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A SPECTATOR SAGA: SAFE STANDING AND
ALL-SEATER STADIA
In November 2021, as the prospect of a limited return to standing on the terraces in England’s top two tiers of professional football finally materialised, the i newspaper’s Chief Football Writer reminded us that this was the culmination of a long-term campaign by supporter groups. Daniel Storey said that “Football’s Safe Standing campaign became a national movement as long ago as 2001” rebuking some authorities’ attitude that even after 20 years of campaigning, this return to standing at English football could be dangerously premature.
No matter that this is actually a new innovation in English football, safe standing with rail seating to protect those fans who want to remain on their feet during the match. Storey rightly points out that some, usually detached from match-going fans, will simply never countenance the fact that some fans do want to stand at football games, and that there are now ways of doing so that appear to be just as safe as the current seating arrangements at grounds like our very own Stadium of Light.
What I want to add to the i’s coverage of events is that the debate over whether standing should be allowed at football stadia, and how it can be made most safe, is actually a much longer one than even Storey acknowledges.
Well before the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster of April 1989, which set in train a review of the state of sports grounds across Britain, fans up and down the country were well aware that conditions at football grounds were liable to cause a repeat of the abysmal scenes witnessed at Heysel and Valley Parade in 1985. Indeed, danger seemed to be an inherent part of watching football in Britain, with other major fatalities at Ranger’s Ibrox in 1971 and Bolton’s Burnden Park in
consciousness than Bradford, Heysel or Hillsborough says as much about the grim acceptance that football grounds were simply unsafe places for much of the twentieth century as it does about the way in which football becoming a TV spectacle broadcast this fact to a far wider audience.
After Heysel, though, and with the rise of the fanzines and Football Supporters’ Association as independent voices for the fans, people really started to question more seriously this miserable situation. The likes of Mike Ticher, writing for When Saturday Comes, did incredibly serious work highlighting
the many potential dangers at stadia in Britain in
the years between 1985 and 1989. In a sickening foreshadowing of things to come, Ticher concluded one piece on the shoddy state of stewarding at football matches by noting that whether or not these shortcomings were potentially fatal, supporters would likely “find out the hard way”. Even if it was “widely assumed that lessons have been learnt... and that consequently football is now a much safer pastime than it was before 1985”, Ticher and other fanzine writers knew the truth the fans saw on a weekly basis, but which Thatcher, her government, and the F.A. would only finally acknowledge after witnessing it for themselves at Hillsborough.
In light of all this gloom, one might expect to read that, in the wake of that disaster, fans were all too
1946 killing 66 and 33 people respectively. That they are far less ingrained in the public
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