Pitch invasions - a disease or a symptom?

The imprisonment of Paul Mitchell, the 27-year-old Birmingham City supporter who vaulted the hoardings to punch Aston Villa midfielder Jack Grealish in Saturday’s Second City derby, was inevitable.

The father-of-one pleaded guilty to the sucker punch that shocked the country, with his lawyer reporting that his client “cannot explain what came over him yesterday morning”, before he was sentenced to 14 weeks in prison and given a 10-year football banning order.

Players and stewards apprehend Paul Mitchell as Jack Grealish recovers

Football fans across the UK might be struggling to explain what has come over the national game after a trio of ugly pitch invasions threatened to eclipse the weekend’s fixtures. Like most disastrous weekends, it got started on Friday night, when Rangers captain James Tavernier was confronted by a fan at Hibernian’s Easter Road. This continued a spate of foul incidents in Scottish football, including sectarian abuse of Kilmarnock manager Steve Clark by Rangers fans, and glass bottles descending on Scott Sinclair from the Easter Road stands.

While the recent incidents north of the border have a sectarian dimension that makes them particularly unsavoury, crowd trouble even surfaced in the perfumed realm of the Premier League on Sunday afternoon. An Arsenal fan ran onto the pitch after the home side’s second goal and shoved Manchester United defender Chris Smalling, before attempting to join the Arsenal players’ celebrations.

David Cotterill called for armed police to protect players

The trio of one-man pitch invasions provoked a storm of conjecture from pundits and columnists. This ranged from well-judged appeals to protect players through appropriate stewarding and deterrent punishments, to David Cotterill’s ludicrous proposal to introduce armed police at football grounds. 

The Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive, Gordon Taylor, deserves some credit for speaking out quickly and suggesting that ground closures and points deductions could be considered for clubs that prove unable to control their fans. His claim that “we’ve been down this road before and we don’t want to go there again”, however, hints at a misdiagnosis of the issue afflicting British football.

Taylor’s comments suggest that the incidents that took place over the weekend mark a return to the hooliganism that plagued grounds across the 1970s and 1980s. While the violence in both eras is repugnant, there is marked difference between the senseless actions from a few modern-day individuals and the organised, Firm-based hooliganism that stalked city centres and stadia before the Premier League era.

Disturbances have traditionally been between fans

What made the weekend’s misdeeds so startling was that the aggression was directed towards professionals on the field of play, rather than other supporters. While this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon (witness the 2012 attack on Chris Kirkland), it represents a shift from the carnage previously wreaked on an almost-weekly basis by established firms such as The Subway Army, The Headhunters and The Soul Crew.     

In a reflection of modern society, the weekend’s incidents were the sole actions of three disorganised and socially disconnected attention-seekers, rather than participants in any sort of community – even a criminal one. It’s not hard to spot Paul Mitchell’s desperation for 15 seconds of infamy as he waves his arms to stir up applause while being dragged off the turf at St Andrews.

The Arsenal pitch invader, meanwhile, wears a Stone Island jacket – that universal marker of aggro – despite grinning manically and seeming more concerned with hugging his team’s players than inflicting any serious damage on Smalling. His hooligan clobber seems an affectation, a costume to distract from the more serious business of celebrity-worship.

Stone Island gear: hooligan dress-up costume?

The same blend of vanity and spite was present on Twitter, where a Birmingham City supporter used the liberating power of social media to taunt Jack Grealish over the death of his infant brother. The supporter – who made no effort to disguise his identity – has since been banned from attending fixtures at St Andrews.

This grim abuse on social media, coupled with the naff hooligan clobber sported by the weekend’s pitch invaders, reveals a section of men desperate to apply outmoded masculine aggression in a society that has (thankfully) moved on.

It’s telling that Paul Mitchell was wearing a hat inspired by Peaky Blinders, the Brummie mafia serial that is a staple on the BBC and Netflix. The overblown Boardwalk Empire rip-off has enjoyed great success as a retro wish-fulfilment showreel for the Strongbow Dark Fruits crowd: slick hairdos, sharp suits and easy women interspersed with shoot-and-stab set pieces.

Retro wish-fulfilment: Peaky Blinders

It’s little surprise that these lurid 1920s images hold some appeal to the young men of modern Britain, often faced with an environment of meaningless service-industry labour, crippling debt and a cultural landscape increasingly focused on hedonistic individualism.   

The same, self-interested society is reflected in the incidents across the weekend, with the perpetrators blundering into crude assertions of their warped masculinity, striving for a few moments of attention as they lash out at more talented, better-adjusted versions of themselves. While fines, banning orders and jail terms may deter some football fans from similarly thuggish behaviour, the vain anger among disconnected young men is something that British society urgently needs to examine and remedy.