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Stories
Fans don’t go to Brentford’s stadium for prestige, they go for the local character and, recently, the brilliant entertainment
For some reason police forces once thought the lure of collecting cards depicting Ian Snodin in an England shirt would stop people committing crime
Alex Lawson on the role of train travel in football
In the 1970s and 80s Football Specials were used to ferry fans to away games by rail in a bid to contain hooliganism. Supporters’ organisations and the British Transport Police have been investigating the idea of restoring the services in the wake of frequent arrests of fans travelling on regular trains. At the height of hooliganism, spare carriages and redundant trains were used to transport huge numbers of fans. But the Specials became a focus for problems and were largely scrapped in the early 1990s as privatisation made organising services across the networks more difficult.