Rome Wasn't Built in a Day, Chapter 12; I’m afraid the news is very bad from Brussels

Twice in the space of just three weeks in May 1985; for a while, it looked as though football in England was in terminal decline.

The benefit of hindsight affords the realisation that, by hook or by crook, football in England may always have been headed towards the events of May 1985. The game had been playing fast and loose with safety for decades, and hooliganism had been permitted to flourish amid a culture of reactionary sergeant major types ‘helpfully’ suggesting the return of the birch or national service, because violence never begets violence and the army would have been delighted to receive a sudden vast influx of conscripts of people who didn’t want to be there.

This was an era of the ideological dominance of the reactionary political right, so responses beyond encaging everybody further and reaching back to their own youth were probably never that likely. But for all the inevitability of hindsight, at the time the feeling of shock was palpable. Supporters were a problem to be contained. Between the 1960s and the mid-1980s, some grounds came to resemble prison camps. When ID cards for supporters were mooted, it felt almost like the logical conclusion of… something.

In the space of just two and a half weeks in May 1985, the acceleration of the decline of English football reached terminal velocity. 95 people were dead, all killed for the act of going to a football match. There was a growing feeling that this was no longer just a decline. By this point it felt as though the game was crumbling around everybody’s ears, and those in control and with the power to do something proactive about it were either completely disinterested or hopelessly out of touch.