The English FA announced it is investigating Sheffield Wednesday for crowd trouble after the season finale against Crystal Palace. (The club name is going to make all this read a little funny. "Wednesday" is the name of the club. It started off as a cricket club that played its matches on Wednesdays, hence the name. The match in question was played on Sunday May 2. The FA made its announcement Tuesday May 4. OK, let's go.)
Rival fans clashed on the pitch and were eventually separated by police after Wednesday and Palace drew 2-2. Emotions were high: by a scheduling quirk, the loser of this game would be relegated to League One, and the winner would survive in the Championship division. In the case of a draw, which is what happened, Palace would stay up and Wednesday would go down.
Wednesday supporters were also involved in vandalism and disorder out side the ground after the match. Property and police vehicles were damaged.
Violence also erupted in Luton on Monday as supporters fought police after home fans threw missiles at visiting players and stormed the field after a 1-0 playoff loss to York. This was a post-season game, with the winners of a four-team playoff rising from the Conference to play in League Two next year.
There are several sides to this problem, and most of them aren't good. Crowd violence has largely disappeared from the top flights of English football. Some people are behaving better, but ticket prices have skyrocketed. The hooligans looking for a fight, then, often watch the match offsite, and prearrange fights away from the stadium. So the grounds are safer, but it's no longer economical for families to buy four or five seats to a really good match. Working-class families can still turn out regularly to support lower-league clubs, but so can the goons.
There's not enough police to adequately blanket every match. While these two games were played on unusual days, most matches still kick off at 3pm on Saturdays. On any given Saturday, there might be 50 matches kicking off across England at that hour with at least 1,000 fans at each.
Many elements in English society are a little tired of hearing about the problem. Recommendations have already been made and followed: increased security forces; closed circuit security cameras; troublemakers identified and banned; larger stadiums are all-seaters now—no standing room. Many of the measures came in as a response to the deaths of 96 Liverpool supporters at a cup game in 1989.
That's one of a couple things that everyone's tip-toeing around. Those 96 souls died at Wednesday's stadium, Hillsborough. Let's be fair: those victims were crushed and it wasn't really a riot; Wednesday's fans were nowhere to be seen, as the club wasn't even playing in that neutral-site match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. That said, if any stadium needs to now serve as a symbol of safety, it's Hillsborough.
The other thing no one wants to talk about is that the World Cup is coming. South Africa already has one of the world's highest rates of violent crime. Now we're going to add hundreds of thousands of visiting soccer fans to the mix. 90-95|PERCENT| of the tourists will be peaceful, and will just have to watch their own backs. A few thousand extra troublemakers, however, is going to make South Africa an even more dangerous place.