The 'safe standing' sham

Regulators can lose battles, but they usually win wars

The good old days.

Cambridge has not become the Silicon Valley of the Fens. Labour are intent on stamping out the scourge of vaping. You will never travel in a driverless car.

These are surely depressing days at the ever-optimistic Adam Smith Institute. Given their failure in persuading politicians to push through any meaningful liberalisation of the British economy (where are ‘street votes’?), the think tank has been forced into trumpeting more minor victories.

One of these is the introduction in July 2022 of ‘safe standing’ at the grounds of clubs in the top two divisions of English football. Superstar policy wonk Ben Southwood, formerly of the Adam Smith Institute, penned a report in 2016 that, we are told, ‘informed the DCMS’s decision’ to go ahead with the change.

In this article, I will attempt to explain why ‘safe standing’, while undeniably well-intentioned on Southwood’s part, has ultimately been a total waste of time. Unfortunately, ‘safe standing’ has been ruined by health and safety and the forces of Woke to the extent that it is completely pointless. The lesson here is that we must always be careful to ensure that attempts to liberalise and deregulate are actually followed through on. After all, while regulators can lose battles, they usually win wars.

The rise and fall of standing at football

Up until the early ’90s, virtually every football ground in Britain was at least eighty years old. Only one staple Football League club — Port Vale, in 1950 — built a new ground between the end of the First World War and the reforms that followed the Hillsborough disaster in 1989.

These grounds, the majority of which still exist today, almost all followed a similar design. They would have one main stand at the side, where the club offices, dugouts, and dressing rooms were all located. This stand would have seats. Initially, the seats were wooden tip-ups (some of which still survive, for example at Everton’s Goodison Park and Fulham’s Craven Cottage). Sometimes they would be wooden benches. At most grounds, though, the wooden seats have long since been replaced by the standard plastic tip-up seats. Sometimes the opposite side stand would also have seats. But while one (and sometimes two) of the four stands at a football stadium would usually have seats, at the overwhelming majority of grounds, the two ‘ends’ (that is to say, the stands behind the goal) would be for standing only, with no seats provided: one home end, and one away end. These terraces were simply huge banks of concrete steps, with metal or wooden bars placed roughly every ten steps to stop potentially deadly surges towards the front during moments of excitement.

For decades, there were two tiers of ticket you could buy: a general entry ticket for standing, and then the opportunity to purchase a seat on top of the entry fee. Fans would almost invariably buy on the door. If the game was in high demand, the gates would simply be locked when the police reckoned the ground was full. The idea of stadiums having a set maximum capacity is a relatively recent invention.

There was, essentially, no real ‘atmosphere’ at football up until the ’60s. There was no singing, and no real culture associated with following the sport. There was also little animosity. Of course, rivalries existed, but they were generally good-natured. At my club, Chelsea, it was common for people to go to Chelsea one week, and to Fulham the week after. One of the early leading members of our firm, Danny ‘Eccles’ Harkins, went to watch Tottenham for a year in the early ’60s because they had signed his childhood hero Jimmy Greaves — something that would be unimaginable for any serious football fan today. It was a very different world.

This all changed because of rising incomes, the concomitant youth culture explosion of the ’60s, and the advent of cheaper and faster travel (especially on newly-built motorways). More fans could now travel far away from home to watch their team, and thus develop deeper, more tribal bonds to their club.

Loath as I am to give Liverpool any credit, they are the club most responsible for creating the whole idea of ‘football culture’ in England. Their home end, ‘The Kop’, was the largest standing terrace in the country. In the late ’60s, Micky Greenaway — the most significant supporter in Chelsea’s history — travelled to see us at Liverpool’s Anfield, and was inspired to create a version at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge. This was at the Fulham Road end of the ground. This stand became known as ‘The Shed’, and was our equivalent of ‘The Kop’ from then until it was knocked down in the summer of 1994. This kind of thing was replicated at almost every club in the country during this period.

Despite rising incomes permitting the most dedicated fans to travel much further to watch football, crowd numbers began dwindling at this time. The main cause of this was the general suburbanisation of the country. This meant that only the most committed carried on going. The altered demographics of football fandom almost inevitably meant that there was an uptick in violence and disorder, which policing and stewarding was not yet equipped to deal with. Moreover, as the luxuries of fridge-freezers and instant mashed potato made their way into British homes, most grounds were still stuck in the interwar period: not only decrepit, but with no changes in design in response to changes in behaviour. The state of the grounds — and the pitches, the concept of ‘grass in winter’ doesn’t seem to have been invented before the middle of the ’80s — became a widely-discussed topic in football circles. In the late ’70s, legendary Nottingham Forest and Derby County manager Brian Clough said he expected that one day, all fans would want to sit down at football. In 1981, Coventry City, under the chairmanship of Match of the Day presenter Jimmy Hill, made Highfield Road the first all-seater ground in the entire country.

But this was an exception. English football was in a funk. This culminated with the Heysel disaster at the 1985 European Cup final in Brussels, where Liverpool fans charged at a group of mostly middle-class Juventus fans, causing a wall to collapse, killing thirty-nine people. But it was not just Heysel: the signs had been there all season. The 1984/85 season was England’s annus horribilis for football-related deaths and violence. On the last day of the season, fifty-six people died at Bradford City’s Valley Parade after an old wooden main stand caught fire. The same day, a 14-year-old Leeds fan died away at Birmingham City. In the months prior, Millwall had rioted at Luton in what was probably the most serious football violence the country has seen. There was also the Chelsea riot at home against Sunderland, where the police were virtually routed on the pitch. After the Bradford fire, a Sunday Times leader article called football ‘a slum sport, played in slum stadiums, increasingly watched by slum people’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the events of the previous year, the following season, 1985/86, was the nadir of England’s league attendances.

Then, four years later, came Hillsborough. The disaster was categorically not the fault of ‘terracing’. Rather, it was the fault of inept police opening an exit gate to ease overcrowding at the turnstiles, then failing to direct Liverpool fans away from the two central pens at the Leppings Lane end, causing a terrible crush and nearly one-hundred deaths.

But as blame for the disaster swirled around, the Taylor Report (the first inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster), published in 1990, recommended that all major stadiums become all-seater. The general mood was that standing inherently meant rowdy chaos, and rowdy chaos inherently meant danger and violence.

The vast majority of grounds at this time were wedged into dense inner-city areas, with very little room for renovation. Clubs rushed to construct new stadiums in retail parks on the outside of cities. Other clubs drastically redeveloped their old grounds. Chelsea knocked down and rebuilt three of its four stands in the ’90s. Then, from the late ’90s, terracing was outright banned at any ground in the top two divisions of English football.

English football was pacified remarkably quickly following the formation of the Premier League in 1992. In fact, in the ’90s and early ’00s, it was not uncommon for large sections of the away ends of big clubs to sit down, something totally unimaginable today. The game continued on its merry path to gentrification and widening appeal all through the ’90s and ’00s, helped along by the formation of the Premier League, a hugely significant rule change, more foreign players, widespread television coverage, Euro 96, Baddiel and Skinner… and Blair.

The start of the debate

In the late ’00s, word began to reach England of a country that had gone down a different path. Germany had rebuilt a load of stadiums in the ’90s and early ’00s in preparation for hosting the 2006 World Cup. Terracing had been retained at these grounds. Tickets remained cheap. You could even drink in the ground and have Hans chuck a Paulaner on your head when Bayern Munich make it 5-0 against Arminia Bielefeld. It is around this time that the reintroduction of so-called ‘safe standing’ became a live issue in English football.

The main person behind the campaign was Jon Darch, an amiable Bristol City fan who also follows Union Berlin. Darch wanted Britain to copy what the Germans had (and still have).

In Germany, there are, broadly speaking, two types of standing areas. First, ordinary terraces that would be recognisable to an Englishman in 1970; and second, ‘rail seating’, a sort of halfway house where the barriers are every two rows and a metal seat is locked in an upright position. The reason for this was that European matches had to be played at all-seater stadiums, though this is no longer the case.

Jon Darch would take his ‘safe standing roadshow’ around various grounds in England in the early ’10s. This consisted of a mock-up of rail seating. The aim of the ‘roadshow’ was to emphasise the safety aspect; that it was, in fact, possible to make standing safe, rather than drawing attention to the various advantages (such as increased capacity) that standing could bring. I do not blame Darch for this, as when dealing with anyone who could make a decision on this, the spectre of Hillsborough loomed large, as does Britain’s generally health-and-safety-obsessed culture.

Supporters’ groups at many clubs undertook surveys, and all without exception showed majority support for safe standing. But the government remained reluctant. In 2016, Celtic introduced a rail seating section, which was successful. This further increased the pressure on the English authorities to consider trials. In 2018, a petition calling for the introduction of ‘safe standing’ garnered over 100,000 signatures in just six months, leading to a parliamentary debate. In the debate, Sports Minister Tracy Crouch announced that there would be a government review into ‘safe standing’.

In 2019 — perhaps partly, though certainly not entirely in response to the lobbying of Southwood and others at the Adam Smith Institute — the Government announced plans to allow trials of safe standing areas, signalling a shift in policy. Labour soon announced that they supported the Government’s decision. In anticipation of a change in the rules, Wolverhampton Wanderers were among the first Premier League clubs to introduce rail seating. In January 2022, four Premier League clubs and one Championship club — Cardiff City, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur — began trialing ‘safe standing’. Then, in July 2022, changes to the rules were finally implemented. Many clubs immediately applied for a license from Sports Grounds Safety Authority which, if granted (and they were), would allow them to introduce ‘safe standing’ areas in time for the upcoming 2022/23 season. Victory!

Or was it?

I stand in the Shed Lower at Stamford Bridge. Ever since I got my season ticket, that part of the ground has stood up all game, and it is many, many years since the stewards at Chelsea made even the vaguest of attempts to get people to sit down. Since the new rules came into force, and Chelsea got their ‘safe standing’ license, there is one single visible change that has occurred: I now have a metal bar in front of my seat. This is supposed to make me safer, apparently. It does also provide something for me to lean on when lagging or bored, so I suppose it’s sometimes useful. There is also one other change, this time invisible: making what was already de facto (everyone stands, regardless of what the rules say), de jure (everyone stands, now in line with the rules). While not quite nothing, this is obviously of almost no practical significance to football fans. All it does is prevent a potential future crackdown on standing, though this was never likely to happen in the first place.

Behold, the metal bar.

What had happened between those first whispers and the final government stamp of approval?

The Sports Minister, Tracey Crouch, was initially opposed, bellyaching about ‘safety’ and ‘Hillsborough’. It was during her period in office from 2015 to 2018 that the proposals were watered down. Laughably, she was eventually persuaded to go ahead with the changes by ‘advances in safe standing technology’ — as if this was an issue as complex as driverless cars, or forensic advances in criminal justice. Crouch, who describes herself as a ‘compassionate, One Nation Conservative’, ended up resigning from government over a delay in the introduction of stake limits on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). Whatever your thoughts on FOBTs, the fact that she considered this a resigning matter is very telling about her attitude towards safety, liberty, and fun.

Upon reading the report commissioned by the Government, Standing at Football: A Rapid Evidence Assessment (2019), it very quickly becomes clear on what terms the discussion was being had outside of the media. The report was mostly about how to manage the current situation, where ‘persistent standing’ in certain sections of the stadium (especially the away end) was tolerated by almost all clubs, despite formally being against safety rules: the authors noted, dryly, that the all-seater policy was ‘challenging to implement’ (though not quite ‘not fit for purpose’). The idea of allowing ‘safe standing’ sections to have increased capacity, though barely discussed, was more or less rejected from the outset (despite Appendix 3 of the report being an analysis of Borussia Dortmund’s ground, which has 1.6x regular capacity in standing areas). This was, in short, a self-consciously conservative report that sought to find ways to improve the management of what was already happening regardless of what regulators actually wanted. It had no interest in the potential or actual benefits of standing at football matches. Despite being heralded as a ‘liberalising’ measure, if anything, the report actually led, de facto, to an increase in regulation — if only by a tiny amount (i.e., the metal bar) — as their price for making the de jure change.

What were the actual advantages of terracing, and why does ‘safe standing’ not address them?

There were three main advantages to terracing. As we will see, none were addressed by the introduction of ‘safe standing’.

The atmosphere is better when people stand up.

This is obvious and shouldn’t need much explaining, even for those who have never been to a football match. There is a reason why choirs stand up to sing rather than sit down. It is also more fun. People won’t be sitting down at Oasis next summer. Loud, partisan atmospheres are crucial to English football’s appeal.

The new legislation does not address this, because at Stamford Bridge and virtually every other ground where ‘safe standing’ has been introduced, it has been introduced only in places where everyone (or almost everyone) already stood up anyway.

More people can be accommodated in standing areas.

In Germany, anywhere between 1.5x to 2x more people can be accommodated in terraces than in seated areas. If introduced in Britain, this would drastically increase the supply of tickets at a time when demand has never been higher. English football attendances are booming to an unprecedented extent. Virtually every Premier League match sells out. Of the ninety-two clubs in the Football League, probably thirty or forty could really do with expanding their capacity. This goes right down the pyramid: in 2011/12 the average attendance in League 2, the fourth tier, was 4,362; last season, it was 6,349, a 45% increase in little over a decade. Don’t listen to Gary Neville: football has never been in less need of a regulator.

If terraced areas could be accommodated at 1.8x regular seated capacity, with the newly reintroduced terraces replacing (say) one-quarter of the current seating in English grounds, then Manchester United’s Old Trafford, which currently has a capacity of 75,000, would become a 90,000 capacity ground. 60,000 capacity grounds — such as Anfield, Arsenal’s Emirates, and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — would jump to 72,000. 40,000 capacity grounds — like Stamford Bridge, Aston Villa’s Villa Park and Leeds United’s Elland Road — would jump to 48,000. If away ends were converted in their entirety to terracing — as would be appropriate, given that everyone stands up away from home at most clubs — then the standard allocation of 3,000 would become 5,400, substantially loosening supply constraints on tickets that are becoming increasingly like gold dust at big clubs.

The average season ticket holder at Chelsea is in their late fifties, part of a generation who first got season tickets in the ’90s when the ground was originally modernised, and seating became the default. Many young people who want to go are in effect locked out by the older generation, who cling on to their tickets and count down the Augusts until they reach sixty-five and become eligible for a discounted concession price.

And who knows, it may even reduce the price of tickets. But that’s probably expecting too much.

The new legislation does not address this, because there’s no new capacity being created by the change. All that’s happened is that there’s now a bar in front of my seat. In any case, because football stadiums in England are generally located in dense urban areas, the authorities would immediately start crying about ‘access’ and ‘safety’ and ‘transport’ if even modest attempts were made by clubs to increase capacity.

People could stand where they wanted.

Because you were simply given entry to a general stand, big (sometimes numbering more than twenty) groups of friends could easily stand together, and it was generally a much more sociable affair. It is still somewhat like this in away ends, where people aren’t bothered about sitting in their allocated seat. However, at home games, it is totally expected that you sit in your allocated seat at grounds that sell out.

At football nowadays, it is difficult to converse with anyone more than a king’s move away from you. At clubs like Chelsea, with very high demand, and where only a tiny number of season tickets become available every summer, it is very hard indeed to organise for a big group to stand together. Clubs generally can’t be bothered to accommodate these sorts of administratively troublesome requests. And why would they? They already sell out, and it’s not like I’m going to stop going because of this.

The new legislation does not address this. I still have an allocated seat. Nothing has changed.

But is standing really safe?

Hillsborough, it is now agreed, was not caused by terracing. Heysel was caused, if anything, by something like a ‘cultural misunderstanding’ (for lack of better terminology): back in the ’70s and ’80s, English fans would often charge and surge in the direction of opposing fans — in this case, separated only by a chicken-wire fence, which proved inadequate — but these were generally shows of bravado that young knuckleheads found enjoyable. It’s unlikely that the Liverpool fans were actually hell-bent on steaming into the relatively effete Juventus fans to cause them genuine injury. But the Italians weren’t to know that, and bolted to deadly effect. This sort of dangerous behaviour is (rightly) not tolerated today, either culturally or by the police. But regardless, this problem can be easily solved: firstly, opposing fans should be separated properly; and secondly, with enough rails, ‘surging’ becomes more or less physically impossible, even if paired with much higher capacity and no set seats.

But there are two more major footballing disasters that have occurred at British football grounds since the Second World War, both of which merit brief discussion.

One was the Ibrox Disaster at an Old Firm game in 1971, where sixty-six Rangers fans died when leaving the game after the hosts had scored a last minute equaliser. They died on the stairway, not on the terraces. It seems that some of them had fallen over, creating a chain reaction and a deadly crush.

The other was a disaster at Burnden Park, Bolton Wanderers’s old ground, in 1946. This was a case of the ground simply being massively overcrowded and the police locking the gates too late. This led to a crush that killed thirty-three people. (It should be noted that 1946/47, the first season after the Second World War, saw the highest attendances of any season on record.)

Neither of these disasters would happen today, even if we introduced terracing at a little under 2x regular capacity. A packed terrace decades ago would have accommodated probably 3x more people than an equivalent seated area. Sensibly enough, advocates of ‘safe standing’ at football matches were not asking for this much additional capacity, and everyone agrees that we should control numbers on terraces much more rigidly than in the past (rather than just having the police eyeball it). Unfortunately, it is perhaps because they didn’t start out asking for that much that they ultimately ended up with nothing.

Every fan who went regularly before 1989 can tell you of times when they felt that a terrace was dangerously full. But since then, policing has massively improved, and all big matches — and even many unimportant matches — sell out at a strict, safe capacity. As for fan disorder, helpfully, we have something of a natural experiment: some stands of League 1 and League 2 clubs are still terraced, though other clubs in these leagues are all-seater. Yet there is no evidence that the all-seater clubs have a lower rate of arrests at matches as a result of their policy (if anything, the raw data suggests the opposite, though obviously it is unlikely that this is causal). Finally, and crucially, there has never been a major football disaster in Germany, despite the country’s widespread use of terracing.

It should be noted that even in the freewheeling, shambolic, ultra-youthful atmosphere of English football from the interwar period until Hillsborough, despite millions upon millions of attendances at football matches, there were only a handful of tragedies, not directly attributable to terracing per se. Even if we admit that it is almost certainly true that standing, even when implemented in a ‘safe’ manner, is slightly less safe than sitting, we should still consider the costs and benefits of regulating on this matter. This is something that almost all of those in favour of more regulation refuse to do, instead making their job easy by assigning almost infinite weight to safety, and almost no weight to anything else. If this is the calculus that you are making, then you will inevitably oppose any kind of liberalisation that consciously trades off — even in the mildest of ways — safety against enjoyment.

Rather than ‘safe standing’, football and/or deregulation fans should straightforwardly advocate for the reintroduction of terracing. In particular, the assumptions that overall capacity must remain exactly the same and that people should still be assigned a specific seat need to go, as these specific assumptions obviate two of the three main benefits of standing.

This is, of course, a relatively trivial issue in the grand scheme of things (though I would argue that ‘English people having fun’ is actually quite important). But the failure of ‘safe standing’ at football matches also serves as a good example of how an unambiguously positive change can be salami-sliced into pointlessness by a hostile bureaucracy, supervised by an easily distracted and usually apathetic political class. I am certain that similar stories can be found in such varied areas as housing regulations, licensing laws, and energy policy.

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