European Championship Stories: 1980, The Decline & Fall of English Football

When England returned to tournament football after missing two consecutive World Cup finals, things couldn't have gone much worse, both on and off the pitch.

On the 12th June 1980, England played Belgium in the finals of the European Championships – their first match in the finals of a major tournament for ten years. It turned out to be a match that acted as a barometer for the state of the game in England in several different respects, and none of them were particularly positive.

On the pitch, Ron Greenwood’s team laboured to a 1-1 draw against a moderate Belgium side, but it was events away from the pitch that grabbed most of the headlines the following day, as serious crowd disturbances disrupted the match, with the Italian police firing tear gas into the crowd behind one goal, leading to play being held up for five minutes during the first half.

How, though, had things come to this? Trouble amongst spectators is almost as old as the game itself, with reports of disorder – including referees being attacked at matches – from as long ago as the nineteenth century. Such incidents were relatively low-key, however, and the post-war attendance boom in England didn’t lead to significantly higher levels of disorder.