Aston Villa condemned for snubbing Board plan to enable Maccabi fans to attend match

A plan by the Board of Deputies to enable Jewish football supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv to attend an upcoming football match against Aston Villa was reportedly ignored by the Birmingham based club, with the Board’s president accusing Villa of ‘running down the clock’.

Last month’s decision by Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) to ban supporters of the Israeli football club from attending was widely condemned in the UK, including by the leaders of all mainstream political parties. As reported by Jewish News, initial hopes that the ban would be overturned were abandoned after Maccabi Tel Aviv decided not to accept its ticket allocation, with a source saying the intervention of far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson led to the club concluding that the risks to innocent fans being caught up in a larger confrontation were now too great.

However, the Board had written to Aston Villa, putting forward a plan which would have seen the club distribute 500 tickets in the away end of Villa Park to British Jewish football fans, many of them keen to support Maccabi Tel Aviv. Despite both written correspondence and direct conversations with the police, the Jewish representative organisation said that Aston Villa had failed to engage with the proposition.

Phil Rosenberg, the board’s president, said: “The ridiculous decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from watching their team play Aston Villa risks giving the impression that there are ‘no-go’ zones in this country.

“We had sought to give Aston Villa and the West Midlands police the opportunity to disprove this harmful notion of ‘no-go’ zones by exploring the possibility of them allocating the tickets to our community and showing this could happen safely.

“In the end, they have collectively fumbled the pass into their own net. While the police seemed to be willing to make this happen, Aston Villa ran down the clock, perhaps hoping this would go away.”

Rosenberg went on to say that “the idea that Villa Park, Birmingham, the West Midlands, or any part of our country should be inhospitable to people because of their religion or nationality must be totally unacceptable, particularly following the Islamist terror attack on our community at Heaton Park just a few weeks ago.”

The fixture between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv is due to be played on 9 November. Despite the lack of Israeli fans, Islamists within Birmingham are reportedly looking to organise mass demonstrations near the football ground in protest at the presence of the Israeli team.