Introduction

In a conference with journalists on 31 May 1985, Margaret Thatcher said that ‘these violent people must be isolated from society’ (qtd in Burgess 1985, 1). Thatcher was talking about football supporters whose behaviour a couple of days previously had contributed to the catastrophe at Heysel Stadium in Brussels leading to the death of 39 mostly Italian spectators. Before the European Cup Final between Liverpool F.C. and Juventus, Liverpool fans charged towards Juventus supporters in an adjacent block, causing a huge number of Italians to press against a wall which collapsed and buried many bodies. The behaviour of Liverpool fans was only one factor contributing to the disaster, however; the ruinous state of the ground and failure on behalf of the authorities to properly segregate rivalling fan groups were also to blame (Frosdick and Marsh 2005, 23). Yet, concern about violence in football stadiums was so common in 1985 that the catastrophe seemed to confirm what many observers, both at home and abroad, had come to expect from English fans. With more than 40 serious incidents in UK stadiums involving deaths and multiple injuries since 1888, the history of football in England and Scotland had always been closely linked to narratives of disaster (Elliott, Frosdick and Smith 1999, 13–14). The reason for most of these incidents was the derelict state of grounds or bad planning, but the figure of the football fan, which for large parts of the public equated with ‘hooligan’ and ‘social pariah’ (Dunn 2020, xvi), made it easy for press reports or politicians to latch onto preconceived notions of football crowds whenever disaster struck (Sandvoss 2005, 2; Piskurek 2018, 2–3).

In her statement to journalists, Thatcher made an interesting link between hooliganism and two other forms of violence in the UK, namely ‘that on the picket lines and [that] in Northern Ireland’ (Burgess 1985, 1). Crucially, moreover, the Prime Minister contrasted the perpetrators of all three types of violence with ‘the good and decent citizens of our society’ (qtd in Burgess 1985, 1). Terrorist violence, especially in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, was an omnipresent threat in the Britain of 1985, and Thatcher herself narrowly escaped an attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in October 1984.