Contemporary academic commentators have suggested that, in a general sense, the football arena reflected the axiom that increased social control often leads to increased social deviance. More specifically, and through the use of documentary evidence in this chapter, I will show that increased police interventions into the social arena of football produced mutual antagonisms between spectators and police which resulted in a greater incidence of police brutality. Police officials, through the organization of the sports ministry in London, tested new tactics which produced reciprocal enmity between the two social groups in progressively more harsh and violent environments within and around stadiums. Police constables and spectators negotiated new social spaces as they emerged, most often through interactions between police and fans that became fiercely hostile. This chapter shows how in the late 1960s and 1970s these contentious relationships developed over time and were contingent upon directives from government inquiries. Controversial police practices since the 1990s, which have been the focus of other studies, drew on long-standing approaches which developed through fragmentary and unsystematic trials in previous decades.

Previous academic inquiries into policing football have been almost entirely ethnographic, and therefore focused on the period after the late 1980s, when anthropological and sociological interest in police involvement in football peaked. These studies provide useful models for understanding police behaviour and interpersonal interaction between fans and police over the last twenty years.