Barcelona’s defeat of Manchester United was considered a victory for good in the press. But is it really so simple, asks Ashley Shaw
So good triumphed over evil in football’s version of the moral maze. Fan-owned Barcelona, the club that proclaims itself as mes que un club (more than a club), Catalonia’s national team, won the European Cup at a canter by beating privately-owned, debt-saddled Manchester United where the ticket prices make your eyes water and the PR spin-cycle is always on high.
With Newcastle being relegated and Arsenal fans unhappy at their defeats to Manchester Utd and Chelsea, the question is raised as to just how much is expected from the teams in the Premier League
In these turbulent times for their club, let’s spare a thought for the silent majority among Newcastle United fans. “Passion” has long been deemed to be a key attribute in English football, whether it’s shown by players, managers or supporters. For several years now, Newcastle followers, or at least a subsection of them, have been seen as the epitome of the committed fan whose life revolves around their club. Thus the arrival of Alan Shearer as manager was greeted on television and radio by blethering idiots hailing the return of the saviour. Many supporters questioned the wisdom of appointing a novice but their views couldn’t be summed up in a crass soundbite so we didn’t get to hear from them.
Joel Richards reports on a new initiative to curb fan violence in Argentina that sounds strangely familiar – and comes at a price
Going to a match in Buenos Aires is one of the main attractions on offer in the capital city, but the price of watching football is set to increase considerably. The Argentine Football Association (AFA) is looking to implement a £41 million project to register football fans, modernise the game’s infrastructure and eradicate violence from the stands. The Supporters Identification Register (PUAI in its Spanish initials) will oblige an estimated four million football fans to register officially in order to attend matches. Paper tickets will no longer exist, and supporters (including tourists) will have to buy online, at cash points or with prepaid vouchers.
On the 25th anniversary of the start of the national miners’ strike, Jon Spurling looks at the industry’s long-established links with professional football that have since been swept away
Twenty-five years ago football and coal mining had in common the fact that Margaret Thatcher clearly didn’t see a long-term future for either within British society. In 1985, a Socialist Worker article drew parallels between the 1984 “Battle of Orgreave”, where around 10,000 pickets squared up to as many police, with the violence at Kenilworth Road during a Luton v Millwall FA Cup tie in 1985: “The images of violence and of raging anger (although those witless football fans have no cause at all) lead us to question whether the fabric of society is close to collapse in Thatcher’s Britain.” Two years after the strike ended, at a time when the minister for sport Colin Moynihan mooted the idea of a compulsory membership scheme to curb hooliganism, a letter to the Guardian expressed a fear that “a high handed government, with sheer contempt for the working classes, is, if one looks at recent events, attempting to utterly destroy two bastions of working class Britain.” To take the comparison to its conclusion, both industries had been irrevocably altered by the late 1980s. In the wake of the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster, and Italia 90, football would become gentrified, and machines replaced workers as colliery closures continued apace. “The working class’s links with both football and mining were, directly or indirectly, rightly or wrongly, severed by Thatcher’s government,” remarked former Labour MP Roy Hattersley in 1992.
Leicester’s tussles with Atlético Madrid left fans simmering at injustice but, as Saul Pope recalls, these were heady days
Eleven years ago their fans would have never accepted it, but Leicester City’s UEFA Cup first round tie against Atlético Madrid in September 1997 will probably be as good as it gets. Leicester didn’t win the game, but for a time they were leading thanks to a player once described by the club fanzine The Fox as looking “knackered whenever he ran on to a football field”.