How do you put a stop to football hooliganism? Banning notorious troublemakers from their club’s home ground doesn’t appear to work. And stopping a team’s supporters from attending away matches punishes both good and bad soccer fans. The latest idea is for the trouble makers to be quickly tracked down – with the help of the crowd at football matches.

The Netherlands still hasn’t cracked the problem of supporters’ violence in professional football – unlike the cradle of soccer hooliganism, Great Britain. There peace has returned to the stands, thanks to years of consistently tough action from the police and courts.

This Sunday, things went badly wrong in the Dutch city of Utrecht where FC Twente were playing away against FC Utrecht in the Premier League. There were clashes between the rival fans during the match. After the final whistle, angry FC Utrecht supporters, unable to reach their rivals, turned against the police. Some officers felt so threatened that they fired warning shots.

Violence against police
A one-off incident? Unfortunately not. There has been serious trouble between marauding fans and police at several Dutch matches over the last year. Not all the games were considered ‘high-risk’ - with clubs considered arch-rivals meeting on the pitch.

The fewer police deployed at a match, the higher the chance of officers becoming the target of violence. Fights between fans tend to be dismissed with a "let them bash each others’ brains out", but when the violence is aimed against police, the story is "enough is enough".

That’s definitely how the ACP police union felt after the trouble in Utrecht on Sunday. It condemned the violence faced by officers and demanded that supporters shouldn’t be allowed to attend away matches any more. ACP chair Gerrit van de Kamp:

“If no one - the Dutch FA, clubs or supporters’ groups - can solve the problem, you’ve got to think of measures such as banning fans from away matches.”

An away-games ban has been in force for matches between arch-rivals Amsterdam’s Ajax and Rotterdam’s Feyenoord for a number of years. Before the ban, Ajax-Feyenoord matches were guaranteed to be marred by trouble.

Hard core
Another police union, the NPB, points out that new legislation provides for notorious troublemakers having to report to the police when games are taking place. The NPB complains that clubs aren’t taking proper advantage of this possibility of barring hooligans from matches. Their failure to do so means the hard core of violent fans can carry on attending games.

It has to be pointed out though that soccer hooliganism sometimes comes from unexpected quarters: the hangers-on and the newcomers. They have to have misbehaved at least once to ‘earn’ the name hooligan. They are not yet known to the police or courts and in general they don’t hang around long enough for officers to note down their details. How can these apprentice hooligans be identified?

Mobile-telephone films
The answer? By using members of the crowd at matches. The ordinary people in the crowd want to watch the game in peace and can help make this possible by filming troublemakers on their mobile phones and passing the footage on to the authorities. The day after the problems at the Utrecht match, the police had already received a number of films. The problem remains however that, although they have been caught on film, the hooligans still haven’t been identified.

They have the answer in Rotterdam. After September’s trouble, the police published photographs of suspects on the internet and on billboards around the city. Many hooligans turned themselves in, preferring to face the courts rather than to face public identification.

It remains to be seen whether the authorities in Utrecht will follow Rotterdam’s example. What’s certain is that ordinary people have the power to help identify the hooligans, although finally dealing with them has in the end got to be left to the authorities.

(mw/rk)