When I was 11, my Dad took me to my first football match. I wasn’t a football-mad kid, but I’d loved the 1990 World Cup the previous year, so he brought me along. We drove to an away game, picking up one of his colleagues on the way. 

This sounds like the opening scene to a cringe film from 1995 directed by Richard Curtis, but it is what happened. My grandmother was staying that weekend, and she got us a ¼ of a pound of wine gums to take with us. We were stood on the terraces. We ate pies at half-time. Beers were being covertly drunk all around us. 

We won 2-1 — going from dismay, to an equaliser, and then a victorious diving header. When that second goal went in, the swelling and eddying of the elated crowd was such that I ended-up metres away from my Dad and his mate, and had to push through a dark forest of legs to find them again. 

This was also the first time, and still to this day the only context, in which I ever heard my Dad swear. He was strict on swearing, so we never dared utter even a “bloody hell” within earshot of him. Yet at the football things were different. Just as one of our boys was launching into a devastating slide tackle minutes before that second goal, his colleague shouted: “BREAK HIS FUCKING LEGS!”. My Dad was a teacher. Admonishing swearing was in his DNA. Here, this was all forgotten. 

This brought an implicit, never-reflected-upon-until-now conviction that none of this could be spoken of, drawn attention to, or used to my advantage next time I was in trouble. There was no rule-of-law to apply here, no transparent consistency or reasonable justification. Context was everything. 

I went along to matches with my Dad for the next few years. Something I only recognised later was the background hum of football violence. Toward this, my Dad was disdainful and uninterested, although there were songs we both sang which were a long way from Sweet Caroline. But it was in the atmosphere at those matches, an edge or undertone to the proceedings. And there were certain matches I was told I couldn’t attend because I was “too young”. This included Millwall, obviously, and also Derby Days. He would never have done anything himself, of this I am entirely sure, but he wouldn’t have wanted me to witness a violent fray. 

Twenty years later, in the noughties, I worked for a company founded by a well-known authority on hooliganism. He had employed a load of old faces from Stamford Bridge. This meant I got frequent updates on what had been occurring the weekend just gone, what was planned to occur the following weekend. There was even the option of unpaid leave once granted to someone having a little spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure. 

Those colleagues of mine would smash-up Volkswagens and Mercedes for the simple fact they were manufactured by Germans

I loathed the big-name England players at that time, the era of WAGs and Beckham posing in a sarong. Things are better now, and I feel no such loathing for the current squad. But it’s remarkable to see scenes like those of this week, when Dutch and English fans joined hands to sing “Hey Jude” outside a Bierkeller. Those colleagues of mine would smash-up Volkswagens and Mercedes for the simple fact they were manufactured by Germans. 

While I worked with those old faces, I was reading-up on Englishness. There were many things they didn’t teach us at school — like the legends of the obstinate King Arthur, like how the dragon St George slew represented instinctual, elemental forces the medievals said could be sublimated by piety and devotion. The links between the flag and the Knight’s Templar, who were said to have learned to channel these forces to enable their military prowess.  

I sometimes wondered if there were links between all this and the popular feeling of those old faces with whom I worked. Hooliganism used to be called “the English disease”. The official narrative contends that under Thatcherism working-class men lost stable employment, collective identity, and belonging — so a debased offering of these things ran rampant. But hooliganism didn’t begin in 1979. 

The phrase “mad dogs and Englishmen” was first documented in 1770, and was already well-established before young men on Grand Tours brought it back to England. It joined with an emerging sense of the English as disdainful of the “pure reason” which led to bloodshed in France, offering by contrast contextual forms of governance and jurisprudence focused on practice and precedent, sometimes impervious to reasonable justification. This contrasted with the tidy, ideological utopianisms that end in an eruption of untidy history.  

Relatedly, is the idea that the French Revolution wasn’t mirrored on these islands because there were pressure valves which enabled release and diffusion. Without these valves, ill-feeling would ferment and become intertwined with an ideology, and then end in pseudo-religious fanaticism. There are many things that, like the dragons of old, defy reasonable justification. In medieval iconography the dragon being slain is always still alive — the trick is the harnessing of it, its perpetual death-in-life, its sublimation. 

This isn’t an apologia for the English football culture of the 1970s and 80s, nor a yearning for the days when each big international match brought calls for England to hang its head in shame at the aftermath. But when conservatives often speak out about law and order, I do sometimes have conflicting feelings. 

Hooliganism is one of those forms of criminality subjected to a zero-tolerance approach, high-resource policing, complex and ever-evolving forms of surveillance. Its near-disappearance at the 2024 Euros shows what can be achieved when states cooperate and expend enough effort. 

Yet we needn’t work too hard to think of forms of criminality which are now de facto tolerated by the establishments of these nations, although few people admit it. And on these shores, the long-standing development of practice and precedent might no longer be serviceable in a rapidly changed society. Then actually existing post-liberalism means deciding what dragons could and should be sublimated. The real problems happen when you pretend they don’t exist.