Cocaine abuse –

Kids running drugs –

50% increase in arrests Disorder at football is on the rise.

The Times’ chief sports correspondent Matt Lawton spoke to Jim White and Simon Jordan about the issues that have seen a 50 per cent increase in arrests and children being used to carry drugs and weapons.

The scenes of chaos at Wembley Stadium in July 2021 prior to the Euro 2020 final between England and Italy brought the subject into a renewed focus, with thousands of ticketless fans attempting to break into the Home of Football.

The situation was so severe that a Government report by Baroness Louise Casey was conducted, and found that severe injuries could have been caused, or even deaths.

Fast forward six months and, whilst thankfully no problem to that scale has been reported, the trend is heading that way.

Times journalist Lawton was in attendance for the East Midlands derby as Nottingham Forest hosted rivals Leicester City in the FA Cup on Sunday, February 6, and witnessed drugs being consumed, amongst other disturbances – including a Foxes supporter who was arrested for invading the pitch and attacking Forest players.

After speaking with the head of football policing, Mark Roberts, the football writer agreed to join police to shadow their operation during a number of games, to see for himself what they’re having to deal with on a weekly basis.

“They suggested two matches in Nottingham – Notts County vs Grimsby on the Saturday and Forest vs Leicester on the Sunday – they expected those games to be problematic. I spent the weekend on the frontline seeing for myself what they deal with,” he said on White and Jordan

“We started on the Saturday morning with the arrival of Grimsby fans at Nottingham station.

“We arrived and the first operation was called Operation Wolfgang with the sniffer dogs to see if these guys were turning up with Class-A drugs – and it proved to be the case.

“They set up a checkpoint, the dogs were there, and what we found was that once they’d all gone through, and some of them were stopped as the dogs responded accordingly, was that they had dumped bags of cocaine on the platform. Once 400 of these guys had gone through, the train platform was littered with drugs. It was extraordinary.

“Something Baroness Casey said in her report, about the trouble in Wembley in the European Championship final, that she thought there was clear evidence that a lot of this disorder is being fuelled by cocaine use, and there it was.

“There were bags and bags of it all over the place.

Sadly, the problem is not a quick fix as Lawton also revealed that children are being used to carry drugs and weapons and smuggle them into matches.

He continued: “I’ve been covering football for nearly 30 years, I hadn’t really seen the issues that the police are having to deal with every day quite so close up before.

“It was a real eye opener, the really telling part for me was the age of some of the lads that are getting involved with these groups.

“They’re very very young, they’re as young as 12 and they’re hanging out with guys in their 40s and 50s and one of the officers said they’re carrying Class-A drugs, they’re carrying weapons.

“They’re there for one reason and they’re there not to watch the football, they’re actually there just to have a fight.

“Every football club in the country has a dedicated officer, they’re like community police officers who spend half of their week visiting homes of kids they’ve seen at the weekend, sitting down with their parents and saying, ‘do you realise your 14-year-old son is hanging out with some pretty bad company at the weekend?’ On quite a few occasions they are not even aware they have got on a train to another part of the country to watch a football match. It’s quite scary, really.”

Fan violence and planned attacks are another problem, although that is perhaps not something that has been on the rise, rather that it never went away.

And Lawton revealed his eye witness account of the scenes of ‘carnage’ before Sunday’s cup game as an organised group of Leicester hooligans descended on a pub where locals were enjoying their lunch.

“I didn’t realise the Baby Squad at Leicester still existed, this crew that has been written about in book about football hooliganism, it was founded in 1981, and the Forest Executive Crew, but at the police strategy meeting in the morning they were talking about those crews, known members and the fact they had intelligence they were planning to meet,” he said.

“The two teams hadn’t played since 2014 and they were planning to meet somewhere unspecified in the city centre.

We started at the train station but were soon aware that once the first few trains had come in that they hadn’t come on the train. They’d probably come in another way, in minibuses.

“Suddenly they got the call, fighting had broken out outside this pub and when we turned up it was total carnage.

“There were people eating their Sunday lunch in this pub and Leicester City fans are throwing tables and chairs through the windows  – it was horrific.”

Lawton’s take away from his weekend spent on the police frontlines was that, unless everyone works together, football could be going back to what it used to be in the 1970s and 80s.

“I should stress that I spent the weekend in Nottingham and 95 percent of the people there were behaving in the way you want them to,” said the Times journalist.

“It’s mums and dads, kids, they buy their chips, burgers, some have a beer and it’s a lovely day out.

“The concern here is this minority is growing, if you go to a game and encounter these groups, it is very, very intimidating and it’s actually starting to make it unpleasant to go to football matches again.

“English football did respond to what had happened in the 70s and 80s, and it did become a good atmosphere.

“You’re never going to completely eradicate this problem and I think we can get on top of this, but we’ve got to work together.”

– Cocaine abuse
– Kids running drugs
– 50% increase in arrests

Disorder at football is on the rise.

We went undercover with the police and @Lawton_Times to find out exactly why.

🤝 In partnership with @TheTimes pic.twitter.com/Pz6qrWHfEk

— talkSPORT (@talkSPORT) February 10, 2022