by Tony Attwood
In an average football season, the average attendance at matches is 40,410, meaning that over an average league weekend about 400,000 people go to the ten Premier League games.
During my lifetime of watching football matches in leagues ranging from the amateur Spartan League up to the Premier League, and games involving England’s first XI, I have had personal experience of very little violence. By which I mean being close enough to see people exchanging blows or expressing their dislike of the opposition supporters in what might be called a violence-inducing manner.
And looking at the official figures on crowd violence, that seems to match with reality since in the recent official analysis of league games, 75% of matches with incidents were categorised as having low severity incidents.
But of course violence, both in terms of physical and verbal abuse, does vary from ground to ground and from supporters group to supporters group, and I was interested to note in the recent government report that West Ham United supporters had the highest number of football banning orders currently in force. Of course one might argue that some police forces give out banning orders more readily to WHU supporters because of their reputation – I wouldn’t know – but WHU fans get the most banning orders.
Now these figures lead up to the end of the 2024/5 season, so they could be a year out of date, but they show that WHU supporters had the highest number of football banning orders issued in England and Wales. And indeed that was for the second consecutive year. So it seems that issuing the orders might be holding numbers constant, but not reducing them. Data is extracted from figures from the Home Office.
| club | 2024/25 ORDERS | 2024/25 RANKING | 2023/24 ORDER | 2023/24 RANKING |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WHU | 112 | 1 | 93 | 1 |
| Man U | 108 | 2 | 89 | 2 |
| Chelsea | 80 | 3 | 54 | 8 |
| Man C | 76 | 4 | 63 | 6 |
| Leicester | 70 | 5 | 72 | 4 (joint) |
The figures show the situation is fairly static – one might argue that the work of the banning orders is holding the situation under control, or one can equally argue that the process is not making a blind bit of difference. Without removing the process of issuing banning orders, we don’t really have a clue. Also, we might note that the number of banning orders is very small compared with the number of people at matches.
Likewise, we don’t have any details on how many people attempted to overcome banning orders by applying for tickets under different names. This, however, is probably very small since most clubs have waiting lists for those who can apply for tickets and it is unlikely that many had, considering that they might get banned, purchased more than one membership. Using another person’s membership to get admission seems more likely, but there is of course no evidence.
The most arrests were of Manchester United fans (121), followed by Manchester City (94), West Ham (77), Chelsea (76) and Aston Villa (71) and most arrests throughout were for violent or public disorder. But what is interesting is that Manchester City had the highest percentage (59%) at home games than away games. Given the very high level of home wins the club got, it seems likely these arrests came about because away fans were able to chant something about the club’s finances that really annoyed the home support – although of course I am only guessing; I have not been to the ManC ground as an away supporter for many, many years.
Although of course not directly related, it is interesting that in the 2024/5 to 2025 season, Arsenal had the largest decrease in arrests. Quite why that happened, however, is harder to ascertain, although there was a large increase in arrests of 34 in the 2023 to 2024 season. One wonders if the reason was to do with who was Chief Constable and what issues he was placing an emphasis on that season. Likewise, Aston Villa had the largest increase in arrests compared with the previous season (from 26 to 71 arrests).t Maybe the police just decided to pay more atteniotn.
But there is no escaping the fact that the club with the most supporters arrested in the 2024/5 campaign was Manchester United, with Manchester City second, followed by West Ham United third, with 77 arrests. Perhaps it was to do with not winning when one expects to win.
But we should also note that the number of football arrests in the 2024/5 domestic season was 11% lower than the previous season, so maybe we are all learning how to behave a bit better.
