Young supporters visiting a Norfolk club, which is understood to have a gay coach, chanted “your gaffer is gay” and “you all take it up the b**” in a manner that was “deliberately discriminatory”. Mulbarton Wanderers FC offered an “unreserved apology” and asked the children to leave. They were fined £75 and given a warning for the incident last May.
It is one of 70 cases of homophobia we found in the FA’s disciplinary commission reports since the start of the 2022 season. During one under-12s match, a spectator shouted to a player who was on the ground, “Get up you p**f, football is a man’s game” or words to that effect. There were two witnesses to the abuse at the game in Buckinghamshire in October.
The Hanslope Hornets’ manager later spoke to the spectator who said that they had made the comment “we are raising young men not they/them woofters”. He denied using the word “p**fter” but accepted that the comment was not suitable for a sideline discussion. The club was fined £110.
An under 9s game was abandoned after one father told the children to be “more aggressive” and a mother told one 14-year-old boy to “f**k off you little f****t” when he asked them to “be quiet and let the kids play”. The ref said “tensions were high” at the game last March, saying “The parents of Kersal were questioning every decision in an aggressive manner which in my opinion had an extremely negative impact on their own players.
“The second half started in a similar manner with parents contesting every decision, whilst at the same time supporting poor behaviour from their own team…. I felt I had little choice but to abandon the game.” A parent from opposition team Radcliffe Juniors FC said: “The parents were once again swearing at their kids, referring to our kids as ‘little b*****ds’ and one father actually shouted ‘let’s have more aggression Kersal, let’s be more aggressive’.” A Radcliffe mum said she heard a mother threaten to “rip the c**t’s face off”. Kersal denied the charge but were fined £125.
We’ve analysed nearly 500 reports from the FA’s disciplinary hearings over the last three years, which reveal the abuse and anger which mar games, mostly played for fun by children, across the country, every weekend.
The FA told us there were 276 serious cases of crowd disorder last season, up 28% in a year. So far this season there have already been 177 upheld. Growing numbers of these are from matches involving under 18s. This was up 45% last year and so far this year nearly two-thirds – 62% – of the most serious cases investigated by the FA were at children’s matches.
An FA spokesperson said: “We strongly condemn any abusive or unacceptable behaviour, either on the pitch or from the sidelines, and we have clear standards of behaviour which we expect all grassroots football clubs, coaches and players to follow.
“This is a collective responsibility and we welcome and fully support action taken by leagues and clubs to help tackle this unacceptable behaviour in our game.”
The FA told us that more cases were being reported and more matches played but that it had introduced a raft of new measures under a four-year plan to ”free” the game of discrimination. This includes a new system of “penalty points” for bad conduct as well as league point deductions, extending a body cams pilot and revamping the punishment of “sinbins”.
Up to 1,800 of the “worst disciplined teams” for both youth and adult football have been placed on to the FA’s Behaviour Improvement Programme.
* Have you experienced abuse at football matches? Email nick.sommerlad@mirror.co.uk
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