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John Williams argues that the efforts of the police to keep hooliganism in the spotlight are masking the real progress that has been made combating violence

Notice the signs, recently, of a new football season approaching? Press stories complaining of too much TV football coverage; fierce debates on player wage hikes; Deloitte and Touche’s annual lecture on the booming financial power of the Premier League and how the market is good for football – but watch out for that nasty club overspend; and now, slotted nicely into the week leading up to the big kick-off, the Nat­ional Criminal Intelligence Service report on the arrest figures related to football. This, too, has become some­thing of an annual media event.

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John Williams looks at the explosion of books nostalgic for the days of mass hooliganism

At West Ham in late September, a few away travel truths struck home a little more sharply than I can remember before. The District Line train eastbound at 2.30 was thinly populated. A number of passengers were Europeans, picking up a Premier League game between the Hammers and Liverpool while on holiday in London. Other Liverpool fans (and their kids) were openly wearing dispiritingly new team shirts.

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West Brom fan Jaz Baines puts the case for his club making more of an effort to recruit players from ethnic minority backgrounds

According to the PFA about one in five professional footballers in the Premiership and Nationwide League are black. To judge by the latest Rothmans, fifteen clubs had no black players on their books last season. Black players will always come and go, of course, and there may be other mitigating circumstances, not least the fact that clubs situated in areas like Yorkshire & Humberside and Tyne & Wear, where the black population is 0.7 per cent and 0.2 per cent respectively, are less likely to recruit black players than clubs in London or the Midlands. However, while the presence of the likes of Tranmere, York, Grimsby and Hartlepool on this list is no surprise, the inclusion of West Bromwich Albion ought to raise a few eyebrows.

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Matt Nation issues a heartfelt plea to footballers to get on with what they do best and stop, well, messing about

“We lost because we done too much fanny dangle,” Dave Bassett once fumed a couple of years back after Sheffield United had gone down without a fight to Coventry. He may well have been right, but this was probably scant use to his team when they looked to analyze the defeat, since they, along with most people on the planet, don’t even have an inkling of what fanny dangle is.

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