Flifs, schooligans and the failed state
Words: Tom Reed
You might have seen a couple of articles popping up recently on the subject of “schooligans”.
Young lads and lasses of school or college age, who dress a certain way and are supposedly attracted to physical skirmishes around football.
The Guardian published one this week following a group of lads from Midlands club Hednesford Town in non-League and there have been other separate smatterings on local BBC TV reports around teenage fans allegedly acting in an anti-social manner.
There was also an online video of two sets of young fans from different clubs kicking-off at a motorway service station while onlookers stopped tutting about the price of grab bags of crisps to watch punches being thrown and mainly missed.
The Hednesford Guardian piece featured a large photo of a grand total of 14 young-uns with a smattering of Burberry check and the odd three stripe, walking (horror of horrors) down a grass verge alongside a tagline reading “Teenage ultras are increasingly causing disorder and communities fear it will not be long before it becomes something more dangerous.”
Such reporting really matters in a sport based around freedom to move and with a popular but fragile supporter culture, so we need to keep an eye on wider framing of fans and how we are treated as match-goers.
I was once contacted by a producer of a sensationalist radio show to come on and talk about a spate of “pitch invasions” but the trail went cold when I said there was no point, as it was just the end of the season, overblown and it wasn’t really deserving of comment.
Banging your head against a wall can bring on amnesia and this collective goldfish brain was a focus of the “Leicester School” of sociology in the 80’s, the university unit that sounds like a firm in itself looking back, but which argued that squaring up at football was nothing new and dated back to the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Indeed, the existence of the “Baby Squad” in Leicester itself and other “youth firms” like the “Under 5’s” at West Ham during the 80’s casual era are testament that football lads into fighting (Flifs if you will) are as old and frayed a phenomena as a split hem over a pair of Trimm-Trabbs.
English society has traditionally edged to framing football fans as “other” so much so that the 1890’s street term “hooligan” was still being used against flifs over a century later.
But sociology has existed as a counterpoint, tying itself in knots to try and make sense of why, for a long time, football fans have had this fascination of chasing colleagues around train stations and putting problem gamblers off their button pushing on M1 fruit machines.
You can bend most sociological traditions to some sort of understanding of mischief at football.
Followers of Robert K Merton’s “strain theory” might link being drawn to football street tussles as "anomie” in a society where norms are breaking down, which made sense in the “big bang” years of Thatcher’s Britain but perhaps moreso in the Trump and AI “fake news” era.
Meanwhile, the Birmingham School of Stuart Hall, John Clarke et al sounded like a group of commentators and old pros but were actually preeminent sociologists and were at odds with the Leicester lot by offering theories that fighting at football could actually be an act of “resistance through rituals”.
If French youth now riot at educational standards and cost of living, then groups of English teenagers dressing up in a bit of a clobber and being in the vicinity of the odd skirmish can actually be seen as functional for society in a sociological sense, by providing a “safety valve” that lets discontented individuals release tension and frustration without destroying the broader social order.
Would the state prefer the odd football tête-à-tête or rather these lads joining trade unions and going after the wider issues that might bring them more joy than mainly getting lost in England’s god forsaken towns?
If you apply the work of Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology and his concept of “Verstehen” or understanding, then trying to walk in the trainers of the so called schooligans can be useful.
On a more quantitative level, despite anecdotal evidence, the actual police stats from the 2025-26 football season, point to a slight decrease in football disorder.
“There were 1,963 football-related arrests and other police actions relating to regulated football matches played in England and Wales. This was a decrease of 2% (-40) compared with equivalent matches in the 2024 to 2025 domestic football season.”
Yet, those stats follow a law and order environment where Unison described in 2024 “catastrophic cuts to the police service” in the “14 years since 2010”.
Indeed, English football make use some of the most comprehensive laws, including the Football Offences Act (1991), the Public Order Acts (1986 and 2023) and the Football Spectators Act (1989). This legislation allows a certain level of autonomy for fans to go about their business (compared for example with restrictions in Holland) but comes down strongly on anyone committing offences.
Even the most callow of football lads know that any significant level of violence will likely end up in a banning order or even “doing bird” and that is the tightrope for anyone ending up with bruised knuckles and expensive ripped jackets at the match.
We need context and proportion and to avoid that old chestnut of a moral panic. The Guardian article on the Hednesford fans noted that “no-one was hurt…the match went off without trouble too” and that the fans were “escorted safely back to the station by police”.
A cuter understanding of the football supporter sphere is useful too, not all casuals are ultras and not all ultras are casuals.
In Australia, Sydney FC were moved to put out a statement on their active fans “The Cove” after a reported run-in with police. To outsiders, both the Sydney crew, described as “the heartbeat” of their club and the lads from Hednesford wear similar gear, but the realities of social interaction and going to the game are more nuanced.
When taking a wider look at this notion of “schooligans”, it would be inconceivable to not look at England’s failures towards its young people over decades, if not centuries.
The pelted ball against all of our back-sides.
The closure of large employers, the defunding of youth centres, the loss of meeting places such as cinemas and night-clubs, the retreat into the front room, high youth unemployment, zero hours contracts, exorbitant housing costs and poor job prospects are just a few things in the arsenal bearing down on our young people and I don’t mean the football team.
Football provided a subcultural scent for youth looking for more in life in the post-WW2 rubble and does so to tik-tok teenagers today.
If after decades, having a sniff of a scrap at the match is still a top buzz for our bored youth, then it says more about England than anything else.
Tom Reed is Terrace Edition Editor and can be found on X and Instagram: @tomreedwriting.
Tom is also on Bluesky @tomreedwriting.bluesky.social
