most of us have done it, even if it’s just swearing at the linesman.
We have a brilliant example of how it really could be. Why don’t we learn from it? Be better people. Wouldn’t you rather be relaxed and happy at a game, rather than outraged, angry and fearing a kick from a stranger? What have we got to lose? Our masculinity? If so, who needs it?