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Fever Pitch Federalism
Yet another example of the EU leaping on a solution when the problem hasn't been fully considered. Last week, the EU's justice chief Franco Frattini called for a Europe-wide police force to tackle football violence.
The force - set up within Interpol - could be up and running by next year's Euro 2008 Tournament.
His declaration was backed enthusiastically by UEFA President Michel Platini, who had earlier demanded the creation of a pan-European police to deal with other football-related problems: corruption, money-laundering and illegal gambling, as well as hooliganism and racism.
"Football, as I have said before, cannot deal with this problem alone" said the former French international, "We need the political will from all EU countries to combat this problem."
Do we?
Platini and Frattini were speaking at what the Guardian describes as the first high-level meeting of EU government officials, the European Commission, police chiefs, supporters and sports bodies.
The meeting was called in response to the deaths of two men in soccer-related violence in Italy in the past twelve months.
Frattini's measures are more modest than Platini's plans for a dedicated football police force - for now. Talking to world football organisation FIFA, he said,
"The popularity of our sport sometimes attracts extremist minority groups who infiltrate supporters clubs, invade stadiums, cross borders and seek to spread their nihilist ideology," he told UEFA’s official website.
"Violence is a problem of society, and football is at the heart of our social life – it is unfortunately natural that fanatics seek to seize our sport, as it is such a visible and popular activity. We therefore need to protect sport and give judges the means to have laws respected.
"Stadium bans exist in a certain number of countries, and often at judicial level, they do not exist in others. At the moment, no bans are applicable at European level. Here, there is an obvious imbalance. The idea of a European sports police force aims notably at filling this vacuum in the EU's provisions.
(...) "we need a European mechanism which would allow the centralization of information, the application of judicial measures beyond borders, the training of specialists and the co-ordination of operations and interventions."
Some readers might argue that many national police forces already do a perfectly good job in preventing hooliganism and violence. It is difficult to see how an international, pan-European force could have prevented the death of policeman Filippo Raciti, who was killed in February when a projectile thrown at him exploded in his face after a match in Sicily. Or, indeed, that of Gabriele Sandri, who was shot by police last month.
After Raciti's death, newspapers reported that Italian hooligans didn't even bother fighting one another anymore, preferring to reserve their energies for attacking the "joint enemy", the police. Would yet another layer of policing have any effect here?
International matches certainly draw their fair share of hooligans, and the police forces of nations with particular problems with this species do cooperate on a case-by-case level and have been relatively successful in recent years in cracking down on violence. Fans have been prevented from travelling to overseas games in some cases, and where this is not possible, forces have tipped off their colleaques about which troublemakers to look out for.
Security and policing have kept clashes within stadia and around grounds down to a low level. Those fights which do kick off aren't always the actions of dedicated football hooligans, but rather drunken brawls between groups of men who have had too many. Indeed, the problem is sometimes a semantic one. Yes, there are a number of men who attach themselves to football teams and who seek to fight followers of other teams. These are football hooligans. However, there are also those who have no intention of causing trouble but who have too many beers and throw a punch at someone they believe has slighted their honour in some respect. It's a sad fact that men of some nations, given too much lager, sometimes end up fighting. This is drunk and disorderly behaviour, and is not an international issue.
And then there are incidents where one wonders how an international anti-hooligan squad could help. During the World Cup Finals held in France in 1998, English fans found themselves following their team to play Tunisia in the tough southern city of Marseilles. Despite the fact that British cops, working with their French counterparts, had identified and excluded England's hard core hooligans, being an England fan ten years ago meant an automatic association with hooliganism, not least among the young men of Marseilles. Marseilles locals (mainly of North African origin) didn't take too kindly to the invasion of their territory by hundreds of boozy English men; Fans of Tunisia, sometimes in concert with local thugs, rioted for three days with the English fans. Ten years later, there are still videos proclaiming the victory of the "Tunisie" over the "Hooligans" posted on YouTube.
It was an accident waiting to happen: But again, how would an international force have prevented these scenes?
Sensible drinking laws and an effort by local authorities and organisers to ensure that large groups of opposing fans rub up together peacefully would surely improve the chances of the tournament passing without event than the actions of an EU-wide special force.
And then we get on to Platini's other recommendations. He would like to see the proposed international force tackle corruption, perhaps a timely warning following this weekend's reports of match-fixing in 15 games linked to an Asian betting syndicate. "Doubts about one Intertoto Cup match were so serious it was referred to their disciplinary committee", reports the Guardian. But as the report says, the match-fixing scandal, if scandal it is, was uncovered by UEFA itself. Where is the need for a pan-European police force, if UEFA has not only done its own homework perfectly well but also passed its dossier to a (presumably national) police force?
Would an international police force have made a better job of the arrest of Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp on suspicion to defraud than that of the City of London Police, who knocked on Redknapp's door at 6.00AM - while the press took photographs?
"I am particularly disappointed the police felt the need to come knocking on my door at that time of the morning. My wife was home alone because I was on my way back into the country and she was absolutely petrified," said Redknapp, "Why I could not just have had a phone call asking me to turn up at the police station, I do not know. If you are telling me this is how you treat anyone, it is not the society I grew up in."
Presumably Redknapp would be equally surprised to discover the society he grew up in giving the go-ahead to a pan-European force to bang on his door at the same time. (Incidentally, Sam Allardyce (Newcastle's manager) was also arrested at the same time as Redknapp. The two are the only English managers in the Premiership: Redknapp, who says that football's governing body sees him as a "barrow boy" reckons that the raid ended his dream of becoming manager of the England national team.)
It's easy to take the Platini Proposals to their absurd conclusion. Sadly, though, EU experience suggests that they'll go that way eventually. Platini would like more done to combat racism: Will Euro-cops be standing on terraces ensuring fans don't make racist remarks? In Britain, teams of cops and stewards already do that (and fans do a good job of shouting down racist abuse, too). For those nations with real racist problems, UEFA already has a system of punishments in place.
Once again, would an EU-wide football police squad make it easier to fight racism? Or is this just another example of the EU seizing on a national problem and demanding a European solution?
"This is, I would say, a step forward towards the creation one day of a true European police for sport," Franco Frattini said as he unveiled plans for the anti-hooligan squad. Today a police force to combat football hooliganism; tomorrow, a force dedicated to wrongdoing of any kind in European football. Next, a European police for all sports; Finally, a European police for.... well, you name it.
