Violence at Villa Park raises new questions about police double standards

On Thursday night, a foreign football team notorious for hooliganism among its fanbase brought disruption to Birmingham.

The game, played at Villa Park, saw an Aston Villa player bleed from a cut on his head after a projectile was thrown at him by some fans of the away team. The match later had to be briefly suspended as further items were thrown onto the pitch by the away fans when Aston Villa scored their second goal. Video footage showed some of those fans attacking a phalanx of police officers in the away section of the stadium.

The club in question was Switzerland’s Young Boys, well known domestically for hooliganism within its fan base. In one of the most recent examples, in September, after the team lost a football match against FC Aarau, Young Boys ultras rioted, setting off full-scale pyrotechnics which injured five of their fellow fans. According to a local observer at the time “hooligans picked up stones, metal barriers, whatever worked as weapon”. In 2022, when Young Boys travelled to Belgium to play Anderlecht, the headline from a local news site was “Masked football hooligans run riot in Brussels brasserie”. 23 Swiss nationals were taken into preventative custody.

Anyone who knows about football will understand why this observation of a Swiss club’s behaviour is appearing in Jewish News. Because just a few short weeks ago, the city of Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group determined that fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv should not be permitted to attend their team’s match against Villa Park. And the primary reason given was hooliganism which had been displayed by fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv at a match against Ajax Amsterdam the previous year.

We know now, thanks to the MP Nick Timothy, that the West Midlands police report regarding what took place in Amsterdam was riddled with more holes than the Emmenthal sold in Young Boy’s native land. The report claimed that hundreds of Israeli fans had been “intentionally targeting Muslim communities”. This was not true. It also claimed that Maccabi fans had been “throwing innocent members of the public into the river”. Again, that was not true – the only video footage of people being thrown into the city’s canals were of people suspected to be fans of the Israeli club. The claim that 5,000 police officers had been deployed? Also untrue. The report also contained basic factual errors – it claimed that Maccabi’s last UK match had been in November 2023, against West Ham. That would have been quite remarkable, as West Ham played Olympiakos that same evening.

But we also know what was not in the report. The report says nothing about the premeditated violence planned by certain people in Amsterdam before the Tel Aviv fans even landed. It goes into absolutely no detail about the Whatsapp groups set up to co-ordinate targeted strikes against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. It does not mention anything about those who engaged in what they themselves would describe as a “Jew hunt”. Instead, the report luridly claims that “The Dutch Police” described MTA fans as “being highly organised, skilled fighters with a serious desire and will to fight with police and opposing groups.”

I will only add that the Dutch police have effectively come out and questioned a wide range of claims made by the West Midlands police in their report.

It is becoming increasingly difficult not to conclude that the police force responsible for the second largest city in Britain did not put together a report which led people to reach a certain decision. It seems more and more likely that it instead created a document designed to support a decision which had effectively already been made. And now it is hoping people will stop asking questions about it.

But what happened on Thursday night at Villa Park shows just why those questions will not go away. A team known for a proportion of its travelling fans carrying out violent acts was allowed to bring those fans to Birmingham – and violence, perhaps inevitably, broke out as a result.

Many people will conclude that the only real difference here in terms of the attitude of the relevant authorities is that one team was from Israel and one was not. Many others will now believe even more strongly that the police in Birmingham allowed sectarian influence and pressure to affect their decision making a few weeks ago – with catastrophic consequences for its reputation.

One thing is for sure; when it comes to this story, we are not even close to the final whistle blowing.