The Sun-Herald

Will Football Yobs Kill England's World Cup Bid?

Outrage swept across England earlier this year at the prospect of Rome hosting the final of the UEFA Champions League Final.

The Italian capital was "Stab City", according to The Times, the newspaper outraged by the potential threat to the safety of traveling football supporters.

The Times, bless its concern, organised a campaign that included a petition and open letters to civic and football officials to have the Final moved from Rome.

In its own words: How many people have to be stabbed in Rome before UEFA agrees to move the Champions League final? Roma's notorious supporters are stuck in the dark ages of the Seventies and Eighties, but that has not stopped Uefa from pressing ahead with its controversial plan to hold this year's Champions League final in Rome's Olympic Stadium. The time is right to make a stand.

Oops.

Last Tuesday, in London, gangs aligned to West Ham United Football Club and Millwall Football Club fought and rioted around West Ham's stadium.

West Ham hooligans stabbed an 'innocent' Millwall supporter and later during the game, mounted a pitch invasion that at times looked more like a Save The Whale rally than a football match.

I'm no expert on hooliganism but have experienced mob violence in several different guises close up and first hand in many countries across the world (I get paid for this).

In Scotland, I've watched young Protestants and Catholics, supporters of rival teams, fight in the streets over something or other that happened (off the pitch) hundreds of years ago.

In England, I've seen Chelsea fans attack a man watching a game with his grandson in their stadium because the 10-year-old kid wore a scarf of their opponents that day.

In France, during the 1998 FIFA World Cup, I watched England fans fight locals in the streets of St Etienne after their national team was eliminated from the competition.

That led to an invitation from British police (who had a special unit dedicated to the problem and present in France observing hooligan activity) to travel to Luxembourg and see their anti-hooligan efforts on an England away trip.

(On that journey, English fans without tickets tried to storm the stadium, failed, subsequently rioted, and smashed up the city centre instead; there were just 16 or so arrests).

That led to meeting one of England's most notorious hooligans of the 1990s and his "crew", a gang from Carlisle near the Scottish border, who politely asked if they could stay on my couch in London during a weekend of planned mayhem (request declined but I did buy one of them a pint).

In Australia, I've watched teenagers from the western suburbs of Sydney fight each other and them met later to enquire about their motivation.

In every case, football matches and teams were not the reason for violence.

The tribal aspects of following a team - we are the same but different to you - supplied a platform to unleash the inner - and not so inner - beasts.

It is no secret that tournament organisers breathed a sigh of relief when England failed to qualify for Euro 2008, hosted by Austria and Switzerland last year.

No England? The violence there was left to hooligans from Poland and Germany.

But the Football Association (English football's governing body) and the British government will be nervous about the amazing scenes, especially with the 2012 Olympic Games in London and the bid for England to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

The Times has not yet started it's campaign to stop either event taking place in London, the scene of last week's violence but, on its previous form, it can't be too long, surely?

For England's World Cup hosting rivals (of which Australia is one) you can be sure that, behind closed doors, the army of yobs might be the greatest thing to happen for their own respective bids.